There are probably four things any virgin visitor to Asia in general – and China in particular – ought to know.
The first concerns food. Abandon happy and homespun preconceptions of steamed vegetables, stir fry, slivers of filleted garlic beef sizzling on a hot plate or sweet and sour-flavoured animal which once grazed on a farm. The reality is instead an array of domesticated pets, vermin, noodle soup with the viscosity of kerosene and a multitude of other unidentifiables served on the gunk-encrusted hotplates by the side of the road. Accompany this guidance with the critical footnote that parts of the animal with which a Western vet wouldn’t even be familiar are served with genuine pride. In addition to ear, brain, penis and cartilage, you find vague and worrying references to muscle, wall, contents, joint or tendon.
This is a lesson also learnt in India. Vindaloo, Korma and the brightly coloured and textured sauces you find when out for a curry back in the West don’t exist in India. Substitute, among other things, tiny fish sufficiently salty to make your body hair fall out and peculiar egg-shaped and hollow crunchy vessels filled with a hot, watery fluid which smells suspiciously like blood and tastes like chalk. Or vice versa, depending on the time of day. Regardless, the lesson is not to avoid sampling all this food. Eating weird shit is integral to the experience and means you will regurgitate not merely the food – a given – but fantastic tales of the Orient upon your emaciated return. The lesson is to be prepared. And find someone who knows how to translate, “Look, I’m not saying I wont eat it. But I want to know what you mean by ‘glands’”. This is more important than “Which way to the train station?” or “Why are there tweezers next to the chopsticks?”
Second, habits. You’re supposed to refrain from adverse judgment when travelling to new and exotic places and to accept that different peoples find different practices acceptable. Just as we would expect conservative Muslim visitors to the West to hold back from soapboxing about women’s attire or anyone’s consumption of alcohol (not that they do), similarly the visitor to China should keep his mouth shut when confronted with some of the less ingratiating local habits.
But as far as I’m concerned, that prohibition extends only as far as not directly accosting strangers in the street. Bitching to people back home is fine. Table manners are the first thing. The constant open-mouthed mastication I can live with. Ditto the nosepicking and regular dinner-table hand down the pants. It’s the spitting of pieces of unwanted gristle – which constitutes pretty much the entirety of a cheap Chinese meal – in a perfect parabola within inches of the visitor’s face that really gets my blood up. But the spitting during meals is nothing – nothing – compared to the veritable celebration of expectoration that goes on absolutely everywhere else. The Chinese spit in the street. They spit in a car. They spit on the floor of a bus or in a hotel foyer. They spit on the wall of the train station. And worst of all, they’ll spit on the wall of your sleeping compartment on the train. (This, by the way, is even done by the sartorial elite in soft sleeper class, heading from one city to another for a business trip. The mind boggles at what it must be like further back in the train. Like standing in a saliva rainstorm without an umbrella I suppose).
The spitting itself isn’t even the worst part. It’s the preliminary cacophonic wind-up. Whereas the Indians (world-class spitters, themselves, it must be credited) measure social status using a complicated and ancient caste system based on ethnicity, profession and skin colour, the Chinese – to their own credit – have simplified the system wholesale. Social status in the Middle Kingdom is directly proportionate to the volume, duration and raspiness of the phlem-finding process. It begins in the lungs, whereupon the truly aristocratic spitter can, in an impressive display of only four or five hacks, raise five ounces of honeyish snot to his larynx, hold it there, while using his tongue and teeth to produce a lump of blackish fluid the size of a tennis ball before hurling it through a curled tongue at the nearest wall, piece of furniture or mortified backpacker. From there, he will watch it glissade languidly down the wall (or furniture or mortified backpacker) admiring its leisurely track downward (the highest socio-economic stratum can manufacture such viscosity that it’ll descend so slowly as to be undetectable in movement – like a medieval pane of glass which is thicker at the bottom than the top). The peasant spitter is profoundly incapable of such virtuosity – no doubt why he remains a peasant. He probably had a job interview in the 1980s, enthusiastically spat in the face of the interviewer but it splashed down onto the prospective employer’s coat instead of clinging impressively to his nose. What a loser.
Third, toilets. Americans, in their inimitable way, sneer at European toilets just as they laugh at our dental work (see below). I don’t think it’s even about hygiene, they’re just confused by a water closet incapable of handling a fecal deposit weighing five or six kilograms. If their consternation is in fact about hygiene, they should drag their planet-sized posteriors to Asia. Hell may very well be Baghdad after a bombing or being stuck in an elevator with Italians. But more likely, it’s having to use a Chinese public latrine.
I’ll spare you specifics. You can probably imagine what I’m talking about – qualitatively, if not quantitatively. Let me just say: Never again will I wrinkle my nose at the facilities at a football match in Britain or a beach toilet in Australia. Never, ever, again.
Fourth and finally, dentistry – or rather, its conspicuous absence. For all you muppets like me who’ve had thousands of pounds spent on orthdontics, periodontics or just plain dental hygiene over the years, it transpires you can manage perfectly well with one sole tooth at the front, and gums everywhere else. Not only is flossing a boondoggle cash-cow conjured up by a cynical tooth lobby, but brushing your teeth is too. Just let them fall out, and wander around frightening tourists with a monodent grin. They’ll want to take your picture and offer you money for the privilege. But stick to soft food.
So, four little things of which to be forewarned next time you venture beyond the Costa Brava or Cape Cod. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that the west coast of the United States tends to do pretty well on all these things. Good food, clean toilets, selfconsciously free of bad public habits, and superlative teeth. As you cross timezones eastwards in the northern hemisphere, you’ll find that all these things steadily deteriorate. The US eastern seabord, then Britain, continental Europe, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, India, and finally China, which is a country of pet-eating, loogy-lunging, single-toothed floor-crappers.
I’m just saying. Forewarned is forearmed.
No comments:
Post a Comment