What the Chinese Don't Eat (12 page)

I used this beautiful lie to my English husband, who loves fish, while my son doesn’t eat fish at all. One day, we were having dinner with my Chinese friends in a seafood restaurant in San Francisco. When the dish arrived, my husband immediately cut off the fish head and put it on my plate. My friends were so shocked, and asked me in Chinese: ‘Are you sure this Englishman loves you? How could he give you that bony fish head in front of us!’

I learned how Chinese women are viewed in men’s eyes from a toast that men used to make at the table in China: it describes how different women look like different fish. Let me get it for you from my first book,
The Good Women of China
. ‘Mistresses are swordfish – tasty but with sharp bones; personal secretaries are carp – the longer you “stew” them, the more flavour they have; other men’s wives are Japanese puffer fish – trying a mouthful could be the end of you, but risking death is a source of pride; men’s own wives are salt cod – they will keep a long time. When there is no other food, salt cod is cheap and convenient, and makes a meal with rice.’

During my book tour, readers from different countries told me this toast would have suited their men as well.

When people ask me why I am lucky enough to have so many good friends and opportunities in my life, I answer that it is
because I know a Chinese saying: you can’t keep a fish alive in completely clean water. When something happens to me, I like to analyse why and what for; which is the fish, which is the water – and what do I want. If I want the fish that is happy in that dirty water, I try to live with the dirty water; if I need very clean water for something else, I have to give up the fish.

There are so many analogies, I don’t think I could ever get away from the influence of fish in my life. My mother often mentions fish when we talk on the phone. When we spoke to each other on Chinese National Day – October 1 – she told me: ‘Try to cook some duck this month, before they start eating mud and grass, and they still taste good from the insects they have eaten in the early autumn. Don’t forget to cook some fish head soup with tofu – it’s good for your health in autumn. And add some green leaves after you have removed the fish bones.’

I used to think there were no good Chinese men, until a brief encounter at Paddington station

Since my book
The Good Women of China
was published, I’ve been asked many times why I haven’t written a book about the good men of China. I’ve always said I’m not qualified; my excuse is that only a man could write such a book. But there is another reason – one I never tell people, but which is always at the back of my mind. My own experiences of China have left me with the feeling that there just aren’t that many good men, at least not by the standards of modern civilised society.

I have little memory of either of my grandfathers. One of them died when I was little, and the other I barely knew. I got to know him when he was in his 80s through reading his diary, which was full of military history but contained little about his family – though he did write of his reservations about marrying a woman with big feet. In the end, he said, he didn’t mind her feet too much as they made her stronger and better able to help him in his work. I read the diary again and again, trying to find something romantic about my grandmother, to whom he was married for 50 years, but there was nothing.

My father acted as both a politician and a manager in his children’s lives. Whenever my younger brother or I visited him there was one family ritual we had to observe, and which never changed. He would order us to make tea for him, then sit down and listen to him: if we didn’t follow what he said closely he would dismiss us as ‘uneducated’. He asked us only about our work and our political beliefs (which had to be the same as his). There were no questions about our
emotions, our friends. Then he would tell us to go home and work hard for the Party.

He would complain that my mother spent 30 minutes shopping at the farmers’ market every day: ‘I am an old man. I shouldn’t be left alone.’ No mention of the fact that his wife, who served 40 years in the army, was married to him for 50, and brought him three meals a day, was an old woman, too.

My brother is the father of a 14-year-old girl and the husband of a lovely, shy woman. Whenever I speak to him on the phone, he tells me just the bare minimum about family life. If I press him, he gets annoyed. ‘My dear sister,’ he’ll say, ‘you live a comfortable life in the developed world. I am struggling here in the
developing
world. I don’t have time to worry about what people think, or what is going through women’s minds. I am too busy to be the sort of husband and father you would like me to be.’ I apologised for him to his wife, but she said in her quiet, powerful voice, ‘There is nothing to apologise for. Like every working-class family, we haven’t got the money to spend time together relaxing and being “romantic”. If you want to see people living romantic lives in China, you have to go to the cinema.’

My niece takes a different view. ‘My father doesn’t need to work so hard,’ she says. ‘It’s just an excuse so that he can go out drinking with his friends – and maybe other women, too. That is a man’s life. Everyone at school knows that.’

Recently, two men upset my theory that there are few good men in China – all in the space of five hours. First, I was standing under the departure boards at Paddington station, trying to work out when the next train to Bristol left, holding a cup of coffee. The cup was so big that I couldn’t reach the espresso at the bottom of it. I tipped the cup higher and higher, but still there didn’t seem to be anything coming out.

Someone shouted at me, but I ignored them (this was London, after all). Then a Chinese man rushed up to me, took the cup from my hand and shouted: ‘You silly woman – just look at your clothes!’ I was stunned, but even more embarrassed when I looked down: my top and my beautiful silk trousers were completely soaked in coffee.

The man was angry: ‘I can’t understand how these coldblooded westerners can stand there watching you pour coffee all over yourself and not say anything. I guess we’re just very different cultures.’ I thanked him, though I disagreed that we were so different.

Four hours later, at the end of my book reading in Bristol, a Chinese man asked me what men could do to change or improve life for Chinese women. I was touched by his question; it is rare that I hear from Chinese men.

So I guess I was wrong about the good men of China. If there were none, how would so many good women of China have grown up? The two Chinese men I met last month have planted a new seed of hope.

Adjusting to life in London means roast pork, girls in smelly clothes and automated phone operators

Last week I went to a ‘green-tea party’ with a group of Chinese women. They talked about the lives they lead in London, as they do every year: they said that meeting like this is their version of the western ‘round robin’ that people send at Christmas. The idea is that they share stories and ideas, but the reality is that they end up sharing a lot of complaints. But I found it all rather interesting and thought-provoking.

One woman, a former schoolteacher in China and a mother of two, could hardly wait to get started. She was fired up with the frustrations of moving house in Britain.

‘We just bought a house,’ she said, ‘and I can’t tell you how difficult it is – all the phone calls you have to make to get gas, water, a phone line, your furniture delivered, a parking permit … It drove me mad. You have to put up with all those automated phone operators, a string of multiple-choice questions, and lots of technical language before you hear a real human voice. If you’re lucky you might get put through to an operator, but first you have to join a queue and listen to terrible music for an eternity. If you’re unlucky, you go in circles before being put back to the main menu.

‘Does life in the developed world mean going without human contact? I miss the old phone operators. I miss arguing with them the way I did in China 11 years ago. It was the only time you could speak without worrying about who you were talking to or who might hear you – so much more human than all these western voice machines.’

An older woman in her 70s, the mother of two restaurant owners, was annoyed about her Chinese church. ‘I used to go to a very small church, and there we tried to help each other all the time. Now I go to a very big church, but everyone just sits around criticising each other and gossiping. If we don’t care about our immediate neighbours, how can we love God?’

Another woman, a mother of three girls whose family owns several Chinese takeaways in London, found it hard to understand why her children had so many school holidays. ‘How much can they learn when they have all these long holidays with no homework? There is no challenge, no pressure, and all the classes are much slower-moving than in China. The government doesn’t seem to realise how lazy this new generation is. You can already see it on the streets: how many kids know how to look after themselves? How many girls care about dressing well? Some of them look like mobile rubbish bins in their dirty, smelly clothes. I don’t want my daughters to turn out like that, but what can a Chinese mother do to resist this western life?’

An artist who was visiting her daughter in London said, ‘I thought London was meant to be the cultural centre of the world, but the names of the streets, the squares, the buildings, people’s names – even the menus – are so boring. They all seem to come from the Bible – St Peter’s, St Paul’s – or the royal family – Queen A, Queen B. There is nothing that tells you anything about the place itself, its history or how it came to be there; there is only royalty and religion.

‘Take restaurant menus, which are just a list of different animals’ names and how they have been cooked. In China, the names on a menu refer to local history, folklore, or poetry; you would never see a dish described as crudely as “roast pork”, for instance. Even in a tiny, shabby family restaurant in the country, you get very descriptive menus. Why does the west lean so
much on its history, but never bring it into its daily life and language?’

One woman didn’t speak unless she was spoken to, and even then she said just one sentence in a quiet voice: ‘I’ve started shopping in Knightsbridge rather than Oxford Street this year.’

Everyone congratulated her, but I had no idea what the significance of this was. Someone explained. Apparently, when she came to London 15 years ago she used to tell everyone you could buy two chickens for £1.99 at the market behind Brixton station. Then she graduated to supermarkets, and then to delicatessens and boutiques. As her wealth increased, so her choice of shopping destination evolved. It was a map of the course of her life. A Chinese saying came to mind: ‘One’s voice becomes more distant as one’s price becomes higher.’

How China has embraced all the bright lights and overindulgence of a very merry Craze Mass

‘Have you started Christmas shopping?’ My friends have been asking me this since early November, when my head was still filled with Zhong Qiu Jie, the Chinese mid-autumn festival. Six weeks until God’s birthday is a long way to go, I thought.

‘Did you do Christmas shopping when you were in China before 1997?’ I did some, but it would be hard to call it Christmas shopping when you compare it to the hundreds and thousands of shopping bags that block the London streets. I was already too old for Christmas shopping, which in most Chinese eyes was considered a western romantic bit of fun for the young.

In fact, the first Christmas things after ‘open policy’ was introduced came not from those big department stores where staff were trying to change their manner from very officious to more encouraging and commercial; nor from ‘the foreigners’ friendship shops’, which sold only to foreign diplomats and top officials, who paid in dollars. At that time most Christmas things were sold in the markets full of ‘
xiao shang
,
xiao faner
’ – hucksters shouting ‘the best from western Craze Mass’.

I once asked a market trader in Nanjing, a woman in her 60s wearing a red beret, ‘What is Christmas? What’s it for?’

‘That is the date for USA God! You see my hat, this is their Craze Mass hat, westerners like the colour red … I did wonder if that was true after everybody said capitalists like black; but as you know, those rich capitalists are very colourful. Money and wealth bring colour to human lives … come on, buy one, forget your age… we have missed out on a lot.’ I bought my
first ever Christmas tree from her. It was made from paper, was no bigger than my hand and had sesame seed-size stars.

I didn’t think too much about how logical her theory on money and colour was, but afterwards I could see it not only in the festival celebrations but in China’s improved daily life. Between the 50s and 80s Chinese people wore a uniform of blue, grey and military green – but not black as that is too capitalist and signifies bad luck.

Christmas, which has become a big thing in the cities over the past few years, has brightened up China in the winter. I recently saw a photo of a Chinese family’s Christmas Eve in Tianjing, a harbour city near Beijing. Six family members – three grandparents, two parents and one daughter – were all standing with a huge plastic Father Christmas next to their dining table; you could see the colourful lights and beautiful flashing curtains behind them.

I have to say, in my parents’ photos, before they were burned by the red guards, I never saw such rich colours, even though they painted the colours on to black and white photos. But they never painted that much colour in.

Last year I did my Christmas shopping in China. The city streets were filled with red, green and gold – the colours dancing and flashing; shop staff waved streamers, giftboxes and angels; in the bookstores, you could see lines of coloured lights jumping up and down to the music. It is like this for the whole of December.

My family and I were on Hainan Island for Christmas last year. We stayed in a western hotel in HaiKou, the capital of Hainan. There was an unbelievably huge choice of seafood for the guests on Christmas Eve, masses of food, more than 10 cooks performing, innumerable waiters, hundreds of diners, loud music, sweating dancing girls, shouting parents and crying children.