UAL Traveler
Apr 1, 01, 2:16 pm
First the preamble. About a month and a half ago, there was a lengthy thread in The Buzz lovingly titled Disgusting Airline Passenger Manners (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/004117.html). In doing justice to its name, that thread diverged several times, at one point venturing into a brief discussion of Chinese food. I made a comment about the cuisine, and was challenged by essxjay to expand my comments. I did promise in the thread that I would post my comments. Though I was thinking about posting in General Travel Talk, since it really isn't a trip report and has nothing to do with FF programs, I decided to put it here due to its length and that it does involve a trip. Therefore, for the displeasure of all, here goes.
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I will describe some aspects of a common and typical dinner in a small Chinese coastal city: Xiamen. By way of brief preamble, my business activities involve frequent travel to Xiamen, directly from HKG, or from BKK, usually via HKG. My business partner and I design and manufacture a number of name-brand small- and personal-care appliances in several facilities in East and Southeast Asia, one of them being in the Port of Xiamen. The factory is sited there in part based on the availability of a free-trade zone, and proximity to the container carriers that we continuously load with product. As such, the neighborhood is quite industrial, but has a dearth of restaurants. At last count (other than the random hawker carts, and I certainly don’t count our own cafeteria) zero. So, we always go out and investigate new restaurants. My partner, who is Chinese, has some favorites, which he is not embarrassed to share with me.
Xiamen is an island in a coastal harbor, geographically similar to Hong Kong, with bridges connecting it to the mainland. Seafood is very prevalent, with a number of great restaurants frequented by both locals and westerners. Perhaps the most popular area for seafood is on the small island of Gulangyu, just a 5-minute ferry ride from Xiamen. There, they have at least 100 small shop-house type restaurants, with fresh seafood cooked to order. Of course, there are a few upscale western hotels, such as the Marco Polo, that offer cuisine that is passable.
So, before I launch into a description of more earthy establishments and practices, I just wanted to point out that Xiamen has many fine venues that visitors from the West would consider quite civilized.
For better or worse, I am often considered a local (despite my western heritage, appearance and demeanor) in many Asian countries. To solidify (actually test) that notion some time ago, my perverse business partner decided to take me (and about a half dozen of our senior staff) to a favorite area of his for dinner, on the eastern side of Xiamen Island. I will never forget that experience, though it has now been repeated numerous times, and is something that I consider quite normal now. Anyway, our driver let us off at the edge of a muddy (parking?) lot bordered along one side by what looked like the edge of a maze of small shanty-like shophouse restaurants. The entire complex was called Da Pai Down (as translated for me). Immediately, 8 or 9 of us were ‘attacked’ by a screaming crowd of middle-aged women. My immediate reaction was to duck and cover, but I noticed my partner was laughing, so I stood back up, and followed him as he fought his way through the pack. It turned out that they were trying to convince him to come and eat at their ‘restaurant.’ Well, ‘OK’ I thought, ‘he knows what he’s doing.’ We zigzagged our way through the rutted, Byzantine alleyways for several minutes, the crowd of shopkeepers thinning as it became apparent that we had a destination in mind.
Finally, my partner proclaimed with a broad smile that we had arrived at ‘his’ restaurant. Like the story goes, there are two places that I don’t eat: those called ‘Eats’ and those named ‘Mom’s.’ This one was called ‘Moo Tse.’ Only sometime later did I learn that it means ‘Mother and Son.’
I asked what kind of seafood they served, and I was told Fujian (sometimes called Min). I figured, no problem: light taste, scented wine and sweet/sour sauces. And, of course, Fujian cuisine is quite common in Xiamen (Fujian province).
Thus far, all the indications were nominal: two rows of plastic containers, brimming with all sorts of live crustaceans and other small sea creatures. On an iced table, lay a dozen varieties of fish, and what I took to be a several distant, now deceased relatives of that which was swimming in the containers below. Other than an occasional plop and slight splashing sound in the background, that I could not place, nothing was amiss. Feeling relaxed, I began to size up the premises. I saw an area behind the display setup that was used for food preparation, but a ‘kitchen’ per se was not visible to my untrained eye. As there were no tables set up at this, or any of the neighboring restaurants, I asked where we eat. My partner said ‘upstairs.’ Up to that point, other than registering the basic shophouse configuration so common in Asia, I never thought about an ‘upstairs’ place. But, there it was, a narrow ladder-like set of stairs angled about 15 degrees from the vertical. Before venturing up however, I felt that it was a convenient time to use the facilities, which I inquired about. All conversation stopped at that point, and it seemed like all eyes were on me. It was as if I’d asked to see the local health inspector. One of our staff had a conversation in rapid Chinese with the owner, who looked perplexed. Given that I apparently was the only westerner she’d seen in quite some time, she felt it her duty to accommodate my strange desire. So, just to the right of, and beneath the staircase, I was shown a small room with a one-inch hole in the center of a tile floor, and a hose. As the owner, and one of my staff who stayed behind, watched me with great expectations, I merely asked ‘so, where is the restroom?’ They smiled and pointed to the tiny cubicle (sans door). Quickly weighing a number of options, alternatives, and scenarios (looking at the tiny hole in the floor) I figured what the hell, and went for it.
I found out why one of my staff waited for me outside the ‘restroom’. He was there to escort me upstairs, and decided that he could help break my fall if the stairs collapsed when I attempted to climb up to the second floor. Fortunately I’m not all that large (at least by western standards), and made it up OK. Well, it was clear that the second floor was nothing but a bunch of round tables – warped, cutout plywood on top of sawhorses, set on the corrugated (I’ll call it tin) roof that covered the display and cooking area below. The walls were sheets tacked to some rotted wooden studs, and the ‘roof’ was more of the same metal we were standing on. There were sizeable gaps all around. Classic Asian Rustic. Fine with me, except it was impossible for me to find a comfortable position of the chair by the table, since the corrugations quantized the possible chair-leg positions. Whatever, I was hungry. By the time I got upstairs, beer and tea had been ordered, along with the appetizer spread, which consisted of chopped chicken parts, a sliced jicama-like vegetable, and spiced peas-in-the-pod.
I was bemused to watch my people eat their appetizers. With complete aplomb, they would take the chicken, and after several chews, spit the bones towards the floor-‘wall’ juncture, at which point, about 1 in 5 would disappear through a joint in the floor. Well, first mystery solved. Now I knew where those plops were coming from that I heard when I was downstairs, 10 minutes earlier. My partner explained that everyone was on their best behavior with me, in that they normally would eat the chicken bones, but since that was not my custom they would politely spit them out. Apparently it was to show me that they were getting paid enough to eat well, and did not have to behave like peasants. (If anyone feels compelled to comment on how we work pay scales in China, please save that for another thread.)
As the final precursor to the main feast, some sashimi on a block of carved ice was laid out. (I was later told that only a western eye would believe that a block of ice that was accidentally run over by a cart in the alley by the side of the kitchen was ‘carved.’) A couple of the guys were passing a toothpaste tube of green paste between them, and naturally I asked what was up. They said that it was some sort of Japanese wasabi (mustard/horseradish mix). Defending my spicy-food-eating reputation, I asked for a squirt. Now, I have to say in all honesty that I’ve bested Thais in Bangkok, and a Lao ringer once on the banks of the Mekong in impromptu contests in the past. So, I had not the slightest hesitation in mainlining a teaspoon-full, right down my gullet. Problem was, it never made it past my tongue. Evil is too mild a prelude to a description of the wicked matter that began to short-circuit my biological throat controls. In what must have been microseconds, my throat closed off, and I began to think that suffocation really was the big deal that it had been made out to be. After about 10 minutes (which in reality was less than 2 seconds), I was able to begin wheezing. Devoid of embarrassment, I thrust my arms forward, capped by two balled-up fists, and hacked out the pea-sized wasabi remnants onto the table in front of me. Realizing that such behavior was totally expected and appropriate, I barely noticed it when one of my Chinese colleagues nonchalantly inquired, ‘you like?’
OK, a few minutes pass, my heart finally slows to under 120 beats/min, and the first main course is finally on the way: prawn. When the dish got closer, I knew it for what it was: fresh. Real fresh. Up to that point, I had only had the pleasure of such cuisine in Seoul, years before. Unlike my Korean hosts of years past, I declared an amnesty on the spot in no uncertain terms. I slowly and clearly stated (pausing for an accurate Chinese translation) that no one should feel compelled to use chopsticks to chase any food that crawls off their plates. ‘Nuff said, except to note that there was no waste (or escapees).
Chinese like shrimp so, more shrimp followed. This time: drunken shrimp. Now, this dish is quite common in US Chinese restaurants, except that the imbibing, if it ever really occurs, does so behind closed kitchen doors. In China, as is traditional in the other ‘Chinas’ (Hong Kong and Taiwan), the better restaurants wheel out a stand with a large broad bowl filled with a wine and water mixture. Then, which a slight flourish, they dump about 30 or so large shrimp into the drink where (what else), they get drunk. It is not a pretty sight. Some make a mad scramble for the rim, and try to dive out, whereby the chef/busboy whacks the poor creature back into their liquid chamber of… Finally, and thankfully, some sort of besotted bliss kicks in, and the shrimp barely resist their final swim in the pot of boiling broth. After a couple of minutes, they were… done.
The next course was a 6-inch long (counting what I think was the head) parboiled sea creature that looked like a cross between a seahorse and a sea cucumber, with about two sets of ten small, delicately fringed flippers fore and aft of its belly. Appeared to be pregnant at that. Even my Chinese staff hadn’t ever seen such a critter before, as there was much debate as to what it might be. My jovial MD (managing director), who thinks it to be impolite to hesitate more than 15 seconds about anything presented to him as ‘food,’ took one poke at the belly with his chopstick. Yep, pregnant. Don’t get me wrong, this was not a scene out of Alien, or anything like that. It was just that the purplish mass that pulsed out had a less than pleasant aroma. However, true believers know that like durian and Limburger, the nose can be fooled. Fortunately, there were true believers around the table, and I didn’t have to endure the stench.
Lets see, what other seafood did we have… hard to say, because by that time I was on my Nth bottle of local Xiamen beer, and about all I can remember was having a large hard-shell crab set before me, and being told that to be polite I was expected to consume all the soft parts. I remember saying something like ‘are you sure?’ To which there was the obvious response. So, I dug in, straight down, right in the middle. Any junior high bio student could guess what was there: a large lung (maybe two, or three, or more, but I wasn’t counting). I figured that since I was the chief breadwinner for the group, no one wanted to see me die, so I dug in and took a bite. And spit it out. Again, a polite (and what might have been a lifesaving) move. Thank God for autonomic responses. Horrified, my chief engineer said “you’re not supposed to eat that.” I said “but you said I should eat everything.” He said “but everyone knows you don’t eat the lung,” and he looked worried, but tried not to show it, which made me more worried. When a Chinese looks worried (and tries not to show it), it’s really not good. The wasabi was starting to taste good in my memory.
The table fell silent. Oh boy, I guess I don’t have to worry now about remembering to reconfirm my flights out on China Southern. Then the engineer asked “do you feel cold?” “What do mean, ‘cold’,” I asked. He stared into my eyes, turned and spit, and said "nevermind, you probably be OK.” I declared aloud that the meal was over for me.
Finally leaving the restaurant I realized that I never found out the meaning of the name… turned out it was ‘Mother and Son.’ As we slogged back to the dirt lot in search of our transportation, I turned to see a worker washing the dirt from several armloads of vegetables he had thrown onto the floor in a little cubicle with a tile floor and a one-inch hole in the center.
[This message has been edited by UAL Traveler (edited 04-02-2001).]
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I will describe some aspects of a common and typical dinner in a small Chinese coastal city: Xiamen. By way of brief preamble, my business activities involve frequent travel to Xiamen, directly from HKG, or from BKK, usually via HKG. My business partner and I design and manufacture a number of name-brand small- and personal-care appliances in several facilities in East and Southeast Asia, one of them being in the Port of Xiamen. The factory is sited there in part based on the availability of a free-trade zone, and proximity to the container carriers that we continuously load with product. As such, the neighborhood is quite industrial, but has a dearth of restaurants. At last count (other than the random hawker carts, and I certainly don’t count our own cafeteria) zero. So, we always go out and investigate new restaurants. My partner, who is Chinese, has some favorites, which he is not embarrassed to share with me.
Xiamen is an island in a coastal harbor, geographically similar to Hong Kong, with bridges connecting it to the mainland. Seafood is very prevalent, with a number of great restaurants frequented by both locals and westerners. Perhaps the most popular area for seafood is on the small island of Gulangyu, just a 5-minute ferry ride from Xiamen. There, they have at least 100 small shop-house type restaurants, with fresh seafood cooked to order. Of course, there are a few upscale western hotels, such as the Marco Polo, that offer cuisine that is passable.
So, before I launch into a description of more earthy establishments and practices, I just wanted to point out that Xiamen has many fine venues that visitors from the West would consider quite civilized.
For better or worse, I am often considered a local (despite my western heritage, appearance and demeanor) in many Asian countries. To solidify (actually test) that notion some time ago, my perverse business partner decided to take me (and about a half dozen of our senior staff) to a favorite area of his for dinner, on the eastern side of Xiamen Island. I will never forget that experience, though it has now been repeated numerous times, and is something that I consider quite normal now. Anyway, our driver let us off at the edge of a muddy (parking?) lot bordered along one side by what looked like the edge of a maze of small shanty-like shophouse restaurants. The entire complex was called Da Pai Down (as translated for me). Immediately, 8 or 9 of us were ‘attacked’ by a screaming crowd of middle-aged women. My immediate reaction was to duck and cover, but I noticed my partner was laughing, so I stood back up, and followed him as he fought his way through the pack. It turned out that they were trying to convince him to come and eat at their ‘restaurant.’ Well, ‘OK’ I thought, ‘he knows what he’s doing.’ We zigzagged our way through the rutted, Byzantine alleyways for several minutes, the crowd of shopkeepers thinning as it became apparent that we had a destination in mind.
Finally, my partner proclaimed with a broad smile that we had arrived at ‘his’ restaurant. Like the story goes, there are two places that I don’t eat: those called ‘Eats’ and those named ‘Mom’s.’ This one was called ‘Moo Tse.’ Only sometime later did I learn that it means ‘Mother and Son.’
I asked what kind of seafood they served, and I was told Fujian (sometimes called Min). I figured, no problem: light taste, scented wine and sweet/sour sauces. And, of course, Fujian cuisine is quite common in Xiamen (Fujian province).
Thus far, all the indications were nominal: two rows of plastic containers, brimming with all sorts of live crustaceans and other small sea creatures. On an iced table, lay a dozen varieties of fish, and what I took to be a several distant, now deceased relatives of that which was swimming in the containers below. Other than an occasional plop and slight splashing sound in the background, that I could not place, nothing was amiss. Feeling relaxed, I began to size up the premises. I saw an area behind the display setup that was used for food preparation, but a ‘kitchen’ per se was not visible to my untrained eye. As there were no tables set up at this, or any of the neighboring restaurants, I asked where we eat. My partner said ‘upstairs.’ Up to that point, other than registering the basic shophouse configuration so common in Asia, I never thought about an ‘upstairs’ place. But, there it was, a narrow ladder-like set of stairs angled about 15 degrees from the vertical. Before venturing up however, I felt that it was a convenient time to use the facilities, which I inquired about. All conversation stopped at that point, and it seemed like all eyes were on me. It was as if I’d asked to see the local health inspector. One of our staff had a conversation in rapid Chinese with the owner, who looked perplexed. Given that I apparently was the only westerner she’d seen in quite some time, she felt it her duty to accommodate my strange desire. So, just to the right of, and beneath the staircase, I was shown a small room with a one-inch hole in the center of a tile floor, and a hose. As the owner, and one of my staff who stayed behind, watched me with great expectations, I merely asked ‘so, where is the restroom?’ They smiled and pointed to the tiny cubicle (sans door). Quickly weighing a number of options, alternatives, and scenarios (looking at the tiny hole in the floor) I figured what the hell, and went for it.
I found out why one of my staff waited for me outside the ‘restroom’. He was there to escort me upstairs, and decided that he could help break my fall if the stairs collapsed when I attempted to climb up to the second floor. Fortunately I’m not all that large (at least by western standards), and made it up OK. Well, it was clear that the second floor was nothing but a bunch of round tables – warped, cutout plywood on top of sawhorses, set on the corrugated (I’ll call it tin) roof that covered the display and cooking area below. The walls were sheets tacked to some rotted wooden studs, and the ‘roof’ was more of the same metal we were standing on. There were sizeable gaps all around. Classic Asian Rustic. Fine with me, except it was impossible for me to find a comfortable position of the chair by the table, since the corrugations quantized the possible chair-leg positions. Whatever, I was hungry. By the time I got upstairs, beer and tea had been ordered, along with the appetizer spread, which consisted of chopped chicken parts, a sliced jicama-like vegetable, and spiced peas-in-the-pod.
I was bemused to watch my people eat their appetizers. With complete aplomb, they would take the chicken, and after several chews, spit the bones towards the floor-‘wall’ juncture, at which point, about 1 in 5 would disappear through a joint in the floor. Well, first mystery solved. Now I knew where those plops were coming from that I heard when I was downstairs, 10 minutes earlier. My partner explained that everyone was on their best behavior with me, in that they normally would eat the chicken bones, but since that was not my custom they would politely spit them out. Apparently it was to show me that they were getting paid enough to eat well, and did not have to behave like peasants. (If anyone feels compelled to comment on how we work pay scales in China, please save that for another thread.)
As the final precursor to the main feast, some sashimi on a block of carved ice was laid out. (I was later told that only a western eye would believe that a block of ice that was accidentally run over by a cart in the alley by the side of the kitchen was ‘carved.’) A couple of the guys were passing a toothpaste tube of green paste between them, and naturally I asked what was up. They said that it was some sort of Japanese wasabi (mustard/horseradish mix). Defending my spicy-food-eating reputation, I asked for a squirt. Now, I have to say in all honesty that I’ve bested Thais in Bangkok, and a Lao ringer once on the banks of the Mekong in impromptu contests in the past. So, I had not the slightest hesitation in mainlining a teaspoon-full, right down my gullet. Problem was, it never made it past my tongue. Evil is too mild a prelude to a description of the wicked matter that began to short-circuit my biological throat controls. In what must have been microseconds, my throat closed off, and I began to think that suffocation really was the big deal that it had been made out to be. After about 10 minutes (which in reality was less than 2 seconds), I was able to begin wheezing. Devoid of embarrassment, I thrust my arms forward, capped by two balled-up fists, and hacked out the pea-sized wasabi remnants onto the table in front of me. Realizing that such behavior was totally expected and appropriate, I barely noticed it when one of my Chinese colleagues nonchalantly inquired, ‘you like?’
OK, a few minutes pass, my heart finally slows to under 120 beats/min, and the first main course is finally on the way: prawn. When the dish got closer, I knew it for what it was: fresh. Real fresh. Up to that point, I had only had the pleasure of such cuisine in Seoul, years before. Unlike my Korean hosts of years past, I declared an amnesty on the spot in no uncertain terms. I slowly and clearly stated (pausing for an accurate Chinese translation) that no one should feel compelled to use chopsticks to chase any food that crawls off their plates. ‘Nuff said, except to note that there was no waste (or escapees).
Chinese like shrimp so, more shrimp followed. This time: drunken shrimp. Now, this dish is quite common in US Chinese restaurants, except that the imbibing, if it ever really occurs, does so behind closed kitchen doors. In China, as is traditional in the other ‘Chinas’ (Hong Kong and Taiwan), the better restaurants wheel out a stand with a large broad bowl filled with a wine and water mixture. Then, which a slight flourish, they dump about 30 or so large shrimp into the drink where (what else), they get drunk. It is not a pretty sight. Some make a mad scramble for the rim, and try to dive out, whereby the chef/busboy whacks the poor creature back into their liquid chamber of… Finally, and thankfully, some sort of besotted bliss kicks in, and the shrimp barely resist their final swim in the pot of boiling broth. After a couple of minutes, they were… done.
The next course was a 6-inch long (counting what I think was the head) parboiled sea creature that looked like a cross between a seahorse and a sea cucumber, with about two sets of ten small, delicately fringed flippers fore and aft of its belly. Appeared to be pregnant at that. Even my Chinese staff hadn’t ever seen such a critter before, as there was much debate as to what it might be. My jovial MD (managing director), who thinks it to be impolite to hesitate more than 15 seconds about anything presented to him as ‘food,’ took one poke at the belly with his chopstick. Yep, pregnant. Don’t get me wrong, this was not a scene out of Alien, or anything like that. It was just that the purplish mass that pulsed out had a less than pleasant aroma. However, true believers know that like durian and Limburger, the nose can be fooled. Fortunately, there were true believers around the table, and I didn’t have to endure the stench.
Lets see, what other seafood did we have… hard to say, because by that time I was on my Nth bottle of local Xiamen beer, and about all I can remember was having a large hard-shell crab set before me, and being told that to be polite I was expected to consume all the soft parts. I remember saying something like ‘are you sure?’ To which there was the obvious response. So, I dug in, straight down, right in the middle. Any junior high bio student could guess what was there: a large lung (maybe two, or three, or more, but I wasn’t counting). I figured that since I was the chief breadwinner for the group, no one wanted to see me die, so I dug in and took a bite. And spit it out. Again, a polite (and what might have been a lifesaving) move. Thank God for autonomic responses. Horrified, my chief engineer said “you’re not supposed to eat that.” I said “but you said I should eat everything.” He said “but everyone knows you don’t eat the lung,” and he looked worried, but tried not to show it, which made me more worried. When a Chinese looks worried (and tries not to show it), it’s really not good. The wasabi was starting to taste good in my memory.
The table fell silent. Oh boy, I guess I don’t have to worry now about remembering to reconfirm my flights out on China Southern. Then the engineer asked “do you feel cold?” “What do mean, ‘cold’,” I asked. He stared into my eyes, turned and spit, and said "nevermind, you probably be OK.” I declared aloud that the meal was over for me.
Finally leaving the restaurant I realized that I never found out the meaning of the name… turned out it was ‘Mother and Son.’ As we slogged back to the dirt lot in search of our transportation, I turned to see a worker washing the dirt from several armloads of vegetables he had thrown onto the floor in a little cubicle with a tile floor and a one-inch hole in the center.
[This message has been edited by UAL Traveler (edited 04-02-2001).]