Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (53 page)

Chengdu is the great unsung city of China. In addition to incomparable food, it has wonderful sights: a panda-breeding center, where you can see the animals up close, including the adorable new cubs; the Wenshu Monastery, with its chanting monks and holy processions; and, a two-hour drive away, the 233-foot-tall Leshan Grand Buddha, carved into the Lingiun Hill rock face in the eighth century AD to subdue the violent confluence of two rivers. It is the largest Buddha in the world—its big toe is twenty-eight feet long.

We went native that night: Sichuan hot pot. Hot pot restaurants abound in Chengdu, and a local friend led us to Huang Cheng Laoma, where two burners are built into the middle of each table, allowing us to have one cauldron chockablock with chilies, and one with a mild broth of chicken and sea horse. We ordered some twenty trays of stuff to cook in them, including sirloin steak, chicken, alligator livers, bamboo pith, bamboo-pith fungus, Chinese spinach, sausage, freshwater and saltwater eels, five kinds of mushrooms, Sichuan ferns, fresh lotus root, and slivers of beef throat. Whatever we cooked in the spicy soup we dipped in sesame oil with onion; whatever we cooked in the mild one we doused in a salty herb sauce. After dinner, we went to another teahouse to see Sichuan opera—a cavalcade of face-off, puppetry, dance, dexterous clowns performing folktales, acrobatic stunts, magic tricks, and masked flame-blowers.

Beijing residents, prohibited from debating who would be the best Party leader, have instead turned their critical attention to a more
pressing question: Who makes the best Peking duck? There are many details to consider. Is the preparation too refined or flashy? Is the skin too fatty or dry? Is it cooked over apple wood or apricot? Is the sauce bean- or fruit-based? Should the skin be dipped in sugar? How should the duck be carved? We went duck hunting seven times. Among the restaurants that cater in good part to Westerners, we liked Commune by the Great Wall and Made in China; among those more for the locals, we preferred Xiangmanlou. Commune by the Great Wall is a hotel composed of villas by leading contemporary architects. From each villa, you can climb up to the Wall and walk along a pleasantly unrestored section that is yours alone. We had the restaurant’s traditional Peking menu, which includes fried shrimp balls, duck soup, braised cod, dumplings, and the duck.

Made in China is in the Grand Hyatt, so you certainly don’t feel as if you’re discovering someplace obscure; you could be in L.A. or New York. Nonetheless, the wisdom in Beijing is that it’s the city’s top restaurant, and everything we had there was delicious. We ate shrimp boiled in green tea, and poached chicken with spicy peanuts. The duck skin had separated entirely from the duck; it was crisp and firm and unfatty, but not brittle. The pancakes were papery thin, and the sauce was made from sweet beans mixed with honey and sesame oil, then reduced to a satisfying thickness.

Xiangmanlou has no frills, though it is clean and pleasant, and the bill for six people would barely have covered sandwiches in New York. Beijing families crowded every table. The duck skin here is divided—the best is put on a special plate, and the “hard skin” is served separately. The duck is fattier than at Made in China, but in a sinful way, like foie gras. A soup of duck bones follows. We had fish, too, brought to us flopping around in a basket before its execution.

The best Beijing street food is the
jianbing
, and the best place to get it is the stalls outside the Baoguo Temple complex, now a flea market. The seller first spreads batter on a wide iron griddle to make a crêpe with scallions in it; then breaks an egg over the top and spreads it around so it cooks into the batter; then flips it over and slathers on bean sauce and chili sauce; and finally wraps the whole thing around a piece of sweet fried bread. It’s steamy and fresh and eggy and starchy and delectable.

To vary our massage addiction, we tried out a late-night ear massage. The Beijing place was like a comfortable hospital—extremely clean, and the massage girls wore nurses’ hats. Before a statue of the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Guanyin, a variety of offerings had been made, including a high-calorie health drink—in case mercy was getting a little thin on the ground.

We celebrated and mourned our last night in Beijing at the ultra-high-concept Green T. House, with its chairs upholstered in feathers, revolving colored lights, exhibitions of contemporary art, rocking horse in the corner, mirrored tables, and so on. The scene is very sceney, screamingly cooler-than-thou. The menu is an absurdist document, the poetry of which, already strained in Chinese, becomes endearingly ludicrous in English: “A Little Caviar Sashimi with Unimaginable Sauce” or “Mystic Beef Rolls Stuffed with Enoki Mushrooms and Mozzarella” or “Bliss upon Cuttlefish” or—my favorite—“Erotic Dance by Six Mushrooms around a Lonely Chestnut.” The food is somewhat less impressive than the titles, but the models smoking long cigarettes and the young hipsters with amazing haircuts are unparalleled.

For twenty-one days, we ate Chinese food at every meal, except for one night, in Beijing, when beloved American expat friends threw a dinner party for us at their apartment. They had borrowed the chef from the French embassy, and he did a terrific job. But Western food tasted strange after the alluring flavors of the Orient. Having to cut things up seemed vulgar and tedious; the buttered fresh vegetables seemed to lack imagination; and the beef, though cooked to perfection, seemed sort of chunky and bland. It was hard to switch back. We had culinary jet lag and all the familiar things felt wrong for a little while. Like scuba divers, we had to come up gradually to avoid getting sick as the atmosphere changed.

“Food comes first for the people,” says an ancient Chinese proverb, and foodie culture has blossomed in China as hedonism has grown less stigmatized. The average Chinese citizen spent more money on
food in 2015 than at any time in the past, and food TV shows such as
A Bite of China
have soaring ratings. Nearly two-thirds of Chinese mobile-phone users consistently photograph their food before eating, then share these photos through food-oriented apps and social media; fluency in food culture is deemed a mark of sophistication. The China Cuisine Association has asked UNESCO to place the country’s cuisine on the Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Demand for premium and organic foods keeps increasing. Recent research has found that people who eat spicy food all the time live substantially longer; though the exact causality is unclear, the study has been warmly received. Torrents of fabulous new restaurants have opened for wealthy Chinese and Westerners; in Shanghai alone, five recently made the list of Asia’s Best Restaurants.

In the meanwhile, however, increasing pollution of soil and water in China means that some food products are corrupted. Nearly a fifth of China’s arable land is contaminated. Other foods are adulterated; three hundred thousand babies were sickened by milk powder that contained melanine; bean sprouts were found to have been treated with toxic chemicals to make them look shinier; flour with dangerously high aluminum content was found in dumplings and steamed buns; rice was full of cadmium and other heavy metals; and pork that had been infected with phosphorescent bacteria was identified by consumers because it glowed in the dark in their kitchens. Vinegar contaminated with antifreeze killed Muslims at a Ramadan meal in 2011, while fake eggs made of plaster, wax, and slimy additives turned up in provincial markets. In 2013, a raid on a food-storage facility turned up chicken feet that had been frozen in 1967; they were being bleached to sell as fresh. In 2015, pork from diseased pigs was approved by bribed regulators. As many as one in ten meals in China uses recycled oil, often from the drains beneath restaurants.

Though increasingly strict laws are intended to address these concerns, they are inconsistently enforced, and many Chinese express skepticism, believing, for example, that much of what is touted as organic is not so. A preponderance of wealthy Chinese consume imported fresh foods they believe are less likely to be compromised—the
market for imported fruit alone is nearly $10 billion. Some organic farms inside China have been set up exclusively for the politically connected and will not sell to common people.

At the same time, the incursion of Western fast-food restaurants means that many people are overeating unhealthily. While the consumption of salt has always been extremely high, Chinese people are eating more and more fats, and while rice sales have gone down, intake of corn products has skyrocketed. Purchasing of packed, processed foods is higher than in the United States and brings in nearly $250 billion a year. Obesity is rising sharply, and about 12 percent of Chinese have diabetes, giving China the world’s largest diabetic population.

World Monuments: 50 Irreplaceable Sites to Discover, Explore, and Champion
, 2015

I spent time in the Qianlong Garden and the Juanqinzhai, in Beijing, during my 2005 food trip to China. I had made frequent visits to the Forbidden City, but never to this refined and intimate area of it. I had studied Chinese art history in college and was interested in the period during which this garden was conceived and built; I had studied architectural conservation, too. I had become a trustee of the World Monuments Fund and had sought to learn more about the challenges of preserving the garden structures. As WMF’s fiftieth anniversary approached, I was asked to write an essay about one of its historic preservation projects, and I selected the Qianlong Garden.

Preservation issues are of concern worldwide, but in China, the erasure of the past to make way for a supposedly better present and future has been pursued with a particularly troubling gusto. I am all for a better present and future, but I don’t believe that destroying the past is a good means of getting there.

T
he central axis of the Forbidden City was designed to impress and intimidate; the Juanqinzhai (Jwen-t(ch)in-JAI), or Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service, built by the Qianlong Emperor in the 1770s for his retirement, is intended to coddle and caress. Clandestine though it may have been to the masses, the Forbidden City was public to its privileged visitors, an architectural rendition of the emperor’s immutable being; the Juanqinzhai promises an almost lonely privacy. Most great monuments are for civic consumption, but the Qianlong Emperor built the Juanqinzhai and surrounding garden for himself, envisioning a lodge that would allow him to live according to his habits but free from his responsibilities. However, nothing about the Juanqinzhai is modest; a refined discretion nuances its opulence. If the Forbidden City is a grand sculpture, this is a jeweled object. As a linchpin uniting heaven, man, and earth, the emperor enacted a formal, immutable self, but the Juanqinzhai acknowledges the passage of time; for all its sumptuousness, it humanizes those who enter it.

When I first went to China in 1982, the streets of Beijing still consisted mainly of
huton
g
s, long alleys of traditional courtyard houses. Down those narrow byways, anxious people in Mao suits bicycled at lackadaisical speed, keeping a deliberate distance from foreigners. The city was dusty and decaying. Luxury, that corrupting anticommunist idea, was essentially nonexistent. In the Qing dynasty, the area that now constitutes Tiananmen Square consisted of a walled, north-south corridor surrounded by government buildings. In the 1950s, inspired by Moscow’s Red Square, authorities bulldozed those buildings to create the empty expanse of Tiananmen as we now know it. The square turned barren, brutally austere, and insufferably grandiose, a place where the pomp of the Communist state could be paraded before a meekly awestruck populace. In the middle of this dilapidation incongruously rose the Forbidden City, long revered as the ultimate stronghold of power, where the most prosperous rulers in the world had once held their hidden court. Of course, Buckingham
Palace is rather grander than the houses across the street from it, and the Louvre puts the rue de Rivoli to shame. But I have never, before or since, encountered so immediate and stark a contrast as that between the Forbidden City and Deng Xiaoping’s Beijing.

The Forbidden City was built in just fourteen years through the efforts of a million workers and is the largest unified complex of wooden buildings in the world. The wood is rare and precious, and every yellow (the imperial color) ceramic roof tile glorifies the emperor. The Forbidden City was the seat of government for six hundred years, for twenty-four emperors in the Ming and Qing dynasties. When our astutely political chaperone showed us through in 1982, he attempted to condescend to the values it embodied, but he couldn’t entirely eliminate the wonder in his voice as he described the life that had once unfolded there. In the outer court, we felt the aloofness of the imperial rulers of China; nothing about these buildings was designed to offer comfort. In the inner court, even the emperor’s apartments proved to be forbidding manifestations of imperial station. The whole setup reflected the inherited wealth and exploitative prerogatives of aristocracy that the country had officially rejected. Our minder was more comfortable with the militarism of the Great Wall than with these palatial quarters, but he recognized that the buildings’ conceptual grace and superb proportions represented the apogee of something brilliantly Chinese—that they constituted part of his cultural heritage.

At that time, we neither saw nor heard of the Qianlong Emperor’s retirement gardens, the landscape at the far end of which the Juanqinzhai stands. The site was too intimate for the burgeoning crowds of tourists, and no one in China then had the skills requisite for its conservation, but the decades of its neglect also suggest an element of purposeful disregard. Although the Communists accused the Qing dynasty of exploitation, those emperors had represented total authority, a legacy that Mao and his successors gamely sustained. The pavilions of the retirement garden signify lavish materialism and rarefied intellect and were thus utterly anathema to Maoism. The larger Forbidden City remained at the heart of Chinese command, and the sizable portrait of Mao that still hangs over its entrance gate was a potent sign of his
enduring authority. In contrast, the retirement garden was a luxurious place of repose for an emperor to pamper himself with solitude after giving up power—and the latter-day rulers of China were not interested in a life after power. Nor were champions of collective action interested in the meditative sequestration of an individual.