Probably the weirdest eating experience I’ve had since coming to China was in late November, when I was visiting some students in a nearby town (about 2 hours away) and they took me out to eat what they said was their town’s specialty, “pork bone”.
Everyplace in China seems to have a specialty of some kind (I have heard a million times, for instance, that nearby Shaxian is famous for its snacks, Quanzhou is famous for its seafood, and Fuzhou is famous for its lazy women), and it is usually food related. So it didn’t seem out of the ordinary that my students’ town, which is called Datian, would have something “famous”—in this case pork bone.
Some students came over and prepared this dinner, which included beef, pork, crab, duck, a few differnt kinds of vegtables, and soup. As you can see, we still managed to deal the meal a crippling blow.
Neither did it seem out of the ordinary when, later, we sat down at table and a large platter of what indeed appeared to be pork bones was placed on the table, and when a student then put a large, pinkish, meaty bone on a platter in front of me.
I picked up the shank of animal and immediately took to gnawing on the most readily gnawable part of it. The meat was delicious—sweeter and more tender than I expected and a little salty. My mouth watered and I immediately exclaimed “hao chi”—delicious—with real enthusiasm, not the faked kind I sometimes utter when someone puts something weird like red chicken or any variety of intestines or snails in front of me. It was really good and I immediately dug in.
But, it turned out, there was a small but important detail that I missed when the bone was placed in front of me.
It was a face.
Yeah. After my first round of gnawing on the large, greasy, drippy bone in my hands, I put it down on my plate to grab my beer glass. Someone was already toasting me, or the whole table, or maybe just everyone in my vicinity, so I was obliged to half-stand and give a little nod of acknowledgement and drink (you never drink on your own here; the glasses are tiny and every time you take a sip someone else butts in and toasts with you, and then you often have to drink the whole thing—that’s just how it works). So I nodded, drank, wiped my hands a little, gave a glance around the table to show I was at least marginally engaged in the conversation around me, and then looked back down.
There was an eyeball, big, maybe the size of a pool ball, on my bone. And a nostril. And teeth. And the ridges you can feel with your tongue on the roof of your mouth. And there was some grayish matter clinging to my left hand that appeared to be brain. It was.
I immediately acknowledged that I was going to have to make a very deliberate effort not to make any sounds of horror, not to visibly move away from the bone, not to make any expression of any kind. I slowly put my hands back onto the bone and raised it upward. It appeared that I had been gnawing somewhere behind the eye, like maybe on the cheek part, or somewhere around where the ear might have been. I could not believe that in a brief moment I had gone from delighting in this particular bone to suddenly feeling about three shades whiter because of it.
After my initial shock, which was I think fleeting, I kept eating. After I realized that my bone was half a skull, and accepting that fact, I simmered down. The eye was still weird, but I tried not to pay attention to it. I’m not sure if the people around me knew what was going on, but I have a feeling that giving me the head was a mild joke they were playing on me. The bone/face was damn good tasting, I’m guessing they gave it to me because the meat tasted so good, but also, I caught a few looks of amusement at my dismay and confusion over, say, what the hell to do with the brains. One of my students’ husbands was sitting to my left, and he pointed out the brains to me and somebody told me what they were, and that they were the “best part”. So, I ate them. They were not the best part.
The best part was, indeed, the face, which I ate most of. When most of the facial meat was gone and I wasn’t sure what to do about the eyeball (I knew I wasn’t going to eat it), I asked a student if she wanted to eat it. She said no, which I felt gave me the green light to consider the bone picked. And I moved on. Despite the fact that I enjoyed the flavor, I did not accept another pork bone after that.
The rest of the meal was, as far as I remember, totally normal, at least for China. Chinese meals usually consist of lots and lots of different dishes, and anytime you go out to eat in any kind of celebratory or official fashion, there seems to be an unwritten law decreeing that there must be at least 10 dishes served. So the other dishes were probably veggies (often spinach and cabbage fried with a heavy serving of oil and salt and sometimes garlic), fish (usually one or two fish dishes, always still with all the bones included, so you have to eat really slowly to make sure you don’t choke on nasty prickly fish bones—the fish is usually broiled/parbroiled in a delicious cream or wine/soysauce mixture and is almost always ridiculously good, despite the onerous task of eating around the bones), chicken (often there are a couple chicken dishes, sometimes fried like the sesame seed chicken you can get at Chinese restaurants all around the States, sometimes chicken pieces cooked up in soup, sometimes just regular old chicken feet, which I still can’t figure out how or why anybody bothers with them, because they’re feet, for one, but also because there’s hardly any meat on them and they are slippery and gross), fried beef/pork, clams/oysters, and or whatever other variety of animal parts you can imagine.
One of the dishes at our dinner was this crab dish, which was cooked with soy sauce, vinagar, salt, and the most amazing red-rice wine I have ever whiffed. Oy, bad picture quality.
At this point, I have eaten so many weird things that I have completely lost track of it all and I no longer consider most of it weird. The small sized whole-body (eyes and tail and everything) fish that you can get for 2 yuan (30 cents) at most barbecue stands, for instance, no longer phase me at all and are a treat I look forward to. The snails and various iterations of beef/pork intestines that I used to recoil from I now enjoyÉand just generally the different style in which all Chinese dishes are cooked is something that I have, pretty much, started to like.
Things I still do not particularly enjoy, but are widespread:
Duck’s blood. The title describes it perfectly. It is nothing but duck’s blood, but it pops up in all kinds of dishes unexpectedly, most commonly, it seems, in malatang, which is a kind of choose-your-own-adventure style of noodle shop. Apparently when they kill the ducks they let the blood drain out before butchering them, congeal the blood somehow so it’s solid, boil it, and then chop it into little pieces. The resulting product is something that looks and tastes somewhat like liver but is somehow even more gross.
Pig’s feet. These are everywhere! They are not at all the pickled pig’s feet that are somewhat common in the U.S., which, as I understand it, usually occupy the spot in the bar behind the jar of pickled eggs, which I once heard is used as a measure to see if someone is truly drunk or not (if you can eat it, you must be drunk—but that might just be something I made up, I don’t know). The pig’s feet here are served as a legitimate, to-be-savored dishÉthere is not much special to them and you wouldn’t know they were feet if you saw them on a platter. They look like really fatty, big chunks of pork. But beware, that ribbed-looking hunk of fat was once an appendage that spent at least a year or two tramping around in a thousand other pigs’ excrement. I just can’t shake that idea when it comes time to eat ‘em.
Tiny bits of pork or beef with hardly no meat on them. That’s kind of a long title, and there’s probably a real name for the dish, but I don’t know it. I just don’t understand these dishes. They are the most unsatisfying thing to eat ever, because the little bits of bone look like meat, they taste a little like meat when you suck on them, but at the end of eating this dish, you have taken like 40 bites of the food but none of it has turned out to be edible, and I always have a big pile of bones next to my bowl that did me no good (in China, lots of stuff has bones, so it’s OK to constantly be spitting stuff out of your mouth onto the table next to your bowl).
Little crabs. These bastards are so hard to crack open/dissect, and, as with the tiny bits of pork or beef, there is hardly anything edible to them, so there is usually almost no payoff (although the 2 miligrams of crab that you get from one of the little suckers is always delicious).
There are a ton of other weird things about eating here (it’s OK to burp at table, apparently; toasting is a complex and socially dominating activity; deciding who is going to pay sometimes involves shouting matches, shoving, and pulling—meaning you have to be willing to literally strong-arm someone’s money back into their pocket if you want them to let you treat; and on and on). But I think, on the whole, the food scene is awesome. Food is by far the cheapest thing in China, it is often really good, and there is usually a ton of it. And, although I do occasionally get bored with my meal rotation when I eat too frequently in the dining halls, it is always really easy to find something totally weird, and interesting, to eat.
