Eating Face to Save Face

"Mm ba ba de / um bum ba de." — Freddie Mercury, "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie, from Hot Space (1981)

Let me begin by saying that I don't want to tell you a story that involves a lot of suspense, or that climaxes with a terrifying vision, or that involves any sort of narrative tension, so I'm just going to lay out exactly what happened on a certain night in Huangshan and retrace a few steps afterward, going into detail and discussing what exactly was going through my head at a restaurant with an unrecognizable menu and tight-lipped fuwuyuans (waiters/-resses). The day my travel companion Emily and I returned from climbing the mountain (Huangshan), we ate a big bowl of duck heads. 

A series of events: eat a delicious noodle/beef/pepper lunch; wander aimlessly around the city (Huangshan); spot pagodas; climb the tower of a bank; stand around an elementary school; eat cake; waltz through a construction site; reminisce; nap; go in search of dinner (enter restaurant; guess at what we're ordering; ignore snickers of waiters[-resses]; receive bowl of mysterious food; realize food is duck heads [consider leaving; whine; remember eating scorpion; think about how cows also have heads; a young child in basketball shorts with a full fish in hand; using corn as bait; mallards off a dock's-edge from youngerdays]; take tentative bites; give up and try to leave; waiters[-resses] give you more food; eat vegetables; leave restaurant); return to hostel; discuss day's events.

So, Duck Heads, now you see how we arrived at this. Entering the building, what should have first tipped us off to the curious nature of the restaurant were the ubiquitous Donald Duck images; certainly the character wasn't legally being used at this place—Disney probably hadn't signed over any rights—but he was everywhere, pants-less, welcoming guests with an outstretched winghand. China is full of such uses of other people's (or companies') creations, so it wasn't extremely bizarre to see D.D. hanging out there, and we assumed we'd be eating duck (a popular dish, especially Roast in Beijing). I remember thinking that Donald Duck was a traitor to his species, like Charlie the Tuna ("Eat my people," they seem to shout, "Take my own flesh, my own blood, and eat, please."), but I didn't know D.D. was willing to go so far...

The other mistake we made was assuming that if we ordered blindly, despite trying to converse with the waitress ("We also like chicken and beef," I recall saying, hoping she'd point it out to us, and she didn't), we'd get something we had before, or at least something not too unfamiliar, something palatable. Emily told me we ordered some sort of duck in addition to vegetables and some sort of vegetable-ball thing, and, remembering childhood Christmas Days, remembering the denouement of that filmic institution A Christmas Story, I joked: "I hope it doesn't have a head," and, minutes later, when served, the exclamation (after the realization): "It's all heads!"

And speaking of realizations, here: the bowl arrived, a great silver half-moon, and in it a potpourri: spices, vegetables, unknown slices of unknown things, and, atop the melange, a dozen-odd T-rex-skull-fossil-shaped pieces of... something. I pulled one out with my chopsticks and commented on the odd shape and texture of the meat. We wondered if it was some sort of liver, or, well, we only knew it was a hard object. I flipped mine (I had been looking at the bone), and saw a cross section (they had been split down the middle, all) of what looked like a head, and, in the half-intact beak, I saw a lolling tongue (lit. lolling out the bottom) and what could pass for a brain, and as my mind raced, I looked at Emily, who was poking around the cranium with her own chopsticks, and said, "These are heads. I'm pretty sure these are heads." And after a brief spell of unbelief, we both accepted that they were, indeed, the heads of ducks. I poked around the bowl desperately for other meat, but only found vertebrae, neck, wing, and, perhaps more disturbingly than heads themselves, a full-on foot: a webbed spindly clawed end. Where was the rest of the duck? Where was the breast, the meat? I thought of ditching out on the place, of DFW's "Consider the Lobster," of all the animals I had eaten before that were, when served, already sans head.

I remembered that every time I eat meat, I'm eating something that had, at one time or another, a face. Eyes, nose, mouth. An identifier. An expresser. I thought that the burgers I eat regularly and the chicken I have almost every day probably lived a rougher life than did these ducks, probably were prepared in less hygienic ways, probably had more chemicals pumped in them throughout life, yet I found this, the duck head, disgusting. I came face to face, pun horribly terrifically intended, with my own meat-eating, and I considered, briefly, that eating meat might be something I no longer wanted to do.

Then I bit into the duck head. Never had I cracked a skull open to get to dinner, but that night in Anhui Province, at the lower-lying regions of a mountain range, I did, and it wasn't as bad as I had worried. I learned that what I find delicious isn't what others necessarily do. What delicacies are served in China are not the delicacies of other nations. That different cultures think about what they put in their mouths every day for sustenance differently, natch, and that, though I thought it'd be disgusting, I just needed to learn to try something new, something other people crave. 

Who am I kidding, I hated it. I was horrified by each bite I took, and I'll never eat something's face-meat again.

NOTES:

Emily ate a heart and gained the courage of a duck. This courage allowed her to eat more heads than I. 

The waitresses(-ers) had a station near us, and they watched the entire time we ate, giggling.

When the vegetables were served, they did so by removing the duck from the big silver bowl and filling it with some sort of red broth (I worriedly thought blood), brought it to a boil, and chucked the veggies in.

We cleansed our palates with Oreos later at the hostel.

Weeks later, finally prepared to write, tiny pages of notes next to me, I'm still too focused on the event, the spectacle (to me) of eating heads, to focus on what sort of insight may have been gained, what sort of conundrums were raised about my own meat-eating and carnivores in general, and what I learned about anything.

Duck heads, head-ness aside, don't have a bad flavor.

Memory, speaking, has too soft a voice.

For those who go abroad

(the following was written by me and published in The Dakota Student at the University of North Dakota on March 29, 2011 — I think all the rights belong to them now, not sure)

I am in China, and that's the first thing you need to know. The second is that David Foster Wallace killed himself 12 years after writing, in Infinite Jest, "That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse." The third is that I have no credentials, that my age is a mere blink in geological time, and that this article has been written before by better writers than I. That this is all you need to know technically means you can stop reading here, and that's your prerogative, and just as Britney has hers, you can exercise it. I hope you don't.

Someone once told me that they were studying abroad because they wanted to experience another culture, and I thought, "admirable," and I also thought, "impossible." Then I chose to study abroad, and I spoke similarly. Why China?To learn Chinese. Why Chinese? Challenging, relevant, useful. What do you plan on doing with that? I don't know. So why China? Uh, I want to... Experience another culture.

But this isn't entirely possible, because you can only scratch surfaces, and if you try to shoehorn your way into a culture, all you're really doing is imposing yourself upon it, right? If you think by spending four months in, say, India you're going to knowIndia, you're going to somehow be a fount of information regarding India, you're going to, more or less, becomejust the tiniest bit Indian, the truth might lie somewhere closer to you poking at India (as if an entire nation of over a billion people were definable) with a yardstick.

Or maybe I'm looking at this wrong. Go abroad, please. But take what you're learning with a grain of salt, not because those teaching you are untrustworthy—no, they're probably terrific pedagogues—but because you yourself can't be trusted. I'm speaking from experience (and here's the can of worms about my experience: what makes me think Iknow anything?). If you're really serious about going abroad, please admit that your knowledge is already flawed, and that it still will be when you return, and that worldliness does not equal knowledge. That knowing and understanding are two different coins altogether.

On March 17th a Buddhist monk in Sichuan self-immolated in response to 2008 military crackdowns in Tibet, the second self-immolation since. The thoughts vaporized in that human pyre are not known, and what escaped into the immediate air, flaring up from a wet bald head, could not be seen.

If you go abroad to some strange place—the neck of some woods—that you don't understand, realize that the very woods you're in don't understand you. This is the first step toward reconciliation. If we fear what we don't understand (source: everyone ever), the problem lies not in what is feared but in our lack of understanding. I've seen fights break out due to lack of ability to understand one another on the most basic of levels: language. When you go abroad, you might not be able to get your point across, and in that moment of perfect frustration, ask why you and your conversational partner can't make sense of each other. Is it because you're both speaking different languages? Is it because you have differing perspectives? Is it because no matter how hard you try, no matter how big your metaphorical trepanning trephine, you can never really get into the mind of another person and examine their thought process? Is it because you will always be in your skull and your skull only?

As a semi-official representative of UND's Study Abroad program, I shouldn't tell you that you don't needto study abroad, but you don't. If it is financially viable and you are willing, by all means, go, you will never regret it, but when I talk about "those who go abroad," I don't just mean those who travel; I mean those who want to get at something more, something in the emptiness between minds. You can cover the world and still retain your same opinions, your sameWeltanschauung, your kanfa—you can choose to think what you think and always think those same thoughts. But know that there are other perspectives—just know it—be aware of it, and the fact that everyone around you has their reasons for doing whatever it is they do might be enough to stop you from blowing your top, or at least slow the boil. I guess what I'm saying is, When I talk about going abroad, I am trying to get at something—for lack of a simpler word—something metaphysical. An intangibility. By "abroad" I don't mean anyplace physical; maybe I'm talking about transcendence.

My god, this is preachy. I'm a dick sometimes, and you might be a dick, and our varying degrees of dickishness may be at the root of disagreements and minor altercations, but, as Wayne Coyne sang, after ruminating on our deaths, all of our inevitable deaths, "Let them know you realize that life goes fast; it's hard to make the good things last," then, as the music moseys along with Coyne's fragile voice, and the riff comes back, he asks of us, "Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face?" Well, do you?

Consider the Jiaozi

"There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other." — David Foster Wallace

Jiaozi, pot stickers, gyoza, momocha, jiao'er, or, more simply, Chinese dumplings have existed, been cooked and eaten, for, at the most liberal side of the estimations, at least four thousand years. The guotie, or pan-fried jiaozi (the most delicious and least good-for-you variation on the Chinese dumpling) has been around for a less-hefty one thousand years (all according to Wikipedia) and is reportedly good for the human soul, though, metaphysically speaking, the sustenance of the soul is a mystery only penetrated insofar as knowing that metaphorical versions of chicken soup possess the ability to lift a soul in a low moment, though (and this is philosophical backtracking) the notion that there can even be said to be "metaphorical versions of chicken soup" let alone a soul that consumes them — that notion requires a house-of-cards stack of premises that is, alas, a bit fragile. These guotie (called Peking ravioli in Bah-ston), regardless of their supposed ability to sustain the human soul, do possess the uncanny quality of filling the human stomach with meat, vegetables, and a starchy outer layer in one convenient package without resorting to the sandwich-stack Western style of doing things. And, ah, the kicker: you can find them (really) anywhere in Beijing, and they're dirt cheap.

In 2006, the average yearly salary for an urban worker in Beijing was 1,759 yuan (US$1,517). Compare this to the average weekly wage of a Manhattanite: $2,404. In China in 1959-61 somewhere between 14 and 40 million people died of famine. The national population in 1949 was about 400 million; today it is roughly 1.6 billion. Violent crime has increased steadily since the 1980s. The burgeoning gap between rich and poor defies the notion of a classless society.

In Beijing, steaming, squat, ill-painted little food vendor stands pepper the busier neighborhoods (really they're all "busier" neighborhoods), operating year-round to supply the cheapest, best taste-to-price ratio dishes of any restaurant, bistro, snack bar, or rathskeller in Northeastern China, and these often-family-run mini-businesses sweep in the tourists, the students, the bustling work crowds to their facades — their sliding windows — to offer up what you might call fast food or takeaway but would more accurately be referred to as street food. One of these stands with an indecipherable name (one might say inscrutable, an inscrutable name) pops up from the concrete in front of a place called the U-Center in Wudaokou, and most people refer to the little noodle shop as, simply, The Jiaozi Stand, though, to be fair, dozens of other jiaozi stands exist within a half-mile radius of this one. Despite its rather plain sobriquet, the stand, with its quiet fry chef and ever-smiling, matronly shifu, has some of the best food in the neighborhood, and its specialty (you guessed it: jiaozi) can be had for the steal-of-a-price of only six kuai (for a plate of ten). Upstreet there's a McDonald's. Downstreet there's another McDonald's. KFC is a block away. A Big Mac combo is 22 kuai. A chicken sandwich with fries is 14 kuai. A plate of jiaozi is 6 six kuai. Six renminbi.

Han Dynasty, 200 AD, generations away, in the dead times, cold times, evolutionarily infinitesimally close, no one knows anyone anymore, cold mountaintops open freezing plains plateaus iced over, before us — here Zhang Zhongjing, a medical practitioner, author of Treatise on Cold Pathogenic and Miscellaneous Diseases — here he took two jiaozi and said to the cold and ultimately dead, Here, warm your ears.

Making jiaozi involves a lot of crimping, a lot of folding over and pinching and massaging. To make jiaozi you have to trap the filling and close it in, then you can boil it or steam it or deep-fry it or, if you're a Beiyu student with a hankering for the cheap, pan-fry it. Jiaozi is often dipped in vinegar or various other sauces, but it can be eaten plain, too, or with some noodles or rice, or it can be eaten as part of a full meal as a main or supporting dish. To eat jiaozi you have to get a firm grip with your chopsticks, but if you squeeze too tightly the jiaozi will be sent flying and ah, what a pain. To make jiaozi, to eat jiaozi, you need to have a steady hand, you have to be just a bit careful, but you can still take risks so long as you keep that hand steady. You can even get fancy. Just remember that the jiaozi is old, older than you, and when you're eating something that has a history spanning empires —literally spanning empires — well, something's going on, and maybe someone sat where you sit and warmed their ears, and maybe not, maybe they just kept on moving, because they didn't have time to do anything but stay alive.