I’m now on the last stop of my Spring Festival tour of south-west China (first Kunming, then Weiyuan/威远 in Sichuan to visit a friend and her family, and now Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, to tour the city with my friend before we both return to Wuhan tomorrow). I’ve seen the Spring Festival grand performance on TV six or seven times (it’s been on constant re-run since Spring Festival Eve). I’ve lit incense at the temple to honor our ancestors, and I’ve had my fortune told by the temple nun (she thought my wish – that I want to learn Chinese – was stupid, “you can just talk to these people around you”, but my fortune was otherwise very positive, and she said that my ancestors are watching over me and making sure that things go well for me). I’ve learned to play Sichuan-style mahjong – I won 12 rmb the first evening, but then lost 20 rmb the next night, so I’m not quite ready for the big stakes just yet. When my friend’s mom plays with her friends (which they, like everyone else in Sichuan, did for a few hours every day that I was there), the tiles seem to fly back and forth across the table, and so does the money – she won 1500 rmb on Friday afternoon.
But my strongest memory of this year’s Spring Festival will most likely be the food. So much food. It seems like we’ve been eating constantly – and when I’ve been full, I’ve been urged to taste just one more thing. In China, people often show consideration for others around the table by picking the tastiest pieces out of the dishes on the table and loading them onto your plate, while urging you to eat more – which can be difficult to get used to for us foreigners, who might not like the same dishes that Chinese people consider to be the tastiest (which are usually the most rare and therefore also the most strange), and who also generally like to stop eating when we’re full. This was especially true in Kunming, where our friend’s aunt showed her hospitality by filling our plates with food, and when we had finished that, loading our plates with more and urging us to taste everything from the selection of dishes that covered the table, always enough for at least three times the size of our group. The food she cooked at home was delicious, and when we ate out it was always at very nice restaurants, but there was always so much, it was hard for my stomach to keep up. Yesterday was only the second time I’ve had rice since I left home almost two weeks ago – rice is filler food, and at every meal there’s been so much cooked food that there’s been no need (or room) for rice.
羊肉汤
In Weiyuan, my friend protected me from being forced to over-eat – she wanted me to taste all of her favorite food from her home town, so she insisted that I didn’t have to finish anything I ate. There, instead, the focus was on variety. I have now tasted cow stomach, duck throat, duck intestine, and duck tongue. Yesterday morning we left home at 6 am to have time for sheep soup before our bus to Chengdu, a soup boiled from sheep everything (stomach, intestines, skull) from which I managed to choose mostly only meat pieces from the soup and hide the sheep blood pudding under my rice. We had the soup with plum wine, “to warm us up”. I soon learned not to ask until after I had finished eating what it was I had just eaten, and sometime it wasn’t as bad as I thought (thick rice noodles), sometimes it was (pig’s ears). To be fair, most organs were perfectly edible, but it’s hard to get used to the consistency of stomach and tongue, let alone the thought of what it was I was eating. I’ve definitely broadened my food horizons on this trip.
People also have a tendency to notice which dishes you eat from the most, or which dishes you praise the most, and then see to it that those dishes magically appear again at the next meal, which really is very considerate. Our last evening in Weiyuan, we had hot pot, and the person sitting to my right, one of my friend’s high school classmates, must have noticed that I preferred to eat the meat pieces from the pot, while everyone else around the table clearly liked stomach, intestines, throat and tongue the best. When he fished around for the cooked food at the bottom of the pot, he picked out a piece of duck’s throat for the person to his right, something suspicious-looking for himself, and a piece of meat for me, to my great relief. Sometimes people say that Chinese people show emotions more through actions than words, and food definitely seems to be one way to show care and consideration.
In Weiyuan, my friend also made sure that I tasted as many of their local snacks as possible, which she insisted I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else in China (at least not with the same flavor) – most of our schedule for the three days I was there was planned around fitting in as much food as possible. I gave up early on trying to remember the names of everything I was eating. Since this is Sichuan, a lot of it was spicy (tofu with rice and a spicy sauce; spicy cold rice noodles; spicy cold egg noodles; something that looked like ravioli in a spicy soup), but there were also things that were sweet (my favorite was a snack that looked like a small pancake, with lots of different options for fillings, including chocolate; another good one was a brown cold soup with a type of noodle that looked a little bit like shrimp; raw sugar cane was peeled, chopped up and sold as a snack on the street; and all of the tea houses had a type of chrysanthemum tea with red dates, goji berries, and pieces of raw sugar cane). And then here in Chengdu, we’ve done the same thing with Chengdu food. We had lunch (which consisted of what must have been at least ten different kinds of local snacks) today at a food-court style restaurant that she said a friend of hers from Taipei flies to Chengdu specifically to eat at, and he then flies back when he’s finished his meal.
My friend's mother, shopping for Chinese medicine
And to top it all off, my friend’s mother sent me off with a huge bag filled with home-cooked meats and sausages, typical Weiyuan snacks, apples for the road, and a bag of Chinese medicine that I’m to boil and drink at the start of next year’s winter to build up my immune system. I thought that my bags coming home (with presents unloaded – the bottle of Absolut I brought seemed very popular with her parents) would be lighter than when I set off a week and a half ago, but now instead I’m coming back with overfilled luggage and more food than I can possible finish. Anyone hungry?