21 Oct Village Food: Digesting Chinese Culture

In the quiet afternoon of rural Hubei, China, the pig let out a solid minute of blood curdling screams. When it finally quieted down, the butcher—with help from my cousins and uncles—held the pig up by its hind legs and tipped it down toward a red plastic basin to drain the blood smoothly waterfalling out of its mouth. 

Meanwhile, one of my uncles steadily poured a baggie of salt into the basin, stirring the crystals into the blood with his bare hand. From where I standing on the second floor of our family’s house, I could see the swirl of blood thickening from a watery crimson to a bright, paint-like red. Earlier, I was asked to join my cousins in holding down one of the pig’s legs, but opted to stay in my room. I only stood at the window for a minute or so out of curiosity—neither watching the slaughter, nor waiting long enough to see the pig get chopped up. The butcher was invited in for lunch, my uncle offering him cigarettes and camaraderie. 

In the evening, 10 of my family members—aunts, uncles, cousins, my mom—gathered around a small square wooden table. Everything was mini-sized: the bowls, the traditional chairs elevating your butt six inches above the ground, the table so small that the young men of the family had to stand and eat. 

Even today when my mom’s family is wealthy enough to build homes with metal doors next to the original small brick home with traditional wood doors, we still use the traditional furniture and bowls for dinner. 

The small size of dinner related objects originated from encouraging smaller rations and slower eating. Small dishes fill up a small table. Small bowls fill a small stomach. There are never knives at the dinner table because there are no chunks of meat to cut up. With over ten homemade dishes coming straight out of the wood-fired kitchen, it was a celebration and feast fit for Chinese New Year.

The small blocks of congealed pig blood were sautéed with scallion, sitting in a pork broth. Pig blood curd is like tofu, but much smoother and softer with a surprisingly chewy bounce to each bite. It’s usually one of my favorite dishes to eat while I’m in China because there definitely isn’t any pig blood curd in Ohio. I was enjoying this dish less than usual, most likely because I saw where it came from and couldn’t get the bright red swirling bucket of blood out of my mind. No one else seemed bothered, so I just shoved my city-dweller logic aside and had the freshest meal I’ve eaten in years. 

 In Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, Zhou Dasheng wrote, “the Chinese make thorough use of every part of the pig, from head to toe” (Zhou 258). Everything from the feet to the brain to the bones is consumed in one way or the other, including the blood. With a population of over a billion, consumption of meat must be conservative. The word meat in Chinese generally means pork (Zhou 257). This puts the pork at the center of festivities in China; the slaughter of the pig was my welcome home.

I’ve seen my uncles slaughter other animals, so I asked why we hired a butcher to slaughter this pig. My cousin told me that killing pigs is a bad deed—bad luck—and that every village has a pig slaughterer for hire because most people don’t know the techniques to killing a pig. I couldn’t help but think about the butcher’s outfit: a black leather vest that looked like it was tough enough to hold knives on the insides, a long sleeve shirt, black pants and big black boots. 

My aunt remarked on how for special occasions growing up, they would have pork broth soup that was actually a huge cauldron of water with some bones and a tiny piece of pork in it, but they nevertheless were ecstatic to eat “meat”; it really just tasted like water, she said. 

Spending time tasting the homemade, homegrown food of my mom’s village, I was eating my way into my family history and my cultural roots. Even just by listening to the Chinese language, I knew that everything revolved around food here. The most common phrase I hear from my friends, family or acquaintances: ‘Have you eaten yet?’ The phrase for having a job: ‘I have rice to eat.’ The measure of quality of life is often a metaphor alluding to the quantity and quality of food you eat. The first thing that happens when entering a Chinese home (after politely taking your shoes off, of course) is the host will offer tea and food. When I meet random aunties and grandmas on the train, they always ask if I have eaten and if my answer does not live up to their standards of what constitutes a meal, they will insist on sharing their food with me. Sancaiyitang—three dishes, one soup—is the requisite for a family dinner, which I grew up eating every day. 

 You’ll never find a single measuring cup in a Chinese kitchen because there are no recipes—only trial, error and tradition. Emily Hahn, a prolific American writer who arrived in Shanghai in 1935, noted that the niceties of Western table manners did not permit the full enjoyment of food and remarked at the speed Chinese dishes were made (Roberts 159). Raising a large family in China meant that making a balanced meal had to be as efficient as nutritious; all efforts were put into maximizing the enjoyment of the food available. To Chinese people, food is art, medicine, happiness and culture, not science, diet, a show of manners and a daily chore. Fast paced, never wasted, varied and adaptable—Chinese food is Chinese life itself. 

In the 1900’s, English secretary to the embassy Sir George Staunton visited China and exclaimed that ordinary Chinese people knew no distinction of clean or unclean meat (Roberts 205). In a culture where ‘eating anything with four legs except for a table’ is a popular saying, I was surprised to learn that bovines are never eaten in villages. My grandma refused beef even when she visited the city because an ox would keep her entire family alive and fed. Like in India, even the old and sick oxen were not to be eaten. This beef taboo first appeared between the ninth and 12th centuries, Vincent Goossaert wrote in Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China (Sterckx 193). The most advanced technologies still can’t beat a working ox in helping peasants till the rugged soils that comprise village life in China. In many ancient paintings and poems, the ox is the representation of strength, persistence and toil that is so deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. 

My eldest uncle treats his oxen like his children. A bit of a black sheep in the family, my eldest uncle never made it past the fourth grade and instead has spent his whole life waking up every day at 4:00 am before the rooster crows to work in the fields with his beloved ox. My grandmother was a huge advocate for education for all of her kids, so most of my family is academically talented and well educated, all moving into the city for university and lucrative jobs. My eldest uncle? He sees the city and comes straight back to his oxen. 

My mom told me about how she used to always miss this one dish my grandma would make for special occasions. My mom longed for that taste of fragrant, salty cured pork perfectly simmered with seasoning and garlic leaves, so on one visit home in her thirties, she asked my grandma to make that dish again.  It just didn’t taste the same. She searched and searched, but never discovered the same flavor she remembered from childhood. “Everything tasted better when we were kids because we didn’t have much to eat,” one of my aunts explained.

The stories of my mom’s childhood somehow always involved food of sorts. On her weekly 20 mile trek to middle school, my grandma would always send her off with two hard boiled eggs—a rare treat. When a traveler came through the village, my grandma would always offer an egg, setting aside the scarcity of eggs in her own family to welcome a stranger. As a child, my mom’s dream job was to work at the candy store. Their family of six—originally eight, but two died in childhood—couldn’t afford the pennies that candy cost. To her, selling candy was a good life. Although she somehow was smart enough to score high enough on national exams to go to one of the best medical schools in China at age 15 and become a surgeon at age 20, her ultimate goal as a child was simple: to afford a taste of candy every now and then. 

My mom always talked about how her village had it good. They had fruits, vegetables, beans, grains, yams that grew and flourished. As much as my mom portrayed her upbringing in this village as beautiful and peaceful, I knew that it was a hard life. I knew that she was born less than a decade after the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward. She said that during famines, their village never starved, but other provinces’ people would come by their door, hungry. 

Pointing to the different trees and shrubs, my mom noted that the villagers all know what is edible, so even if there was no food, the mountain would provide. 

“The Chinese peasants apparently know every edible plant in their environment… Most do not ordinarily belong on the dinner table, but they may be easily adapted in time of famine… The knowledge of these “famine plants” was carefully handed down as a living culture—apparently this knowledge was not placed in dead storage too long or too often.” 

(Chang 9)

A word to describe tasty dishes is ‘xiafan’ which literally translates to ‘make the rice go down’. The word for dinner food is ‘fancai’; ‘fan’means rice—and can refer to food in general—and ‘cai’ means vegetables, but actually refers to all dishes. Children who eat a lot of ‘fan’ are rewarded (Chang 303). In the generations before mine, this was not simply tradition, but a way of rationing the limited resources in a large population with little arable land. Having a full belly of rice lessened the hunger for meat that was a scarce and unsustainable source of nutrition for the people. 

“The food of contemporary southern China is, in the opinion of many, the finest in the world. It combines quality, variety, and a nutritional effectiveness that allows it to sustain more people per acre than any other diet on earth except modern laboratory creations” (Chang 319). The reliance on non-meat sources necessitated creativity in using all the various edible parts of vegetables and meat alike. This is why there are seemingly infinite variations of yummy vegetable dishes in China, but somehow mostly salad and bland boiled vegetables in the U.S. 

Food is used to communicate the occasion and partnership between people in China. Whatever food you eat is socially encoded with messages about the meaning of your relationship in respect to your host. Not only is food a language, it’s the universal language. There is no social gathering without food because a get-together without food is just disrespectful and inconsiderate. Historically, this habit likely stemmed from how peasants frequently snacked in between insufficient meals; friends and family cared for each other by reminding each other to eat to help prevent anyone from getting too malnourished.

Chinese culture isn’t very emotional or affectionate. The number one way Chinese people show love is through food. I have never heard my dad say I love you or I miss you, but he always makes my favorite foods when I come home, always tries to add food into my bowl even when I’m full, waits for me to finish eating before he starts eating too much (I’m a slow eater) and always saves the best part of a meal—like the fish fillet or the most tender parts of the meat—for me. When I’m away at college, he’ll send me pictures of the food he’s making: homemade dumplings, his “famous” stir-fried noodles and new dishes that he’s experimenting with. My mom’s main worry when I’m traveling or away at school is if I’m eating well. Because to her, eating well is living well and living well is to eat well. My mom also aggressively offers food to me and anyone else she comes in contact with, including my friends, concerned for whether they’re eating enough. 

Coming from a history with high pressures on population and resources, China’s omnipresent obsession with eating—its cultural identity largely defined by its food—is a result of rationing and survival mechanisms stemming from the rural villages of ancient times. After spending most of this summer in China, I started seeing all those traditions in myself. I went to Alaska after China, and when I met up with a rock climbing buddy I met on Facebook, I brought her strawberries. When I was hitchhiking in the middle of Wrangell St. Elias National Park, I left my ride with a bag full of juicy, sweet grapes. I realized that when I’m with my friends, I’m the annoying one who always asks if everyone ate, prodding a few too many times about if they’re sure they don’t want more food. I noticed that I uphold the same Chinese standards of variety and flavor; that I treat food as a source of positive energy and a central force to my livelihood; and that I show my welcome and care through food just like my mom, my grandma and great-ancestors all did. Friend or foe, rich or poor, good or bad: no one deserves to go hungry. 

My mom’s village’s name is YunXiDong. It means a hole in the mountain under the clouds and flowing with streams. From the rice paddies of my roots in rural China to the booming modern tech city of Shenzhen where I was born, to the people all over China, as long as there is food, there is love and there is life. 

Citations

Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, Zhou Dasheng 2001
China to Chinatown, J.A.G Roberts 2002

Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China, Roel Sterckx 2005

Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, K.C. Chang 1977

Chinese Foods, Liu Junru 2011 To the People, Food is Heaven, Audra Ang 2012