Let's See It All

Everyone loves the farmer’s market, right? Everything is fresh. Everyone is friendly. The atmosphere is leisurely and little...bourgeois.

That’s definitely NOT how a farmer’s market works in China!

Let me introduce you to my hometown. First of all, the town doesn’t have a grocery store so everyone has to shop in a farmer’s market. When I call it a farmer’s market, it’s just a street or several street blocks where vendors and farmers gather. Imagine a one-way only beat-up street in Manhattan, lined by dimly-lit restaurants, deli shops, and convenience stores. On the curbs in front of the shops, vendors sit by their stalls densely loaded with sacks of colorful spices and dehydrated foods such as marinated squids, smoked quails, or cured pork. Along the curbs in the street, farmers stoop over their baskets or vinyl sheets, guarding handfuls of freshly picked vegetables. The customers, also stooping over the baskets or vinyl sheets, pick through the produce and stand up from time to time to make room for bicycles, motorcycles, pedicabs and occasionally cars that are worming through the crowd.

Here in the US farmer’s market shoppers and stall owners act as if they were best friends. They exchange the latest recipes, chat about the year’s harvest, and share information about each other’s family members. They don’t haggle. People in an American farmer’s market are not there for the prices--neither the farmers nor the customers--or so they pretend. They are there because they share resentment and contempt towards grocery store products laden with chemicals and straining to appear fresh through dubious injections and frequent sprinkling. They are there because they share the belief that cooking and eating are not just necessity but an art form. They are there for a lifestyle they consider priceless. Therefore, haggling over money is forbidden.

In a Chinese farmer’s market, the typical customer and the typical farmer or vendor are enemies. They bargain, cajole, intimidate and plead to try to wrangle a few cents from each other. They are like Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong sitting at the negotiation table, each calculating his own chips and scoping out the other’s bottom line. Here’s how they talk to each other:

Customer: How much does your bean sprout sell for?

Farmer: Five Jiao (about six cents) a kilogram.

Customer: What? You’d better rob me! It’s getting dark. Your stuff is not that fresh anymore, and the market is going to close soon. You would have to take your sprouts back and let it rot if you don’t sell it to me. How about Four Jiao?

Farmer: You are kidding me! Look how crisp they are! I picked them fresh from the field this morning, and walked three hours from the Shuangxi village here. The market is just getting busy. Five Jiao!

Customer: You are from Shuangxi!? I grew up there! See, we are from the same place. You have to give me some discount.

Farmer: Then you know how tough life is there in the rural village. I work year round and can barely feed my two children. Now one of them is going to college.

Customer: Ok. How about four and a half Jiao? It’s more than fair! Farmer: No. I know the prices around, and I can’t go below five.

Customer: (Walking away tentatively) I’m sure I can find better deals from someone else.

Farmer: All right, all right! Four and a half...only because we are from the same village. Don’t tell others that you got this deal from me. What a crummy deal. My whole day’s labor won’t even pay for our dinner tonight...

Now let’s go to the meat and poultry section.

I know what you have in mind--neatly packaged meat under clear plastic wraps showing the perfect pinkish hue--deep enough to demonstrate the freshness yet light enough to avoid association with blood. So it reminds you that it’s cut from some animal that’s moving and chewing until most recently, but it doesn’t prod you to think how that animal becomes those chunks of meat stacked on the stall. Actually those packages look so innocent that you might as well think they are “harvested” somewhere like apples plucked from the tree.

Chinese meat is not packaged. Slabs of pork or beef or lamp dangle from steel hooks. They are fresh all right, because some are dripping blood. You tell the seller how much you want from which section of which slab. He or she grabs that slap, whacks a chunk off, slits a hole in that chunk, puts a straw string through that hole, ties a knot and hands you your purchase. Right besides the meat, livers and kidneys are also hanging from hooks. On the counter, it’s an assortment of pig heads, bones, and tails. So when you take your purchase into your hand, whether it’s a chunk of meat, a liver, or a pig ear, you know you are taking home a part of a recently alive animal, and the brutal evidence of the murdering and dismembering of that creature is lying right in front of your eyes.

There are chicken, ducks, and rabbits, too--carcasses hanging down from wooden stakes right besides cages of live ones waiting to become carcasses. You want your food to be fresh? Here’s the real deal. Say you are thinking of a spicy rabbit stir-fry for dinner. You stare into the cages at those long-eared creatures huddling tightly together, some still munching grass, maybe stick one of your fingers into the cage and poke at some to feel the thickness of their meat underneath their white or gray fur. You’ve made up your mind and point out your chosen one to the vendor. He lifts the hatch on the cage, grabs your choice by its ears and pulls it out, its legs kicking in the air. I won’t go into further details for the sake of the faint-hearted, but at the end of the story is your chosen rabbit slaughtered and skinned in front your eyes and you going home with a warm rabbit carcass for your rabbit stir-fry.

The thing is, I don’t feel there’s anything morbid about the whole thing. We eat meat. We crave rabbit stir-fries, steaks, and chicken soup. WE are calling for the death of all the animals we consume. We are as much their murderers as those who slit open their throats. So let’s witness the murders. Let’s see the blood. Let’s watch how lives are taken. We don’t need to be shielded from our guilt. We know what we are taking home. And we’re going to swallow our guilt along with the meat.

In Chinese, “pork” is “zhu rou,” which is literally “pig’s meat.” “Beef” is “niu rou,” which is “cow’s meat,” and so on. So it’s given to you straight: meat comes from whole animals! Don’t even try to think it’s something else.

Because we know we are taking lives away, we honor the lives by consuming almost everything from the slain creatures--meat, organs, intestines, heads, feet, ears and eyes.

But there are side effects from being life-long murder scene witnesses, too. When Americans see ducks and ducklings filing through highways, they stop and wait and say: “Look, how cute.” Chinese stop and wait (if they are in the US), and think: “Mmmm, duck soup.”

Out in the Open

So I was riding in a train to a rural village in Shandong Province. I was lucky enough to get a seat. Many were standing, squatting, sitting on their luggage or floating along the narrow corridor between two columns of seats. My seat was at the end of the car besides the joint of two cars. More people were standing, squatting, or floating around on the joint. That area also hosted two bathrooms and two sinks. People were chatting loudly, but I hardly had any clue what they are talking. Yes, I am Chinese and they were too, but they were speaking a Shandong dialect to which my ears had been barely trained. The train was air-conditioned, but with so many warm bodies jammed together, I was sweating bullets. Everyone else was too. And because the train was air-conditioned, all windows were closed. Soon the air was a cocktail of sweat, smoke, all types of body scents, and wafts from the bathrooms.

I sat beside a young woman with a baby. She told me that the baby’s name was Junyan. Junyan, like any new arrival in the world, scoped everything up by grabbing, tugging, licking and biting. Soon she’s all over my backpack, my glasses, and my tank top straps. Suddenly her kicking and tugging stopped. I turned my head her way and find her serenely latched to a breast and sucking happily. I withdrew my sight in a hurry and overcompensated my visual intrusion by turning my body completely sideway to face the opposite window. I waited for ten minutes to return to my normal position but found it impossible. The guy sitting opposite to me had stretched across the aisle between us and placed his legs underneath my seat. He was sound asleep, but all of a sudden he jerked up and pulled his legs back as if his toes had been bitten by a snake. His abrupt movement was accompanied by a “shhhh” sound from my side. Junyan was held upright in the air with her legs spread out and a stream rushing out in between. (Later an attendant lectured us for dripping water all over the floor. I was shocked and felt embarrassed, but I couldn’t remember if I had always felt one should not breast-feed and let her baby go potty in the open, or I had adopted such social etiquette during my time in the US.

Later, I felt embarrassed for being embarrassed. Sure, it’s easy to tell the mom to find a room or take her baby to the bathroom, but try to do those yourself in a jammed train. We were in space where elbows were shoved into ribs. The path to the bathroom was blocked by bodies, suitcases, buckets and crates. The bathroom doors were guarded by giant sacks and men leaning besides them.

I also have to admit, though, Chinese women do these things when they can afford not to as well.

Charlie has several scenes etched in his memory from his stay in China. In Shanghai, he says, (Yes, Shanghai, the most metropolitan and most westernized city in China) people often lounge outside their apartment buildings on street curbs in the summer. They sit on stools and cool themselves with paper fans. They chat and stare and point when a six foot three white dude like Charlie passes by. And then right there, in the midst of streams of pedestrians, bicyclists, pedicabs, cars and the din of the city, a woman is suckling her baby, her shirt rolled all the way up to her collar bones.

Now let’s go to Beijing. Chang’an Jie, the street that runs by the Tian’an Men Square is the broadest and most famous street in the nation. Columns of automobiles barrel along the center artery. Knots of bicycles charge in the side lanes flanking the auto zone. Floods of pedestrians flow on the curbs--tourists pausing for pictures, locals rushing to work, college couples locking arms sauntering along. Then a woman is squatting by the flower bed, holding a baby by its buttock, a steady stream flowing between its legs and vanishing into the soil. At the same time, she may be making cajoling sounds to her baby in order to expedite the business or chatting with her companion who’s standing idly by. No ones gives her a second glance or barely the first. The universe keeps revolving.

When Charlie recounts those encounters with utter amazement, I feel stung. A thousand years ago, my ancestors called his ancestors “western barbarians.” How did we evolve into the uncivilized bunch and the former barbarians are shaking heads at our mannerism?

There must explanations. After all, we are a civilization of five thousand years.
Let’s begin with the breasts.

In Woman, An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier argues that there are two sets of breasts--the maternal breast and the aesthetic breast. “The maternal breast soothes us and invites us to rest. The aesthetic breast arouses us, grabs us by the collar or the bodice, and so it is used on billboards and magazine covers and everywhere we turn.” Because the aesthetic breast is aggressive, we demand our women to conceal them with bras of the right thickness that can oppress the protruding nipples, blunt the shape of breasts into dull curves, and restrain their movements. Yet bras, to my knowledge, are as western an invention as hamburgers. My grandmas never used a single pair of bras in their lives. So maybe the aesthetic breasts are something of a western invention as well. Angier says: “Because the display of the beckoning breast is aggressive and ubiquitous in the United States, we are said to be unusually, even pathologically, breast-obsessed. In other cultures, including parts of Africa and Asia, breasts are pedestrian.” She cites Emily Martin, a cultural historian as saying: “From my research in China, it’s very clear that the breast is much less sexualized there than it is in American culture. It’s neither hidden nor revealed in any particular way in women’s dress or undergarments. In many villages, women sit in the sun with their breasts exposed, and older women will be out washing their clothes with their breasts exposed, and it’s all completely irrelevant to erotic arousal.”

Chinese for “breast” is “rufang.” It literally means “the container of milk.” In Chinese eyes, breasts generate milk. That’s it. Plain and simple. Without the aid of a stretched imagination, the word itself hardly conjures any sexual implication. So maybe breasts are much less sexual objects in Chinese culture than in the western culture to begin with?

Angier also says: “ When we find the image of a breast-feeding mother lovely or appealing, we do so by negating the aesthetic breast in our minds and focusing on the bond between mother and infant, on the miraculous properties that we imagine human milk to have, or on thoughts of warmth, comfort, and love recalled from our childhood.” If the aesthetic breast is non-existent in the Chinese culture to begin with, no negating and focusing efforts are necessary. If a mother is using her breasts to do what breasts are supposed to do--generating milk and suckling her young, which is lovely and appealing, absent of implications added by imaginative minds, why should be embarrassed about it?

Now let’s talk about baby urine. I remember the following conversation between me and my aunt.

My aunt was holding my baby cousin in the air who was peeing on a street curb. I jumped several feet away, frowning and covering my nose with one hand.
“Ew! It’s gross.” The teenaged me said.

“What’s all the fuss? It’s just baby pee. It’s clean and smell-less.” Said my aunt.
The teenaged me remained credulous and took a big detour around the little puddle formed on the curb.

Now the adult me thinks my aunt’s argument deserves certain credibility. Here Angiers again about human milk: “ The lactose in the milk ensures that very ion of calcium will be used instead of just peed away, as is much of the calcium that you get from drinking, say, fortified orange juice. The baby digests the proteins in the milk down to the last amino acid, which is why a suckling infant’s used diapers hardly smell: there’s very little waste matter, very little excreted protein, to lend a stench.” So if baby pee is practically water, what’s all the fuss about it? And above all, if you have been in Beijing, you’ll know that a public bathroom is really hard to come by.