Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [11]
Night lady.
I had begun my day in Sacramento, and now I found myself in front of a church in Beijing, surrounded by shoppers and migrant workers, being propositioned by a lady of the night. It had been a long and strange day. I walked on. Ahead, blinking brightly, I could see a sign that announced itself as the “Moslem Restaurant.” Encouraged by the English words, and the implication that there might even be English menus, I entered. It was busy, and as I settled into a seat, I was gratified to receive a menu I could comprehend. And as I perused the restaurant’s offerings, I was more than a little thankful.
Cattle Penis with Garlic
Chicken and Sheep’s Placenta in Soup
Ox’s Penis and Sheep Whip in the Soup
Processed Ox Stomach
Sheep’s Heart
Sheep’s Testicle
Sheep Brain
Ox Larynx
When the waiter returned, I pointed to the Grilled Chicken. I am amenable to eating anything, but not after a long airplane journey, which for me results in a strange and inexplicable knotting of the stomach. Some time later, he returned with a dish that was manifestly not what I thought I had ordered. It was vaguely gelatinous. It quivered. I called the waiter over.
“Zhege zhende shi jirou ma?” I asked.
He looked at me blankly.
“Zhege zhende shi jirou ma?” I repeated, indicating the food. Surely this wasn’t the chicken I had ordered.
He fetched the menu. I pointed to the dish I thought I had requested. The waiter nodded his head effusively. I looked at the menu a little more closely. And then I recognized the enormity of my mistake. Cultural hegemonist that I was, I had assumed that the menu items were displayed in English first, followed by their Chinese translation. The reverse, of course, was true. And now I learned that the grisly mass that lay before me was not a chicken but the brain of an unfortunate sheep. As I sat there, chopsticks in hand, it occurred to me that it was time to start paying attention in China, because there are consequences for not paying attention in China. Big consequences.
3
Let’s begin with Chairman Mao. So much in modern China begins and ends with the colorful tyrant from Hunan. When the China of yore, that long twilight presided over by the doddering Qing Dynasty, finally collapsed with the abdication of the boy emperor, sad little Puyi, it was Mao who emerged in 1949 as the last man standing after decades of civil war. There are still some, apparently, who regard this as a fundamentally good thing, arguing that a fractious, backward country like China could only have entered the modern age under the steely guidance of a megalomaniac like Mao Zedong. Indeed, this view is often expressed empirically as 70:30—70 percent of what Mao did was pretty darn good, while 30 percent of his actions were a trifle excessive. This is, in fact, the official view in China.
Of course, the government acknowledges, here and there mistakes were made. In retrospect, the Great Leap Forward was probably not such a good idea after all. In the spring of 1958, Mao had decided that China should be a superpower. Not just any superpower, mind you; Mao was nothing if not ambitious. As he unleashed his Great Leap Forward, Mao idly drew plans for what he called the Earth Control Committee. At the time, China was a land of peasants still reeling from years of war and centuries of impoverishment. And yet Mao believed China should rule the world. He just needed a year or two to boost the country up and prepare it for global domination. And thus the Great Leap Forward, a headlong rush to transform a country of farms into a nation of factories. Gazing at a vista of temples and pagodas from his perch in the Forbidden City, Mao declared: “In the future, I want to look around and see chimneys everywhere!”
And so it would be. Throughout China, city walls that had