Dragon Eyes, Cloud Ear Fungus and Such

Dragon Eyes, Cloud Ear Fungus, White Rot, and so on . . .don't let these colorful phrases scare you off! The Chinese tend to give all kinds of things interesting names--not just their fruit (including Dragon Eyes) and mushrooms (including Cloud Ear Fungus and White Rot).

Dragon Eyes - Longan - just about eyeball size

But let me back up to some confusion last week when Olga, Keri Ann and I went to a restaurant that served us some delicious eggplant, potato, and mushroom dishes. We ordered the mushroom dish first, asking for "mogu" and being told they didn't have any "mogu." We were so disappointed. We had our hearts set on the mushroom dish. But the restaurant refrigerator stood an arm's length away from our little table, and we could see a plastic bucket through the glass door that contained something that looked like mushrooms. Ah! Those! Yes! We could have a dish with those, but those were not "mogu." So, when I later asked my tutor Xiaodan to explain why the waiter didn't understand "mogu," I learned that there are scores of names for mushrooms, and "mogu" is only one kind--even if that's the word most Chinese dictionaries give for mushrooms in general.

As Xiaodan and I talked, we started exploring the pictures and names of the various kinds of mushrooms I've been eating for a year and a half (pictures to follow)--but one thing led to another and we found ourselves viewing Xiaodan's favorite documentary--a must see for all those foodies out there--"A Bite of China."

Any part of this seven-episode 2012 documentary about food in China will mesmerize you--the photography is stunning and the history is amazing. The scale of things, as usual, is off the chart--the sheer number of plants, animals, fungi and other organisms--and the thousands of years of experimentation with them and the variety of geographical settings for harvesting them. The English version of the documentary is here: http://english.cntv.cn/special/a_bite_of_china/homepage/index.shtml

But back to the mushrooms. "Mogu" are what many Westerners first picture when they think of mushrooms, but they're a little more expensive than their darker spotted cousins "xianggu."

xianggu    en.wikipedia.org

Here are more mushrooms, from the wonderfully cheap jing zhong gu, widely available. . .
(screenshot of photo on bostonfoodandwhine.com)

To the astronomically expensive and rare songrong (which I've never had).
(screenshot from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsutake

The documentary showed these and many more varieties of mushrooms being harvested and cooked, but also talked about scores of other foods including lotus root. 

Of course, everyone knows what the beautiful lotus flower looks like, and if you've lived in China for more than a week you've probably eaten some lotus root. As for me, I just bought some from my vegetable man an hour and a half ago, partly because I like the crunch it gives other vegetables that go soft when cooked (tomatoes, eggplant, and so on), partly because I think it's pretty when sliced, and partly because it's fairly nutritious. I didn't realize, though, the challenge of harvesting lotus root from muck that might be as thick as half-formed concrete without breaking apart the lotus root, which grows like beads on a string.

Screenshot of image on www.flowerpicturegallery.com

One way to slice lotus root (can also be diced into little bits)
Hungrypassport.blogspot.com

So, I was reminded of this fascinating film when having lunch with my linguist buddy at the school cafeteria on Wednesday. I noticed something mixed in with my peppers and other vegetables that was a bit like a bottle-brush-shaped noodle. Lots of little bottle brush things played peek-a-boo through the vegetable medley. Maybe another kind of mushroom. Those! My friend stood up and pointed to two places on her lower back, about where I'd expect kidneys, but these did not look like any kidney I'd ever seen. I'm still not sure if they were kidneys and, if so, from what animal.

That somehow prompted my friend to pull out her surprise--she'd brought me a gift--a bag of delicious Dragon Eyes (or Longan). I thought I'd had them before, thinking they were Lychees, but I hadn't. (Indeed, Longan and Lychees are similar but apparently not exactly the same.) Such delicious little sweet and sour fruit. And so aptly named.

Making a wish

Thanks to all of the well wishers, beginning with Ted and Cathy, who recently visited me in Beibei. Yes, I just celebrated my second birthday in China.

My birthday was a damp, misty day in the 40's (F), about what it's been all week. I had a full morning of Chinese classes, but Wednesday is one day I don't teach. I thought I'd catch up on listening to audio files on my computer in the afternoon at home, but I discovered that all of Ban Zhu Cun was without electricity for most of the day. So, bundled in my long down jacket, I just focused on writing characters until fellow Peace Corps volunteer Keri Ann arrived to practice talking in Chinese.

She pretended she knew nothing about my birthday, acting surprised when Olga showed up with birthday cake, wine (a very special treat), and plans to go to a nearby Uyghur restaurant I'd never been to--where the Muslim cooks served us three delicious dishes with eggplant, mushrooms, and potato and sesame.

My special friend Li Ling and her daughter had earlier brought by another cake, and "Merry" gave me shoes that she had painted herself with special sayings. One message reads "you peng zi yuanfang lai, bu yi yue hu?" It means "Will you be very happy if your friends come to visit you from far away?"  The short phrase means "it rocks," "cool," or "awesome"

These shoes are too special to wear--a good thing, for my feet are too big for just about any women's shoes made in China, including these. Thanks to Ou Yang for bundles of fruit, to Martha Mockus for a half dozen homemade brownies made with real chocolate, and, of course, to dear ones all--including sons and sibs, also Jo Ann, Marty, Jim, Aunt Grace, Jane, Ben, Inge, Kathleen, Eleanor, Crawford, Sandy and Patti among others--for good wishes and more.

My brothers Ted and Paul have birthdays on the same day, nine years apart, and my sister Mary and I have birthdays that are close enough. Here's wishing Mary the very best in just a few days! Thanks to Chris, Ana, Ben and Nick for the b-day plan.

Humbled by Hanzi

Learning Hanzi (Chinese characters) isn't the only thing that humbles me. The fact of the matter is I often don't really know what I'm eating, I'm not always 100% sure who is talking on the other end of the cell phone until I'm part way into it, and I frequently miss big chunks of what they're saying. All this is very humbling. So, before returning to the mysteries of Hanzi, I want to share today's mystery. I was having lunch in one of the school canteens with a linguist buddy of mine (who speaks English as well as I speak Chinese--not very well) when she commented on what I had selected to eat. I'm used to eating many unusual (to me) mushrooms and small plants, so it was with considerable surprise that I discovered this dish consists of cocks' combs:

But more humbling, perhaps, is the ruled notebook used when learning to write Chinese characters (Hanzi), reminiscent of dotted lined paper used in second grade. I feel like a primary school child when sent to the blackboard to write a list of new vocabulary words in characters--but I love it. I love being a student, and I love learning this amazing visual/verbal art form that combines story, picture, history, symbol. For me anyway, it requires Zen-like concentration to make the characters, arranging them just so in the tiny space and then distinguishing each character from all the other characters making use of some of the same radicals.

You might be able to make out a word or two with Roman letters in the notebook above (above all but the very last rows of characters) : "ma," "ne" "na," "chi" "a," "jiao," and "tu," the Pinyin version of the characters (but without tones--sorry). Foreigners who are used to a Roman alphabet have Pinyin as a bridge, but we are weaned from Pinyin as soon as we can make sense of the characters. The Vietnamese and Korean students in my class have a little easier time with Chinese characters.

I find myself in a near meditative trance writing scores of these characters, trying to memorize them. As you can see on the blackboard below, one radical might be repeated in lots of different words, but often the radical is associated with a meaning, like the caozitou, which has something to do with "grass" and appears in the character for many fruits--but also in the character for "England" and "English," I don't know why. Similarly, the three tiny strokes called san dian are often associated with water, as in the "hai" part of  "Shanghai," a seaside city.

The character for "first"--"xian"--shows up in the character for "choose" and "wash," so for a while I got these very different words mixed up.  But then I learned to notice more things, like those three dian (associated with water) in the character for "wash." The characters for "thousand," "I," and "look for" at first looked very similar to me--and I almost needed a magnifying class to distinguish them. And sometimes the exact same character does have radically different meanings.

Learning this millennia-old amazing art form is a challenge for my weary brain, but I utterly love studying it. Sometimes you have the etymology of the word packed in via pictograms, sometimes ideograms, all mixed with phono-semantic compounds.

Thank goodness the pragmatic founders of the People's Republic of China wanted to simplify Hanzi to promote literacy and to make it easier for folks like me to get a handle on writing characters; however, the more complex traditional form is still used in Taiwan. I'd really be in trouble there.

Another time, I might write  a little more about the evolution of this amazing form of writing, from the "oracle bones" (those ancient carvings on pieces of bones and turtle shells) to the current simplified Hanzi (easier to learn but harder to associate with the original pictures). I might also comment on the idea of a dictionary--imagine what a Chinese dictionary is like, organized by the number of strokes. No alphabet, remember.

Now I have to shift from student mode back to teacher mode--I need to respond to about seventy audio-files from my sophomore Conversational English students and about the same number of papers from my senior Academic Writing students. It will be a long weekend. . .

Medicinal Gunk

Olga drinking tea - students made the paper roses

My Russian friend Olga and I met as usual this Friday afternoon, even though our dear tutor is off in Chengdu today, competing with thousands of other Chinese graduates on an exam for prospective civil servants. A small fraction of the test-takers will be invited to interview for an even smaller number of job openings. We wish Xiaodan the best. Competition is fierce.

As a graduate student, Xiaodan both teaches and tutors Chinese.

Xiaodan will no doubt tell Olga and me all about her views of the exam system next week. We've already discussed--to the degree my limited vocabulary allows it--her views about job hunting and working conditions for young people in China.

Today, though, Olga and I told each other stories--in Chinese--about our week. Without a doubt, the highlight of my week was fetching my brother Ted and his wife Cathy from a hotel in Chongqing and bringing them back to Beibei for a day. They regaled me with tales of their travels, from ancient monasteries in the desert northwest to the cold splendor of Tibet in the southwest, filled me in on family news, and traipsed around the university with me in Beibei, getting a taste of my life here.

If seeing Ted and Cathy was the best thing that happened, though, meeting two old men in the park below my apartment was the weirdest thing. The park is full of mostly older people doing taijiquan most mornings and it wasn't unusual to have someone come up and stare at me as I cut through on my way to classes. Curiosity kept me from shaking off one elderly man who seized my wrist, took my pulse and within seconds put his finger in two places, creating some noticeable warmth. (He was small enough I could have thrown him if I took a mind to--I wasn't threatened and don't under ordinary circumstances let people touch me. I had no intention of paying him for whatever service he thought he was providing.) He then slapped a piece of paper (below) with some medicinal gunk on my back, which was a bit of a feat, given that I was wearing a coat and two shirts. I did at that point shrug him off and "mei you'd" him when his notebook with fees came out. Sitting on rocks nearby, watching, were the folks from whom I regularly buy vegetables.

Later that morning, when a woman from Malawi in my Chinese class offered to help wash it off my back, the classmate with a PhD from Suriname said it looked just like a poultice her mother makes. Even after we had peeled the paper off and scrubbed most of the tar-like gunk off my back, enough of the gunk was left on the paper that, when the paper was placed in my notebook, it bled through to the other side. My back looks somewhat similar.

Even later, when I was talking with some Chinese students in my English classes, they smelled it and earnestly told me that the tar-like gunk is very good for you, even though only one could speculate what it is made out of. That student, who said her mother is a doctor, thought it was made from boiled donkey hide. Others told me about the pain relief such gunk provides.

My sense is that nearly all of my Chinese friends, including MDs, are respectful of Chinese medical practices, even if they also--even primarily--use Western ones. The same doctor may offer both Eastern and Western diagnoses and therapies. Hospitals, too.

The men in the park were something close to charlatans and many herbal remedies have no evidence-based support--and yet I suspect that among the mostly-benign-but-useless treatments are many treatments the West would benefit from learning more about. At the very least we should be willing to research them, and I suspect we have something to learn from a much more holistic perspective of health.  Even if most of these treatments, some millennia-old, are useless, I find utterly amazing that some seem to work spectacularly well. Evidence seems to be mounting that acupuncture, for instance, works in particular contexts (see http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/issue/feb2011/feature1 ).

Without the benefit of many contemporary research tools, imagine the path of discovery for these ancient Chinese medical practitioners. Hen youisi.

Dazu

If you follow stories about China in some of my favorite news venues, including NPR and the NYT, you've just read about another tragic self-immolation and off-the-scale air pollution. These stories are indeed news and no doubt need to be told. But! What amazing stories rarely find their way into the daily news!?

I'm reminded a little of the first time I read about the US in (what was to me) a foreign newspaper, the Auckland Star. Where was this land of drug junkies, urban riots, revolution and general mayhem? The newspaper was full of stories about the troubled US. Was it describing the same land where I had, just months before, stood at the foot of the hill each morning, waiting for my yellow school bus?

For sure, everything in China is big--including its problems and its amazing history. I don't fault the NYT or NPR for covering some of the problems--that's what news media do. But I want to take you back to the Dazu Rock Carvings, a place I first visited under clear skies in July and thought I would be re-visiting this weekend with my brother and his wife. As it turns out, we'll be scaling the local mountains in Beibei instead, but I still want to share a little more about Dazu, something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

When my friend Martha and I decided to go last July, we managed to buy our tickets and board a bus from Tongliang to Dazu with no problem--and spoke a tiny bit of Chinese with two different passengers who were curious about our travel plans and eager to use a little of their English. Once we got to the bus station in Dazu, it wasn't completely self-evident where we got the next bus to the historic caves. We could have just "Qing-wen,-dazu-zai-nar?"-ed our way, but one of the two fellows on the bus volunteered to accompany us the many blocks to the next bus stop, angling for nothing in return and taking more than an hour out of his day. This was far from the first time a stranger had walked me some distance, simply to wave good bye.

Martha and I might as well have stepped into a time machine--back to the Tang Dynasty. It was in the seventh century when the earliest carvings were made in these rock walls, but it was in the twelfth century, by then the Song Dynasty, when Zhao Zhifeng devoted his adult life to the the rock carvings and sculpture. Other monks and nuns toiled over the carvings for years, spreading via rock carvings a medium and a message along the Silk Road from India into northwestern China. Today you'll find tens of thousands of statues and scores of sculptures just at Dazu, with mostly Buddhist themes. The most interesting, we believed, were those on Mount Baoding. Just one of the reclining Buddha's fingers would dwarf you.

You can glimpse the Bao Ding Mountain Circle of Life in the distance.

Somebody's English is about on par with my Chinese.

Check the Buddhist gesture on the street lights.
A lotus flower dangles from each Buddha hand.

A lotus flower.

My Peace Corps buddy Martha

The Bao Ding Mountain Demons with the Rulers of Hell.

Instead of static, repetitive clusters of three to five statutes, these carvings depict a lively mix of the sacred and secular, of Buddhism and local versions of Confucian and Daoist beliefs, in a sequence of "thirty-one monumental tableaux carved around a horse-shoe shaped gully." http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/china/dazu/

Stuffed!

Gòu le! Enough! I’m stuffed!

You see, I’m one little pig who is running way behind schedule this Friday night because I just couldn’t wait to cook up some goods from our semi-annual pilgrimage to the Metro in Chongqing. The Metro is a big German store—in some ways like Carre Four or Cosco or Sam’s. The one in Chongqing stocks both local goods and imports, and it’s the one place to get cheese or other hard-to-get things, most of them wicked and delicious. Chocolate. French wine. New Zealand butter.  French bread (made in Chongqing). Feta cheese. Walnuts. Basil.

The secret ingredient in the foods my Chinese friends
have most appreciated--including banana bread.

The waiban packed a dozen of us foreigners into a small bus and took us to stock up on whatever sinful things we craved—and that we did. For me, part of the treat was being able to buy some items in bulk—rice and oil—without having to carry them the long way from the local Yong Hui market back to my apartment. (Although I can get some things—fruit, vegetables, eggs, and tofu—at the food stands at the foot of my hill, I must walk four or five blocks for things like yogurt, oil, nuts, rice, noodles and so on. No big deal, but I don’t try to save money by buying these things in bulk when I have to carry them a long way. And no elevators in my apartment.)

So I stocked up on things both practical and impractical—including some ingredients I’d been awaiting for months to be able to make a delicious cheese soup and cheese muffins that were part of a Christmas package some dear ones sent me from home last year. I hadn’t even unpacked the toothpaste and such before I’d gone down to the corner shop to get a Shancheng beer, another ingredient for the cheese soup. I whipped up the biscuit mix and soup—and then wolfed down half of what I made, which was probably meant to feed a family of five.

But I’m full and satiated.

It’s interesting because I never thought much about “fullness factors” before coming to China. Here I eat exceedingly well—probably more nutritiously than ever in my life—and I eat quite a lot. But I rarely feel full.

Part of it may be because there is so little bread, butter, sweets, cheese, or milk products in my diet, things that are fattening but also satisfying.  Many (most?) Chinese are lactose intolerant and don’t drink milk or eat cheese. The Chinese do use meat and potatoes in various dishes, but they usually cut them up in tiny pieces and mix them in with other ingredients—you won't find big slabs of any kind of meat. And, traditionally, the Chinese are not bakers. They don’t have ovens. Typically, they don’t bake bread or desserts. In this part of China, spicy dishes are much preferred to sweet things and even children don’t seem to have much of a sweet tooth. So many of the things that might make me feel full at home just aren’t available in my neighborhood.

So, much as I like Gongbao Jiding, Yuxiang Qiezi and other Chinese dishes, I thoroughly enjoyed pigging out on my cheese soup and biscuits tonight.

And now . . . I’m going to indulge in a bite of chocolate.

Heavy stone

All week, I've been listening to the chink, chink, chink of chisels being hammered into rock. First a rock wall forty feet under my kitchen/porch was excavated, much of it by hand; now, workers are chiseling in near unison on huge blocks of stone to build some sort of retaining wall around all of it. The chinking goes on and on, from dawn til dusk. Brutal as the labor must be, the workers laugh and chatter easily enough, almost like goofy school boys.

Perhaps most striking to me is the contrast between two very visible power systems in Beibei: the human powered and the fossil-fuel powered. Over and over, I have been reminded that the human body is capable of doing amazing things. I see tiny women shouldering huge baskets along with their raggedy stick brooms up and down the city sidewalks; I see small wiry men clamoring up and down hillsides like sherpas with heavy construction loads. To the side of big buses and trucks are three-wheeled carts laden with fruit or furniture or recycled goods, being pulled behind wrinkled old men on foot. Striking as well is the contrast between one of the most ancient professions, stone masonry, and some of the most high-tech research imaginable being conducted just across Tiansheng Road at Southwest University.

These photos show men laboring to make room for more cars and motorcycles. Far below, you can see that a small wooded area between two apartments has been razed to make room for a tiny parking lot. The rock retaining wall under construction is supporting the area topped with the new parking lot. Even if most of the woods was razed, trees occasionally are left standing in the middle of parking spaces.

The stone mason's mallet, chisel, and straight edge
 are all within easy reach. No pnuematic tools here.

The chinking is rhymical, almost musical--distracting,
but not nearly as distracting as the blaring TV from
the upstairs apartment.

On the other side of the lane, these men shovel dirt into a cart,
barely visible, and will haul it off somewhere far away.