Chong Yang

Christine Sismondo

On March 30, 2005, 110 Americans hit a national lottery jackpot.

That may not sound like all that many. In fact, that number was 30 times higher than the probability for hitting five correct numbers in a U.S. Powerball lottery. The unexpected, statistically anomalous pay out? Nearly $20 million in total. Numbers like that just don’t happen without some kind of explanation. So the lottery officials launched an inquest.

It wasn’t some sort of fancy computer fraud. Nor was it an error on the lottery’s end. Nor were the winners all connected by blood, employment or region. It turned out that the only common bond these people shared was a penchant for sweet and sour chicken balls and a willingness to follow the sage teachings of Confucius.

It was the fortune cookies. Or, rather, five of the six numbers printed on the fortune found inside the cookie.

Well, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the ubiquitous Golden Dragon fortune cookie was the common denominator in those 110 people’s lives, since, to hear a few writers tell it, Chinese food – of one sort or another – may well be one of the universal cultural experiences.

Of course, Chinese food can be radically different from place to place. Fuchsia Dunlop is a remarkable human who took off from England to China way before it was cool to do so, and dove headfirst, into Sichuan cooking and culture. The result is Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China.

Dunlop divides Chinese cooking, itself, into four main cuisines: grand northern (roast meats, rich soups and expensive delicacies); specialties from the eastern provinces (drunken shrimps, freshwater crabs and water chestnuts); minimalist Cantonese (translucent shrimp dumplings, ginger, green onions and soy); and her true love, spicy Sichuan.

Dunlop went to China as a student, but the academic side of things didn’t work out so great. As she came to realize that fact, her brief depression and feelings of isolation were assuaged by breakfast dumplings in hot chili sauce. She managed to forge connections with locals through food and, soon enough, was revitalized and had new direction.

That probably makes it all sound a lot easier than it was. Dunlop was the first Westerner ever to train at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and, between the language barrier and the novelty of being a Western intellectual slumming it at cooking school (cooking is an extremely low-status trade in China), she had her fair share of challenges.

But Dunlop’s determination is amazing. She not only became an accomplished chef but also managed to write three cookbooks and, now, the memoir, in which she manages to relate her story and simultaneously explain the cultural context of the cuisine.

Dunlop also experiences a taste transformation, which she describes as “going native.” Although she describes herself as an “adventurous eater” before her trip to China, preserved duck eggs, the skinning of live rabbits and epic nose-to-tail eating does manage to turn her off – initially. She is continually presented with concrete evidence that the Chinese really do eat everything.

By the end of her odyssey, she eats with the best of them, evidenced by her plucking a caterpillar right out of a garden and eating it live.

Not bad for a Westerner. Especially when you consider that even Jen Lin-Liu, author of Serve the People: A Stir-Friend Journey through China, actually grew up eating “authentic” Chinese food in America and still couldn’t stomach the abundance of jellyfish, fish heads and chicken feet. She, too, is devouring them by the end.

Lin-Liu had moved from America to Shanghai to work as a freelance journalist. She was lucky enough to land just as the American market for stories about China was budding. Despite career success, she felt alienated. Not at home with either the ex-pat community (since she was Chinese) nor with the native-born Chinese (because of her relatively poor language skills and strange accent), Lin-Liu decided to try to learn about the culture through its most easily accessible commodity.

“If I can’t connect with the people, at least I’m going to connect with the food,” she decided.

Like Dunlop, she then went to cooking school, moving from Shanghai to Beijing to enrol in a rather bizarre-sounding culinary institute where she listened to hours of food theory – much of it, she says, of questionable accuracy. If you want to learn about how eating fish heads will repair brain cells and how eating spicy food improves the complexion, this would be the cooking school for you.

Lin-Liu manages to secure some private instruction on the side and, later, apprenticeships, through which she actually masters the art of making noodles.

And much, much more, of course. Lin-Liu’s book is highly entertaining, in part because she manages in the end to truly delve into the culture and history of the country and its food. While she makes dumplings with her first mentor, a history of the unhappy marriage between cuisine and Chairman Mao unfolds.

our final guide never actually went to cooking school. But that’s okay, too, because Jennifer 8. Lee, a Chinese-American newspaper writer who grew up in New York, takes an entirely different tack. She’s interested in a more esoteric side of Chinese food – its cultural meaning and how it’s been interpreted outside of China.

In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, Lee points out that eating Chinese food is universal in America. She says there are twice as many Chinese restaurants as there are McDonalds. What’s more, the menus are roughly standardized. Travel almost anywhere in America (or Canada) and you can pick up a tasty General Tso chicken for a decent price as easily as you could satisfy a Big Mac attack.

Sure, General Tso chicken isn’t “authentic.” But who really cares about what’s authentic and what isn’t? Is it even a valid category? Lee critiques the snobbery that goes along with that categorization, rightly pointing out that food is always about exchange between cultures. Lee then explores the origins of those most inauthentic Chinese food dishes: General Tso (Taiwan), Chop Suey (America) and, of course, fortune cookies (Japan via San Francisco).

It’s the fortune cookies that really intrigue her. In fact, Lee’s odyssey into Chinese food begins with the Powerball lottery story mentioned earlier. Lee traces the history of the fortune cookie that led them to their destiny.

And what about Wonton Food, the company that picked the winning Powerball numbers? Should we all start playing the lotto with fortune cookie numbers?

Maybe so. They hit another jackpot that same year and 83 other lucky people won the lottery.

Just how do they do it? It’s obvious if you think about it.

Ancient Chinese Secret.

Christine Sismondo is the author of Mondo Cocktail: A Shaken and Stirred History (McArthur & Co.).

Now exiled in London, a banned Chinese author who lived though the exhilaration and horror of Tiananmen Square revisits its meaning.

May 25, 2008
Geoff Pevere

The Book:

Beijing Coma
by Ma Jian
translated by Flora Drew
Knopf Canada,
592 pages, $34

On June 4, 1989, Dai Wei, the narrator of Ma Jian’s epic historical novel Beijing Coma, takes a bullet in the head while attempting to flee the government crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Plunged into a decade-long coma by the wound, the former student activist, a key pro-democracy player in the demonstrations that so riveted real-world attention, is buffeted by memories – of his life, his loves, his political experiences and, most tragically, the terminal wound afflicting his country.

“I am still living, in what Buddhists refer to as the stinking skin-bag of the human body,” Dai Wei ruminates after nearly a decade of semi-oblivion.

As the son of musicians persecuted as “rightists” during the Cultural Revolution – among other atrocities, his long-imprisoned father remembers seeing near-starved political inmates mutilate and eat the bodies of the freshly-executed – Dai Wei represents the latest generational turnover of doomed dissidence. But political activism, like human flesh, has a way of forgetting pain and regenerating itself, especially when stoned on its own sense of invincibility.

This is the book’s most dramatically sustained and audacious metaphor. The trauma inflicted on Dai Wei’s body is inextricable from that imposed on the nation. As the nation powers into the global economy, even Dai Wei’s body becomes a commodity. At first his urine is sold as a kind of magic healing tonic, then his cash-strapped mother arranges for the removal and sale of his kidney.

In the same way that Dai Wei is left to lie in catatonic semi-consciousness as his memories swirl around the drain of cognitive decline, so the events at Tiananmen Square – anywhere from 300 deaths (state figures) to 3,000 (student calculations) – have disappeared into a vortex of revisionist cleansing.

Already notorious for writing novels banned in his homeland due to their criticism of China’s policies on human rights and Tibet, the now London-based Ma Jian here launches his most sustained and intricate indictment of his former country.

Ma Jian was himself present at Tiananmen in the weeks of May leading up to the state’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators – previously in self-exile for two years, he returned to China during the brief “Beijing Spring”. As novelist, he painstakingly recreates the cycle of idealism, arrogance, confusion and despair that characterized the experience of demonstrators on the ground in the square.

Initially mobilized into action by the death of the reformist former Secretary General Hu Yaobang in April 1989, the largely university-based protesters quickly find themselves dissembling into competing factions and squabbling petty ideologues.

Although prone to sometimes numbingly pedantic debates over the most politically correct protocol, Ma Jian’s young would-be revolutionaries are also painfully human. Some are characterized by their body odour and childish resentment, others by their stubborn idealism and romantic allure. (As much as he reflects on the events leading up to the tragedy, Dai Wei fixates on sex, love and the smell of a former lover’s foot.) Arguing over the protocol of press conferences and wording of banners, buffeted by conflicting rumours of state response, the demonstrators leave themselves ripe for slaughter long before the rumble of tanks is heard at the perimeter gates.

As witness to, participant in, and ultimate casualty of the events, the flesh-imprisoned Dai Wei is especially vulnerable to torturous musings over what went wrong:

“A light so bright it’s almost black hovers above my bed,” he observes. “If I’m to die now, I won’t feel many regrets. I’ve been lying here for ten years. I have retrieved every detail of my life. There is nothing left for me to remember. If I’m to die now, I won’t feel many regrets, only grief and guilt about the students who died before me.”

As horrifying as the author’s rendering of the ultimate crackdown is – replete with harrowingly vivid descriptions of bodies crushed by tanks and ripped open by exploding bullets – the infamous slaughter isn’t itself the primary object of critical regard in Beijing Coma. Ma Jian focuses more on the collapse that precedes the crush. If anything, this is what marks the novel as both daring and controversial.

It’s one thing to damn the Chinese government for doing what it had already proven itself only too willing and able to do in the past. It’s quite another to suggest that the demonstrators were nearly as complicit in their own slaughter as those who gave the order to shoot.

Set mostly in 1999, two years after the “handover” of Hong Kong and in the thick of the country’s preparation for an Olympic bid – which leads directly to the demolition of the building where Dai Wei lies – Beijing Coma manages to shine a harsh light of history even through the smudged prism of the present. While occasionally choked by a dizzying overabundance of incident, character and detail, especially of the politically windy variety, the book still yanks atrocity out of the shadows and holds human arrogance and folly to account.

By the end of Beijing Coma, Dai Wei has learned that many of his former Tiananmen comrades have become successful 21st century Chinese capitalists. Like their country, they’re marching forward, not letting history get in the way of progress.

Author and broadcaster Geoff Pevere is The Star’s book columnist. He appears weekly.