China: Its Gastronomic Landscape : A Passage to Tai San : Travelogue: Lasting impressions of a South China village, its food and its people.

In the fall of 1980, I was sent to China. My destination was Tai San, a village in South China that had been closed to “foreign guests” for more than 40 years. My assignment was to join the first group of tourists and report on food. The magazine that sent me thought that they would get a great gastronomic story; what I found was far more interesting than anything that they--or I--could have expected. These are excerpts from my journal.

The China-Macao border. Visually the entrance into China is dramatic. We go from the decorative, festive crowdedness of Macao to the square cleanliness of red China. It looks just like the posters--vast empty rooms dominated by large heroic paintings. It’s hot, but the curtains cast a cool, green tint on the light coming into the room. The officers--men and women--sit behind massive desks wearing green Mao caps and jackets. They are thorough; clearing customs takes forever. The inspectors count our money, dollar by dollar.

When they are finally finished, we go to the Overseas Chinese Hotel for our first taste of real Chinese food. In the restaurant fans are whirring madly in a large, cool room open to the air and filled with what seems like hundreds of plastic-covered tables, all big enough to seat about 10. The seats are so low you can’t help feeling that you have been seated at a table for children. We are served clear chicken broth with pork and broccoli; steamed fish; sweet-and-sour pork with red peppers and pickled vegetables; frog with broccoli; whole duck; fried chicken; cucumbers with beef and onion. It is not until the very end of the meal that a bowl of white rice appears.

Tai San is only about 100 miles from the border, but it takes us a full day to get there, the bus honking and scattering bicycles the entire way. We cross rivers, endlessly. They are all muddy and brown--and the ferries, which carry everything (cars, buses, bikes, people) are free. Standing here on the deck, I am looking at a landscape that must be exactly the same as it was a hundred years ago.

Our arrival, finally, in Tai San turns out to be a big event; the entire town has gathered to inspect us. As I walk into the hotel I turn around, only to discover that there are hundreds of little children behind me on the steps, reaching out to touch my hair.

The rooms in the hotel have no locks--and hot water only between 7 and 8 in the morning. So I splash water on my face, change my shirt--and go in to dinner.

Which reminds me a lot of lunch. The meal begins with egg drop soup with bean threads, and then goes on to fried sausage rolls. A whole roast duck appears, then squid sauteed with mushrooms and greens, broccoli and finally a whole fried fish in sweet and sour sauce. Again, no rice appears until the end of the meal. We later discover that this is a point of pride--poor people eat rice, and we are getting the best of everything. There is nothing unfamiliar about this food; it tastes like what I’ve been eating in Chinese restaurants all my life--only better.

It is hot here, and the day starts early. Out on the island in the middle of the lake, old men and women do their tai chi exercises--slowly, beautifully. Then the traffic jam starts--thousands of bicycles crowding the narrow streets.

Breakfast is dim sum--but dim sum unlike anything I’ve ever been served before. First there are the ubiquitous siu mai , har gow and char siu bao. But then the fun begins. A sort of fruit cake made with nuts and egg yolk in an almond-cookie crust appears, followed by fluffy coconut-covered domes that look exactly like Hostess Snowballs--and even taste a little like them. There are yeast rolls with fillings made of sweet egg yolks. Bao , still warm, have been filled with roast pork, dipped in coconut, baked and then fried.

On subsequent mornings there will also be dim sum--often baked, always different. This lasts until one day someone in the group grumbles about these “damn dumplings.” The next morning we are served a version of Western breakfast--omelets that are reminiscent of egg foo yong. It takes a good deal of diplomacy to convince Mr. Lee, our “responsible person,” that most of us prefer the dim sum.

The Tai San market takes place one day a week, as farmers come in from the outskirts and fan through the streets setting up stalls. In this heat, with no refrigeration, that means that most people eat fresh meat no more than once a week. Judging by what is available in the market, this must be mostly chicken, which can be seen clucking in makeshift bamboo pens. There are also pigs (you can take them home live, or have them slaughtered on the spot), and ducks. I don’t see any fresh fish, although I do see lots of seafood--squid both fresh and dried, buckets filled with clams, octopus. And lots of frogs. I don’t see any cut meat for sale, although there are lots of sausages. Mostly, though, there are fruits, vegetables, spices--and tofu in every conceivable form.

As I stroll through the market a kid comes up, and in halting English asks if I would be kind enough to read his English lessons into his tape recorder. “Sure,” I say, and make an appointment to meet him in the hotel lobby after dinner.

At 8 p.m. the kid shows up. He hands me his lesson book. And as I start to read into his tape recorder, there in the lobby, the manager of the hotel goes crazy. I have no idea what is wrong, but it is clearly something major. As time stretches on, it becomes embarrassing, humiliating, uncomfortable.

Eventually someone tells the kid that he has to go. Then Mr. Lee appears and asks me to sit down for a talk. He tells me that since the Gang of Four have been out of favor, people here have been wanting to learn English. And that if they had let this kid record, tomorrow there would be hundreds of people showing up at the hotel with tape recorders.

This is so different from Guangzhou, where people openly spoke with us on the street and our “responsible person” was so blase he gladly answered questions about his salary, spoke of unemployment and admitted his worries about the future.

We have been given bikes, and told that we can ride anywhere we want, looking at the town. For Mr. Lee this is obviously a terrible problem; he keeps biting his nails, wondering what we will do next to get him into trouble. Last night a few of us were invited into somebody’s home for tea; Mr. Lee was furious when he found out. The most innocent undertaking here seems to have ominous overtones.

Mr. Lee watched me ride off on my bike tonight with what I can only call apprehension. He has already given me a lecture on appropriate attire. I have completely lost my self-consciousness; we are so closely watched--by everyone--that I have gotten used to the stares.

I rode down back alleys in the early twilight; people were sitting on the stoops and chickens scratched in the dirt while wash hung above them. Looking into open windows I could see people eating their dinners around dark kitchen tables.

But most life here is lived on the street. Mr. Lee, who says he is lucky, lives in one room with his parents, his sister, his wife and his child. It’s no wonder that people drag their chairs into the street, cook out here, even bathe out here.

The center of village nightlife is the soy milk factory, which is also a sort of cafe. They sell the tofu as it is made, still warm, slightly sweetened, with a bit of peanut oil. But the factory’s main activity is to take the just-made curd and turn it into skins. The curd is spread onto a long conveyor belt in a thin layer. It travels for about 18 feet, slowly, as it is steam-heated. At the end of the line the slightly wrinkled sheets are peeled off. This is what you see, everywhere, in dried tangles.

Mr. Chen, one of the local elders, has befriended us. Tonight he gave us our first Cantonese lessons. He is 72 years old, a professor of theoretical chemistry and a linguist. He wrote his dissertation on the H-bomb; during the cultural revolution he was sent back to the village to be reformed. “You see the lake?” he asks, grabbing an imaginary shovel and making digging motions. “I dug it.” The cultural revolution had such an impact here that everybody uses it as a reference point; “since the end of the Gang of Four” is something you hear all the time.

Finally, after much negotiation, I got into the hotel kitchen. It is dark and smaller than I expected, but not tiny. It is not as hot as a typical American kitchen, for despite the steamy heat outside, the windows open onto the lake and the room is cooled by a constant breeze.

The head cook is a small, thin man trying very hard to please us. He showed me the tank where they keep the fresh fish; picking one up, he held it proudly for a photograph. As he put the fish back into the tank he said he noticed that we didn’t seem to like whole fish--head and all--so he’s been cutting the meat off the bone for us and serving it in small pieces.

Next he showed off the woks, which are set over coals, running water behind them. (He says they clean the woks with baking soda.) Hanging everywhere are big sheets of pig skin which has been deep-fried until it turns into great puffs of crackling. We had it with sweet-and-sour sauce the other night. The chef says he also uses unfried pig skin: his cooks slice it into thin strips and weave imitation bird’s nests.

Walking through his kitchen, the chef paused to pick up a strange-looking animal. He seemed quite proud to be serving it. What could it be? A sort of bird, I thought. The chef shook his head and held up the skin--it was a kind of plated armor. Suddenly it struck me--a baby armadillo! I thought they only had them in Texas.

Next he walked to another counter and showed us the makings for our lunch: stuffed bitter melon; lotus root with duck; Chinese broccoli (we have yet to have a meal without it); soup with daikon.

Finally he took us to another small kitchen, a sort of pastry room where he makes the dim sum. This is what he seemed particularly proud of; here, he said, here is where I want you to take my picture.

Last night the boy who wanted me to read for him found me in the street and handed me his tape recorder. “In your room,” he said, handing me his book, “Essential English,” as well. When I got up here, I discovered that the tape recorder doesn’t work. I’m reading into my own tape recorder now; when I leave, I will wrap it up in a brown paper bag and give it to him.

The farewell banquet.

Mr. Lee has warned me not to wear my sleeveless T-shirt to the banquet--it would be disrespectful. (I’m surprised that he thinks I am civilized enough to be capable of disrespect.) But no wonder he was worried . . . The deputy governor of Tai San has come to the banquet. So has Mr. Lee’s boss, the Overseas Travel manager, various VIPs and Professor Chen. There are many toasts. Much applause. And poor Mr. Lee is so nervous that his hands are shaking and his voice cracking as he translates.

The custom at a banquet is to serve other people and in turn allow them to serve you. There is a great clacking of chopsticks all around the table.

The chef has outdone himself. There are three hors d’oeuvres: cold chicken with five-spice seasoning; pork with pineapple; fried sausage. Then there is the ubiquitous soup, this one with meat and bean threads.

These are followed by an avalanche of dishes. Fried crab, the shells soft, to dip into soy and fried salt. Fish fillets rolled around sausage, battered and deep-fried. The armadillo, steamed (Dr. Chen assures me that this is good for cancer and liver ailments). Pork with broccoli. Roast chicken. Fried rice. And then a sweet water chestnut soup served with those marshmallow-like dim sum. Finally, to clear the palate, a plate of siu mai makes its way around the table.

But this is not the end. The final surprise is a cake. A real Western cake, sitting proudly in its cardboard box. It tastes as if it is about a hundred years old--the cake is tough and the icing so hard that it is cracked. We drink another toast. “Long life!”