Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  In America, you would also be hard-pressed to find twelve thousand fruit-fed rats anywhere on any weekend, but this isn’t a problem in Luogang. On my first morning in the village, I watched dozens of farmers come down from the hills, looking to get a piece of the rat business. They came on mopeds, on bicycles, on foot; and all of them carried squirming burlap sacks full of rats that had been trapped on their farms.

  “Last year I sold my oranges for fifteen cents a pound,” a farmer named Zhong Senji told me. “But this year the price has dropped to less than ten cents.” Like many other farmers, Zhong decided that the rat business was a lot better than the orange business. Today he had nine rats in his sack, which was weighed by a worker at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant. The bag shook and squeaked on the scale. It weighed in at just under three pounds, and Zhong received the equivalent in yuan of $1.45 per pound, for a total of $3.87. In Luogang, rats are more expensive than pork or chicken. A pound of rat costs nearly twice as much as a pound of beef.

  At the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, I begin with a dish called Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans. The menu also includes Mountain Rat Soup, Steamed Mountain Rat, Simmered Mountain Rat, Roasted Mountain Rat, Mountain Rat Curry, and Spicy and Salty Mountain Rat. But the waitress enthusiastically recommended the Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans, which arrives in a clay pot.

  I eat the beans first. They taste fine. I poke at the rat meat. It’s clearly well done, and it’s attractively garnished with onions, leeks, and ginger. Nestled in a light sauce are skinny rat thighs, short strips of rat flank, and delicate toylike rat ribs. I start with a thigh, put a chunk of it into my mouth, and reach for a glass of beer. The beer helps.

  The restaurant’s owner, Zhong Dieqin, comes over and sits down. “What do you think?” she asks.

  “I think it tastes good.”

  “You know it’s good for your health.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “It’s good for your hair and skin,” she says. “It’s also good for your kidneys.”

  Earlier this morning, I met a farmer who told me that my brown hair might turn black if I ate enough rat. Then he thought for a moment and said that he wasn’t certain if eating rat has the same effect on foreigners that it does on the Chinese—it might do something entirely different to me. The possibility seemed to interest him a great deal.

  At the table, Zhong Dieqin watches me intently. The audience also includes much of the restaurant staff. “Are you sure you like it?” asks the owner.

  “Yes,” I say, tentatively. In fact, it isn’t bad. The meat is lean and white, without a hint of gaminess. There’s no aftertaste. Gradually, my squeamishness fades, and I try to decide what the meat reminds me of, but nothing comes to mind. It simply tastes like rat.

  After a while, Zhong Dieqin excuses herself, and the waitresses drift away. A young man comes over and identifies himself as the restaurant’s assistant manager. He asks who I write for, and whether I came to Luogang specifically to report on the restaurants. None of my answers seems to satisfy him, and there’s a wariness in his voice. I recognize it as a syndrome that’s still pervasive in some parts of China: Fear of a Foreign Writer.

  “Did you register with the government before you came here?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s too much trouble.”

  “You should have done that,” he says. “Those are the rules.”

  “I don’t think the government cares very much if I write about restaurants.”

  “They could help you,” he says. “They would give you statistics and arrange interviews.”

  “I can find my own interviews. And if I registered with the government I would have to take all of the government officials out to lunch.” A scene appears in my mind: a gaggle of Communist cadres, middle-aged men in cheap suits, all of them eating rat. I put my chopsticks down. The assistant manager keeps talking.

  “A lot of foreigners come to our China to write about human rights,” he says.

  “That’s true.”

  He looks at me hard. “Have you come here to write about human rights?”

  “Have I asked you any questions about human rights?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, it would be hard for me to write a story about human rights.”

  He thinks about this for a while, but he still looks unsatisfied.

  “I’m writing a story about Luogang’s rat restaurants,” I say. “It’s nothing sensitive.”

  “You should have registered with the government,” he says again. And I can see that if we keep talking he will repeat this phrase over and over, because this is one of those conversations that has been doomed by paranoia. It’s a sad truth in China: even a perfectly good rat meal can be contaminated by politics.

  I shrug and gather my things to leave, and the assistant manager requests that I not use his name in my article. I ask if I can use his family name.

  “No,” he says firmly.

  “What’s the risk?” I ask. “Everybody in Luogang has the same name anyway.”

  But his paranoia is particularly deep-rooted and he refuses. I thank him and promise that I won’t mention his family name in my story. And I don’t.

  Next door, at the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City, the Zhongs are far more media-savvy. They ask if I brought along a television crew.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t have anything to do with television.”

  Zhong Qingjiang, the owner, is clearly disappointed. She tells me that a Hong Kong station came last month. She escorts me to a table, and the floor manager sits next to me. She asks, “How was the other restaurant?”

  “It was fine,” I say.

  “What did you eat?”

  “Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans.”

  “You’ll like ours better,” she says. “Our cook is better, the service is quicker, and the waitresses are more polite.”

  I decide to order the Spicy and Salty Mountain Rat. This time, when the waitress asks about size, I respond immediately. “Big rat,” I say, pleased with my boldness.

  “Come and choose it.”

  “What?”

  “Pick out the rat you want.”

  In Chinese restaurants, fish and other seafood are traditionally shown live to customers for approval, as a way of guaranteeing freshness. It’s not what I expected with rat, but now that the invitation has been made, it’s too late to back out. I follow one of the kitchen workers to a shed behind the restaurant, where cages are stacked one on top of the other. Each cage contains more than thirty rats. The shed does not smell good. The worker points at a rat.

  “How about this one?” he says.

  “Um, sure.”

  He puts on a leather glove, opens the cage, and picks up the chosen rat. It’s about the size of a softball. The rat is calm, perched on the hand of the worker, who keeps a grip on the tail.

  “Is it OK?” asks the worker.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you certain?”

  The rat gazes at me with beady eyes. I have a strong desire to leave the shed.

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s fine.”

  Before I go, the worker makes a sudden motion. He flips his wrist, keeps a grip on the tail, and swings his arm quickly. The rat makes a neat arc in the air. There is a soft thud when its head strikes the cement floor. There isn’t much blood. The worker grins.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “You can sit back down now,” says the worker. “We’ll bring it out to you soon.”

  Less than fifteen minutes later the dish is at my table. This time the chunks of rat are garnished with carrots and leeks. The chef comes out of the kitchen to join the rest of the audience, which consists of the owner, the floor manager, and a cousin of the owner. I take a bite.

  “How is it?” the chef asks.

  “Good.”

  “Is it too tough?”

  “No,” I say. �
�It’s fine.”

  In truth, I’m trying hard not to taste anything. I lost my appetite in the shed, and now I eat quickly, washing every bite down with beer. I do my best to put on a good show, gnawing on the bones as enthusiastically as possible. When I finish, I sit back and manage a smile. The chef and the others nod with approval.

  The owner’s cousin says, “Next time you should try the Longfu Soup, because it contains tiger, dragon, and phoenix.”

  “What do you mean by ‘tiger, dragon, and phoenix’?” I ask warily. I don’t want to make another trip to the shed.

  “It’s not real tigers, dragons, and phoenixes,” he says. “They’re represented by other animals—cat for the tiger, snake for the dragon, and chicken for the phoenix. When you mix them together, there are all kinds of health benefits.” He smiles and says, “They taste good, too.”

  Hutong Karma

  For the past five years, i’ve lived about a mile north of the Forbidden City, in an apartment building off a tiny alleyway in downtown Beijing. My alley has no official name, and it begins in the west, passes through three ninety-degree turns, and exits to the south. On a map, the shape is distinctive: it looks a little like a question mark, or perhaps half of a Buddhist swastika. The alley is also distinctive because it belongs to one of the few surviving sections of old Beijing. The capital, like all Chinese cities nowadays, has been changing fast—the biggest local map publisher updates its diagrams every three months, to keep pace with development. But the layout of my neighborhood has remained more or less the same for centuries. The first detailed map of Beijing was completed in 1750, under the reign of the great Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong, and on that document my alley follows the same route it does today. Xu Pingfang, a Beijing archaeologist, has told me that my street may very well date to the fourteenth century, when many sections of the city were originally laid out, under the Yuan dynasty. The Yuan also left the word hutong, a Mongolian term that has come to mean “alley” in Chinese. Locals call my alley Little Ju’er, because it connects with the larger street known as Ju’er Hutong.

  I live in a modern three-story building, but it’s surrounded by the single-story homes of brick, wood, and tile that are characteristic of hutong. These structures stand behind walls of gray brick, and often a visitor to old Beijing is impressed by the sense of division: wall after wall, gray brick upon gray brick. But actually a hutong neighborhood is most distinguished by connections and movement. Dozens of households might share a single entrance, and although the old residences have running water, few people have private bathrooms, so public toilets play a major role in local life. In a hutong, much is communal, including the alley itself. Even in winter, residents bundle up and sit in the road, chatting with their neighbors. Street vendors pass through regularly, because the hutong are too small for supermarkets.

  There are few cars. Some alleys, like the one I live on, are too narrow for automobile traffic, and the sounds of daily life are completely different from what one would expect in the heart of a city of seven million people. Usually I’m awake by dawn, and from my desk I hear residents chatting as they make their way to the public toilet next to my building, chamber pots in hand. By midmorning the vendors are out. They pedal through the alley on three-wheeled carts, each announcing his product with a trademark cry. The beer woman is the loudest, singing out again and again: “Maaaaiiiii piiiiijiuuuuuu!” At eight in the morning, it can be distracting—buuuuyyyy beeeeeeeeeer!—but over the years I’ve learned to appreciate the music in the calls. The rice man’s refrain is higher-pitched; the vinegar dealer occupies the lower scales. The knife-sharpener provides percussion—a steady click-clack of metal plates. The sounds are soothing, a reminder that even if I never left my doorway again life would be sustainable, albeit imbalanced. I would have cooking oil, soy sauce, and certain vegetables and fruit in season. In winter I could buy strings of garlic. A vendor of toilet paper would pedal through every day. There would be no shortage of coal. Occasionally I could eat candied crabapple.

  I could even earn some money from the freelance recyclers. On an average day, a recycler passes through every half hour, riding a flatbed tricycle. They purchase cardboard, paper, Styrofoam, and broken appliances. They buy old books by the kilogram and dead televisions by the square inch. Appliances can be repaired or stripped for parts, and the paper and plastic are sold to recycling centers for the barest of profits: the margins of trash. Not long ago, I piled some useless possessions in the entranceway of my apartment and invited each passing recycler inside to see what everything was worth. A stack of old magazines sold for sixty-two cents; a burned-out computer cord went for a nickel. Two broken lamps were seven cents, total. A worn-out pair of shoes: twelve cents. Two broken Palm Pilots: thirty-seven cents. I gave one man a marked-up manuscript of the book I’d been writing, and he pulled out a scale, weighed the pages, and paid me fifteen cents.

  One day in late April, I was sitting at my desk and heard somebody call out, “Looonnnng haaaaiiiir! Looonnnng haaaaiiiir! Looonnnng haaaaiiiir!” That was a new strain of music, so I went out into the alley, where a man had parked his cart. He had come from Henan Province, where he worked for a factory that produces wigs and hair extensions. When I asked about business, he reached inside a burlap sack and pulled out a long black ponytail. He said he’d just bought it from another hutong resident for ten dollars. He had come to Beijing because it was getting warm—haircut season—and he hoped to acquire one hundred pounds of good hair before returning to Henan. Most of it, he said, would eventually be exported to the United States or Japan.

  While we were talking, a woman hurried out of a neighboring house, carrying something in a purple silk handkerchief. Carefully, she unwrapped it: two thick strands.

  “They’re from my daughter,” she said, explaining that she’d saved them from the last haircut.

  Each ponytail was about eight inches long. The man held one up so that it dangled like a fish on the line. He squinted appraisingly and said, “Those are too short.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re no use to me,” he said. “They need to be longer than that.”

  The woman tried to bargain, but she didn’t have much leverage; finally she returned home, hair in hand. The call echoed as the man left the hutong: “Looonnnng haaaaiiiir! Looonnnng haaaaiiiir!”

  Not long after i moved into Little Ju’er, Beijing stepped up its campaign to host the 2008 Games, and traces of Olympic glory began to touch the hutong. In order to boost the athleticism and health of average Beijing residents, the government constructed hundreds of outdoor exercise stations. The painted steel equipment is well-intentioned but odd, as if the designer had caught a fleeting glimpse of a gym and then worked from memory. At the exercise stations, people can spin giant wheels with their hands, push big levers that offer no resistance, and swing on pendulums like children at a park. In the greater Beijing region, the stations are everywhere, even in tiny farming villages by the Great Wall. Out there, the equipment gives the peasants a new lifestyle option: after working a twelve-hour day on the walnut harvest, they can get in shape by spinning a big yellow wheel over and over.

  But nobody appreciates the exercise stations more than hutong residents. The machines are scattered throughout old parts of the city, tucked into narrow alleyways. At dawn and dusk, they are especially busy—older people meet in groups to chat and take a few rounds on the pendulum. On warm evenings, men sit idly on the machines and smoke cigarettes. The workout stations are perfect for the ultimate hutong sport: hanging around in the street with the neighbors.

  At the end of 2000, as part of the citywide pre-Olympic campaign to improve sanitation facilities, the government rebuilt the public toilet at the head of Ju’er Hutong. The change was so dramatic that it was as if a shaft of light had descended directly from Mount Olympus to the alleyway, leaving a magnificent structure in its wake. The building had running water, infrared-automated flush toilets, and signs in Chinese, English, and B
raille. Gray rooftop tiles recalled traditional hutong architecture. A list of detailed rules was printed onto stainless steel: “Number 3: Each user is entitled to one free piece of common toilet paper (length 80 centimeters, width 10 centimeters).” A small room housed a married couple who served as full-time attendants. Realizing that no self-respecting Beijing resident would work in a public toilet, the government had imported dozens of couples from the interior, mostly from the poor province of Anhui. The logic was sound: the husband cleaned the men’s room, the wife cleaned the women’s.

  The couple in Ju’er Hutong brought their young son, who took his first steps in front of the public toilet. Such scenes occurred across the capital, and perhaps someday the kids would become the Beijing version of Midnight’s Children: a generation of toddlers raised in public toilets who, ten years after the Olympics, will come of age and bring hygienic glory to the Motherland. Meanwhile, Ju’er residents took full advantage of the well-kept public space that fronted the new toilet. Old Yang, the local bicycle repairman, stored his tools and extra bikes there, and in the fall cabbage vendors slept on the strip of grass that bordered the bathroom. Wang Zhaoxin, who ran the cigarette shop next door, arranged some ripped-up couches around the toilet entrance. Someone else contributed a chessboard. Folding chairs appeared, along with a wooden cabinet stocked with beer glasses.

  After a while, there was so much furniture, and so many people there every night, that Wang Zhaoxin declared the formation of the “W. C. Julebu”: the W. C. Club. Membership was open to all, although there were disputes about who should be chairman or a member of the Politburo. As a foreigner, I joined at the level of a Young Pioneer. On weekend nights, the club hosted barbecues in front of the toilet. Wang Zhaoxin supplied cigarettes, beer, and grain alcohol, and Mr. Cao, a driver for the Xinhua news service, discussed what was happening in the papers. The coal-fired grill was attended to by a handicapped man named Chu. Because of his disability, Chu was licensed to drive a small motorized cart, which made it easy for him to transport skewers of mutton through the hutong. In the summer of 2002, when the Chinese men’s soccer team made history by playing in its first World Cup, the W. C. Club acquired a television, plugged it into the bathroom, and mercilessly mocked the national team as it failed to score a single goal throughout the tournament.