Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (7 page)

Fifty years later, the government still prefers to blame the weather. Today, in a country of expanding waistlines, young people are bewildered by rumors of hunger in their parents' and grandparents' lives. But back in the 1970s, everyone remembered the desperation of just a decade before. Hungry ghosts still thronged the memories of the people we passed in the streets, and a bowl of rice was something that few of the living took for granted.

There was food, though it was not abundant. Grain, oil, and meat were all rationed, and restaurants required their customers to supply coupons for their meals. The coupons tied people to their home district; they were not valid elsewhere. Scarcity was still the rule. The campus canteen served compacted cubes of stale rice with bowls of thin vegetables. In the Beijing winter, great pyramids of cabbages appeared on the edge of the institute's playing fields, their bulk slowly dissipating as the cooks loaded wheelbarrows with tired cabbages to haul off to the canteen. Bright red persimmons were left outside to freeze and passed for ice cream. To buy an orange required a medical certificate. But in the parallel reality that foreigners occupied there were no grain coupons, perhaps to maintain the fiction of socialist abundance. We were free to eat where we chose.

For us, eating our way through China's gastronomic encyclopedia was an escape from the drab hostility of Mao's China. It was the only visible trace of the China of my imagination, the China that had first impelled me to climb the steep foothills of the language. I had landed in Beijing just as China's richly layered imperial past was in retreat. The Tang poetry that I wanted to study, the celadon glazes and gilded, curved roofs that I admired, the shaded courtyards hidden behind high gray walls that I longed to explore were all beyond reach. Traditional culture was banned as reactionary and all beliefs, other than socialism, condemned as superstition.

The culture of food, though, had stubbornly survived, albeit behind a facade of austere proletarianism. Restaurants were dilapidated and poorly lit, and their clients spat chewed debris freely onto the table or the floor. But
behind the kitchen door, old skills had quietly been preserved, waiting for better times.

In the 1980s Mao's lifelong rival, the diminutive political survivor Deng Xiaoping, began to dismantle the dead chairman's legacy in earnest. He had suffered political disgrace twice, and on his third return to power he was a man in a hurry. The reforms he launched would set China on a path of headlong growth that would extinguish Maoist fundamentalism forever. Mao was reduced to the status of revered ancestor as the society that he had transformed into a socialist state turned to the market with enthusiasm.

By the 1990s, peasants had their collectivized land back under household control, though many would lose it again to rapacious local officials. The managers of state-owned factories operating at a loss abandoned the Maoist idea that everyone should have a job, and the factory workers discovered that there was a dark side to the market economy: they were no longer the proletarian elite, and their safe factory jobs evaporated. The managers grabbed large shareholdings in the new, slimmed-down enterprises, and the workers were left to fend for themselves.

As the People's Communes were broken up and the state factories dismantled, setting up in business became the lifeline of the newly redundant. Workers began to revive the skills of petty enterprise, and food production ceased to be a state monopoly. For some, it became a means of survival; for a few, it was the route to riches.

In Chongqing, a sweltering metropolis on the edge of the Yangtze River in Sichuan, former Red Guard Zhou Wenli and his wife set up a tiny hot pot restaurant. They began with a couple of tables on the pavement outside the family home. In a country in which innovation was still rare and where it was still considered dangerous to be different, one simple invention was to make the Zhous suddenly and fabulously rich. It was a gas-fired hot pot that was set into the table and divided in two sections; one was filled with a fiery, chile-laced version of the local dish, while the other side was blander.
It became a sensation. Within five years, the Zhous commanded a chain of large and lavish hot pot restaurants in ever-smarter locations. They added a cabaret of brightly dressed dancers, mostly peasant girls from mountain villages, in tinsel costumes. The colors were electric, as though the Zhous and their customers needed to erase the memory of two decades of monochrome living.

The restaurant chain did not just make the Zhous rich, it allowed them to retell the story of their lives. Mr. Zhou acquired a white Cadillac and a chauffeur and dressed in tailored Western suits. The couple bought a generous detached house on a raw new estate. On their bedroom wall they hung their wedding photographs—not photographs of the day they had actually married, but photographs of the wedding they now felt they should have had.

Fifteen years earlier, their marriage had been a low-key affair, in line with the politics of the day. Nobody had dressed up, and the only treats were a handful of sweets and a few cigarettes shared with the local party officials. It had been commemorated in a black-and-white photograph of the couple taken in front of a standard-issue poster of Chairman Mao. They stood staring at the camera, side by side, neither smiling nor touching.

The couple's talent for business had allowed them to leave those days far behind, but even their new affluence was not enough to make up for a youth lived in drab austerity. They had the power to carry their wealth into the future, but they also had the capacity to project it into the past, replacing their black-and-white memories with a colorful fantasy biography. They retroactively created the life that politics had denied them, a made-to-order life story in which they played the starring roles.

On the bedroom wall of their new villa, the utilitarian image of their socialist wedding was replaced with blown-up photographs of a wedding that never was. Mr. Zhou, dressed in a morning suit and top hat, leans toward the camera over the head of his wife, his gaze mimicking in its intensity that of the romantic lead in a Hollywood B movie. His bride is encased in an entire sweet shop of silk and lace, her heavily made-up face framed by
a sculpture of black curls, topped with a white veil. The couple gazes out of the frame with the self-absorption of a pair of actors impersonating themselves for an admiring public.

The Zhous were not the only people who were rewriting their life story. The restaurants they opened were both places to eat and an invitation to share a fantasy of affordable glamour. Food was no longer about survival: across the country it was being reinvented to reflect a different China, a country that was suddenly turning out cheap goods for credit-fueled Western consumers and which, after years of isolation, was hungry to open to the world.

Ten years ago, a small street in central Beijing that I know well was a quiet, unpaved lane that boasted a greengrocer, a dry cleaner, and a small noodle shop. Now it offers thirty different restaurants, from Indian through Italian to Tibetan. A pair of elderly sisters have opened a tea shop in their living room and dispense homemade sponge cakes and apple tarts. A down-market hotel sells lasagna and chili con carne to passing backpackers. Coffee, which few Chinese used to find palatable—one Chinese teacher once told me it tasted like medicine—is now so ubiquitous that Chinese friends think nothing of spending the equivalent of half a migrant worker's daily wage on a single Starbucks cappuccino. Tea drinking, too, has become a gourmet pursuit: an artist friend, known in the 1990s for his risqué performance art, recently chose to rendezvous at a teahouse where the brew he selected from the heavily brocaded menu cost thirty pounds for each tiny cup.

A dairy industry has sprung from nowhere in a country where cheese was once regarded with bewilderment and disgust, and exotic fruits and vegetables are on sale year-round. Kentucky Fried Chicken is now rumored to be China's biggest restaurant chain, and every city is infested with McDonald's. Meat eating, once a New Year's treat for many, has made young generations taller, while diabetes, obesity, and other afflictions of plenty are taking hold.

The Chinese people have never been so numerous or so well-off, and most can eat their fill, thanks to the thirty years of industrialization and
economic growth. Hunger is a remote memory for the newly affluent in China's cities, but food remains at the center of the sense of well-being. Where once it was hoarded and husbanded, now it is dispensed with lavish extravagance. Wasting food is no longer seen as a sin against the labor of the peasant farmer but as a sign of lavish generosity in a wealthy host; in the competition for face, no animal is too exotic to end its days on the dining table. The rarer the creature, the more it boosts the host's reputation for good living. Poachers comb the forests and hills of neighboring countries for owls, crocodiles, pangolins, and civet cats to serve on China's tables. China's zoos offer visitors the opportunity, for a price, to eat the inmates, and the guardians of China's nature preserves have been known to celebrate important occasions by serving endangered species to their guests.

Old superstitions—that eating the corresponding part of an animal will cure an afflicted human organ—drive some of this traffic. In its most banal form, men eat animal penises in an effort to reassure themselves about the performance of their own. In a similar quest for potency, between 30 million and 100 million sharks are mutilated each year for the supposedly aphrodisiac qualities of their fins. Warnings that the elevated levels of mercury they contain might have the opposite physiological effect have not yet dented consumer demand. Nor has the suspicion that the Cantonese habit of eating civet cat contributed to the outbreak of SARS in 2002 had much impact on the popularity of the dish.

Prosperity has corroded China's memories of famine, but the industrial revolution has left a deadly deposit on the country's overloaded plates. In their race to produce, China's factories have left layers of contamination on soils and crops. The uncontrolled pollution that seeps from China's industrial centers dumps tons of toxins into the country's suffering rivers and renders long stretches of water unsafe to touch, let alone to drink. China's farmers still irrigate their crops, but now the water they use is laced with untreated sewage and industrial effluent that contains lead, arsenic, mercury, and other lethal heavy metals.

Beijing's winter cabbages now carry a load of cadmium and along the Yellow River, rice harvests are contaminated with chromium. The children who live along the riverbank appear to be suffering from sinister rates of mental retardation and stunted growth that doctors blame on high concentrations of arsenic and lead in their diet. And in China's fast-forwarded industrial revolution, which has allowed more people to eat more lavishly than ever before, food adulteration has become a national sport.

In the early years of this century, Chinese writer Zhou Qing, the kind of journalist that authoritarian governments regard as a dangerous nuisance, set out to investigate China's food industry. He discovered that Chinese farmers and food producers had embraced industrial innovation with enthusiasm, and the result was a catalog of horrors. Stories of an epidemic of early puberty in young children led him to investigate fish farms where the farmers had discovered that their fish grew faster if they were fed liberal quantities of contraceptive pills. He found that pork, another staple of the Chinese diet, was contaminated with clenbuterol, a drug that had been banned as an asthma treatment because of its dangerous side effects. China's farmers had discovered that it helped to produce lean meat in pigs, though those who ate the meat reported symptoms that included giddiness, nausea, and heart palpitations.

Soy sauce was being manufactured and exported in which fermented human hair, heavily contaminated with arsenic, was a major ingredient. Seafood was laced with formaldehyde and carcinogenic levels of a chemical called Malachite green that keeps fish scales looking fresh; eels were being killed with potassium permanganate before being shipped to market. Leather off-cuts from China's tanneries were being ground up to serve as animal and fish food. A Russian woman, Ilina Bulajina, caused a sensation when she reported finding drops of mercury in her oven after cooking some Chinese pork. The mercury, newspapers reported, had been injected to increase the weight.

Doctors began to attribute rising rates of cancer in Guangdong Province to the increased use of pesticides, additives, and preservatives. In one attention-grabbing speech, a scientist warned that sperm counts in the province had halved, despite the heavy consumption of alleged aphrodisiac foods. Diners were eating pesticide residues with their vegetables, sodium formaldehyde with their grains, and formaldehyde in their seafood.

If China's consumers were alarmed by reports of freak diseases or rumors of food-related cancer clusters, they had few alternatives in a market that valued rapid growth and discouraged the dissemination of bad news. Farmers, who knew what was going into their produce, admitted that they did not feed their own families the produce they sent to market. People in the cities, as one farmer told a reporter, had access to medical care, unlike poor farmers like himself.

Outside China, periodic scandals raised alarm about what horrors China's food concealed: European and U.S. inspectors chased down a periodic table of contaminants and residues in Chinese exports from seafood to honey, costing China hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. Chinese diplomats and trade officials called foul and complained of discrimination, but back home officials were grappling unsuccessfully with the impossibility of maintaining safety in a system that lacked the key instruments of enforcement—the rule of law, consumer rights, a free press, and political accountability. China's full stomachs were important symbols of the success of the Communist Party's policies since the death of Mao; to suggest that what was filling those stomachs was less than wholesome was not just unwelcome, it bordered on unpatriotic.