I was hungry… starving, in fact. I had wandered in Yunnan for several weeks. I was sick of pointing at things in the street with early-on, non-existent Chinese… eating the two offerings I was familiar with… noodles and Yangzhou fried rice with a bit of egg… then, noodles again! It was time to step up. I needed real food. I found a nice hotel. I sat down to a starched, pink tablecloth with matching napkins in the form of pointy little hats. Things were looking up! Then, she asked me in English, no less, if I wanted to see the English menu. What luck! I took it in my shaky-from-starvation hand. I opened it up. My mouth was watering. What???

Braised goose kidney ball Poached pork’s blood with bone marrow Poached pepper pig’s stomach and gingko fruit in syrup Chicken with wheld’s meat in soup Sea cucumbers in goose web Stewed eggplant with minced pork and goose’s intestines Double boiled cow’s penis with encommiae ulmoide

 Should I have the Sea Cucumbers in Goose Web… or how about the Pork Blood with Bone Marrow? I was staying away from the last, for sure! I was determined to have a meal. The young waitresses really wanted to help. If I had gotten up to go, the only help I would have required was for them to pick me up off the floor and call the doctor from starvation fainting. I asked for soup. It’s China. There is soup. How bad could it be? I spied the local, wild mushrooms. A steaming slurry of green vegetable puree appeared in a basin so big I could have bathed in it… and were there any wild mushrooms left in the forest? I ate my lunch with a bowl of rice. Ahhhh… finally… LUNCH!!

Saved again! I have returned and can run down Rat Street to buy noodles with sesame sauce, tofu, and cilantro. I can buy “xiao bing”… small, round flat breads to make a pizza… and egg bread. I watch them make it on the flat griddle… the thin batter cooked up like a crepe, an egg fried in the middle and a sauce that is sheer delight. No more starvation. No pig stomach with gingko.

Perhaps I should have thought again. As always, I agree to be a guest. We sit at the huge round table with the glass Lazy Susan in the upscale restaurant. We eat cold dishes of tripe and duck’s feet… mystery meat and linguine-cut seaweed. Then come the rest of the dishes. I’ve fished out the leathery creature from the house it has carried on its back sucking its way gently on its mollusk path along the bottom of a sea, untroubled and murky. I’ve clicked off the slurry of pollutants mindlessly… mercury… PCP’s… lead. I eat it anyway. It tastes faintly of sorghum… not bad, not good. I’ve fulfilled my responsibility. I eat only one… washing it down with white peach juice resolving that I’ll never eat the “booboo” again… a future promise to separate its nether part from the lot I’ll allow myself to swallow and push the offending remnant back inside the shell hidden from inquiring Chinese eyes. Perhaps everything else will be edible, but the pig stomach comes… not with gingko fruit and syrup. This time it’s cooked up in fiery red and green peppers in a “wet hot” version of Hunan cooking. Now what? I eat some of the peppers and push the stomach under the crab shells so as not to offend.

I have resorted to drinking beer. The thought of beer makes me ill, because of my grandmother. She admonished me throughout my childhood not to drink beer. Beer is made from hops. Rats love hops. They love them so much that they drown themselves in the vats of fermenting beer. She says that everyone knows this about the rats and that I need to be forewarned. The rats are alcoholics straightaway and “THAT, my Will-of-the-Wisp, could happen to you,” she repeats (and repeats). Fortunately, she has given me no such admonitions about wine. 

I hold my nose to avoid what I imagine smells like alcoholic, drowned rats, and I wash what I can’t eat down with beer. I try thousand year old duck eggs and almost gag at the grainy yolks… more beer. I eat squiggly things from the sea. One looks like… ahem!!… an extraordinarily large male organ… called something else in impolite company. It boils in the seafood hotpot as big as a table with the mantis that I can’t help but thinking look like albino, giant cockroaches of the sea and cut my skin on my fingertips when I try to separate them from the shell. Do you suppose they are called mantis, because they resemble Preying Mantis? The other “ahem…” thing seems to be nothing but a hydra that sucked the life out of plankton on the bottom of the sea. Actually, it tastes pretty good… and then, comes the donkey meat! Lordy!!

Get ready for the echinoderms. Sea cucumbers. By this time, I’ve adopted fiery “baijiu” made of sorghum as my drink of choice. After all I am Romanian. I’ve been known to hoist a few shots of “tsuica” from time to time and the Chinese are surprised that I can do this without the blink of an eye. Sea cucumbers. A little slimy with pointy protrusions the length and breadth. I’m told they are good to prevent aging. They are often the expensive fare of banquets, but I keep getting my shirt cuff in the sauce as Chinese people ignore my Western savage inability to eat them. I learn to eat them finally from a boyfriend on Christmas Eve. We’ve driven everywhere to find a Western place to eat… no such luck. The Chinese, as it turns out, are mad about Christmas “ho-ho-ho.” We end up at a busy Chinese place at the only table remaining near the kitchen door with what else? The cooks arguing. Is there any peace EVER in a Chinese restaurant kitchen? My BF regales me with stories about cooks throwing cleavers at each other. We laugh and laugh… finally I am relaxed enough for the sea cucumber course. The slithery thing slips between my chopsticks awkwardly each time splashing to the sea-cucumber-shaped plate. He shows me how. Pick up the plate and hold it under the mouth and slide it in. Do not chew…let it slide down the gullet. Beer… more beer! Maybe the sea cucumber doesn’t taste so bad after all… not when your gaze is lost in the swimming eyes of love.  Ahhhh! Romance over echinoderms and soft light….and he’s worked so hard to find a wonderful place to eat… and he’s and bought you a lovely Christmas gift.

However… Christmas passes and it’s back to eating. Let’s go for snake hotpot! More beer! More baijiu! More wine!! My friend buys a goat head in the market. The smell from the steaming pot… clouds of wetness that smells of insides and star anise about does me in. We eat it at her brother’s house. He plops out the eyeballs and offers me one… they will improve my sight, and the curried pig’s ears everyone is chomping on will make my bones hard. I don’t know what fried chicken feet do, but I don’t want any of those either. I swallow shots of “baijiu”  instead. We go for Beijing Duck. I love duck, but we eat a mountain of pickled cabbage and jelly fish first. More beer. More “baijiu.” When my eyes are swimming and I fear walking or a loose tongue, my cry becomes, “More Eight Treasure Chrysanthemum tea!!”

I am going to live in this country for a long, long time Something has to give. Bring on the bugs… the larvae… the silk worms. No!! Please not yet!! China is always a delectable surprise or a horror show for lunch… and there was the latter straight from the kitchen… fried up with their tails intact proceeding in a line across the hills and vales of shrimp chips… scorpions! Okay. I give up. I’ll eat the proverbial green eggs and ham, Dr. Seuss!! I take one between my chopsticks and nibble. The tail is crunchy and the rest is kind of soft and yicky. Okay, okay! I’ve eaten my medicinal spring tonic to improve my health and, now, I wonder what kind of creatures a scorpion eats… and what I may have ingested along with the the scorpion’s digestive process.

Now it’s time to grow up. I can eat these things. I have to change. I don’t want to, but I have to try. Pickled cabbage and jelly fish becomes my favorite dish and the sauce and peppers (without the pig stomach) is just delicious. I learn to eat a soy milk soup with sea cucumber and goji berries… delightful. I order a broiled papaya at my favorite restaurant. I think it has taro pearls on top. I eat it with Golden Osmanthus honey that tastes and smells like flowers. Later I find out that I have eaten frog ovaries. I order it again and again after the pot of chicken with the feet and head in it. I can eat almost anything now.  I can avoid alcoholism! I can approach just this side of teatoatling again!

Along the sea one day, a waiter fishes a long, ocean sea eel out of a tub with a net. The long, heavy eel escapes and slithers all over the dirty floor while the waiter chases it through the tables of shocked, then delighted, customers to catch it back up in the net. Eel with curry… my mouth waters… and, then, the regret… too big for two people to eat it.

We order a smaller, ugly fish instead. We leave a pile of bones on the table in our wake. We’ve eaten it at a bare, outside table with a bottle of beer… and, if one should be a believer, didn’t we all come from that place as we slithered, crawled and then, began to walk upright? That was before we were so lofty to have opinions about what those not us eat.

 But what of the “stinky” tofu? Sorry, China. I will never, ever… never eat that!