Food Food Food

In Cuba people would always talk to me about me being Chinese, because that was the obviously simple thing to talk about. If there was ever a lull in the conversation and I was part of it, you could count on someone to pull out some funny little banal statement about los chinos. One of these, which I heard often, was some variant of, “Chinese people eat dogs, right? Have you eaten dog? Chinese people will eat anything!”

To answer this question, I am making a list of all the somewhat interesting foods I have eaten in the past days (animal lovers stop reading now!):

dog (Indeed! My first time ever, if you’ll believe it. I thought it was beef, it tasted like beef, then my auntie told me it was dog)

goose feet (a delicacy)

goose liver

lamb liver

pig liver

pig blood (congealed), pig intestines, pig stomach, lots of other pig insides

turtle

wild boar

wild hare

duck tongue

cow head meat

Unlike in Cuba, where there is no food (jk jk), eating is quite the activity in China, and Chinese people are really good at it. It seems like all I’ve been doing since I’ve gotten here is eat eat eat. Big fancy meals have been overabundant, partly because its customarily respectful/polite/good to feed people who are visiting a lot of good food (no one meets old friends over coffee or tea, only over meals), and partly because we’re always eating with a lot of people, so even if the meal isn’t meant to be big and fancy it ends up that way. They also end up lasting a very long time because 1 – there are a lot of dishes to serve, since there are a lot of people, and in China everyone shares all the dishes, and 2 – people are chatting it up. Conclusion: I feel like I’ve been sent to a fattening farm.

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On a relatively unrelated note, a funny little story pertaining to food: My grandmother was talking about her grandchildren, and complaining about one of my cousins, saying how she’s really not very ‘guai’( a word that means obedient, well-behaved, respectful, used all the time to describe the good qualities in children). Then she stopped and thought a little, and said, “but she’s changed, I think. For example, at lunch today she gave me the duck head. Imagine that! She put the duck head in my bowl and said, ‘grandma, have the duck head.’ I was so surprised. Yes, she’s gotten a little better.”