Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [60]
Toward the end of the exhibit, near the plaques commemorating the awards won by China’s leading sexologists, was a sign that pretty much summarized the purpose of the items on display.
The sex medicine and sex tools were popularized in ancient age because men needed sex medicine to strong their sex ability and women needed sex tools for masturbation because the women had to keep their chastity and couldn’t remarriage, and the wives and concubines couldn’t satisfy their sex desire from their husbands.
Which is just so thoughtful.
Soon thereafter, I found myself in a restaurant, gratefully perusing an English-language menu, which informed me that I might want to consider the Bullfrog. It’s not very often that I ponder the wonders of a bullfrog, but this one would come barbecued. I have a soft spot for barbecue. Not so much for its Southern porky manifestation (too sweet), but for, well, pretty much everything else that’s grilled over smoky embers. Purists and semanticists, of course, would argue that only a pig cooked in the Southern manner can be considered true barbecue and any deviation should be called grilling, to which I say whatever. On many a fine evening, and even those that are not so fine, I can be found standing over a Weber, barbecuing fish, shrimps, hunks of flesh, and myriad vegetables. It is, frankly, the only way I know to make squash taste good. I do it because I like it. And it makes me feel like a Man.
But never had I considered the possibility of grilling a frog. Not once. Clearly, when it comes to barbecue, the Chinese are out-of-the-box thinkers. I was in a busy restaurant on a side street near the bustling pedestrian arcade known as Nanjing Lu. I was intrigued by this barbecued bullfrog, and then I noticed that the menu also offered a barbecued goose, my all-time favorite bird for eating, and I thought, Why not? Let’s have both. I’m crazy that way. “And some vegetables in supreme broth too, please?” I said to the waiter, very carefully pointing to the correct Chinese translation lest I accidentally commit myself to a heaping platter of sheep gonads. “Xie xie very much.”
As I waited, I noticed an Englishman sitting with an attractive Chinese woman at a nearby table.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked her. “Rum and Coke? Do you know where rum comes from? The West Indies. Scotch? Scotland. Vodka comes from Russia…”
And on and on he went.
“…in France, people drink wine. Wine also comes from Italy. Slivovice comes from Serbia…”
What a dork. Here he was in a restaurant in China with an actual Chinese person who could speak English—though this might have been a fanciful presumption; she hadn’t uttered a word—but still, presumably, a person who could unlock the mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, and he’d decided to educate her about Europe, which we all know is a totally irrelevant region that’s about to be subsumed into the Muslim caliphate (I watch Fox News occasionally too). Here he was with a person who could resolve some of the most curious Chinese puzzles—like why, for instance, every day in China there are tens of millions of toddlers piddling on sidewalks. Why is this so? I understood the reluctance to use disposable diapers. It’s the eco-friendly thing to do. But for those little ones that aren’t quite babies and aren’t quite ready for potty training—or squat training, as the case may be with Chinese toilets—why have them waddling around in split pants? Are the results not regarded as a little messy, a wee bit unsanitary? I could understand the reluctance to use a public toilet in China. They’re hideous. There are few things more disturbing to the soul than the sight of thirty