China Bowl

WHEN I LIVED IN BEIJING in the first decade of the new millennium, I often wondered about the people who in their lifetime had seen imperial China morph into a communist country and then witnessed the capricious horrors of Mao’s mass campaigns give way to the capitalist excess of the 21st century. How did they maintain a personal narrative arc that was not as violently fractured as the broader political canvas against which their lives had played out?

Over time, I concluded that a central source of continuity in China was food. More than religion or architecture or climate, food stitched a unifying tapestry out of the diversity of this empire-like country. I recently read Invitation to a Banquet, a deep dive into Chinese gastronomic sociology, by Fuchsia Dunlop, which confirmed this thesis.

For the Chinese, cooking—or using fire to transform raw food—was what separated their “civilised” selves from the nomadic barbarians, who “drank blood and ate feathers” (ru mao yin xue), on their borders. But fire wasn’t the only element of this culinary Great Wall that drew a conceptual line between the Han Chinese and the Mongol meat-eaters, who were a constant, menacing presence on the frontier. There was also grain.

Settled agriculture and the cultivation of grain, in particular rice, is what makes the Chinese themselves in an atavistic sense. The country consumes more rice than any other nation, and the centrality of the grain to the civilisation is apparent in the way it permeates language.

The standard greeting in China, the equivalent of for example, “How’s it going?” is “Chi fan le ma?” or “Have you eaten your rice yet?” While the word, “fan” technically refers to any type of grain, it’s usually used to equate rice. Dunlop points out how the term for a restaurant in Chinese is fan guan, or a place that serves rice. To cook is to zuofan or “make rice”.

Bowls of rice are also part of the tempting repast that the Chinese customarily offer to family ancestors. The qi, or essence of these mortal culinary treats, is thought to waft up and nourish the spirits of the beloved deceased. Food has traditionally formed the bridge between the world of the living and the spiritual realm. It is used to appease the spirits of various Taoist and Buddhist deities as a way of asking for boons.

This ancient practice has its modern avatar in the wining and dining that officials in contemporary China often expect instead of monetary bribes. A banquet of shark’s fin soup and abalone, expensive boxes of mooncakes, or bottles of Rémy Martin are the preferred ways of buttering up influential people. When President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, amongst his first moves was to launch an anti-corruption campaign, the centerpiece of which was a ban on lavish banquets for party cadres. Graft and gluttony have long gone hand-in-hand in China.

But although party apparatchiks have had to downgrade their gastronomical adventures to more modest levels of consumption in the Xi-era, food remains the most important social lubricant. Paying for someone’s meal binds them to you and also confers a sense of power to the inviting party. This explains the many scenes at restaurants that I witnessed in Beijing where diners warring to pay the bill ended in light fisticuffs.

When talking about China’s gastronomy, wet markets, and exotic animals are a subject that the Covid pandemic has made difficult to ignore. Although the virus’ origins remain shrouded in mystery, it has been linked to the eating of bats and pangolins.

Dunlop explains that obscure parts of rare and exotic creatures, such as bear paw and shark fin, have formed part of the diet of a rarified elite of Chinese gourmets for millennia. These foods were prized for several reasons, ranging from their scarcity and expense, which gave them prestige, to their putative medicinal qualities. When I was pregnant with my first child in Beijing, for instance, my Chinese friends all recommended bird’s nest soup— made from the saliva of Southeast Asian swiftlets—as a tonic. The idea of food as medicine is deeply ingrained in culinary culture.

One can imagine the dilemma that arose when China’s customary all-encompassing gastro-propensity collided with the arrival of meat-restricting Buddhism from India, in about the first century. Before the arrival of this new religion, vegetarianism was only practised for reasons of poverty. Now, it gradually transformed into a religious lifestyle choice for a section of society, in particular, monks.

The strictures against eating meat in Buddhism were wholly countercultural. Consider the fact that in Mandarin, the word for home, jia is a character that depicts a pig under a roof. Home is where the soon-to-be-eaten pig is. And so it was, that the Chinese began experimenting with mock meats, made out of plant sources like tofu and bamboo shoots, more than 1,000 years before the contemporary trend of vegan burgers and ‘impossible meats’.

In India, where vegetarianism stems from an abhorrence of the killing of animals, the Chinese ‘vegetarian’ restaurant that lists only trompe-l’oeil meat dishes on its menu, is confounding.

But in China, the default social assumption is that meat is desirable and giving it up is a sacrifice. There is a famous Fujianese banquet dish, for example, that is called fotiaoqiang or “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall”. This is a stew of marine exotica, including sea cucumbers, abalone, and shark fin, whose fragrance is ostensibly so irresistible that it makes even the most devout of Buddhists quit their vows.

Hence, the propensity of vegetarian eateries in China to offer ‘pork belly’ made of winter melon or ‘shark’s fin’ of mung bean noodles. It allows Buddhists, and other vegetarians, to fit in with the social convention that a significant meal must include meat.

Dunlop points out that the default meaning of ‘meat’ in China is pork, rather than beef, unlike in many parts of the West. In fact, at various points in history, Chinese rulers issued edicts banning the consumption of beef. These bans were for practical, rather than religious reasons. Oxen were considered an invaluable assistant in the fields. The idea was that they deserved protection and gratitude in their old age for having worked so hard to help farmers.

Writing in 1882, JL Nevius, an American missionary who had spent much of his adult life in China, described in fairly absolute terms a revulsion for beef: “Beef is never exposed for sale in the Chinese markets.…There is a strong and almost universal prejudice against eating beef…” For many at the time, eating a cow would have been seen as akin to eating the family pet. Similar to the contemporary horror in the West of eating dogs.

It was only in the 20th century that beef gradually became more popular, in particular, after the communists came to power in 1949.

Dunlop concludes with a quote from the writer Lin Yutang,

who wrote in his 1935 classic My Country and My People: “If there is anything we [the Chinese] are serious about, it is neither religion, nor learning, but food. We openly acclaim eating as one of the few joys in this human life.”

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