Food and Fears

People are still shooting off fireworks. Not a lot, once, maybe twice a day I’ll hear a boom or a crack and reminisce about that night 6 days ago. I apologize for taking so long to send another wire, it’s just that they’re doing such a great job of keeping me busy all the time that I haven’t had much time to relax, let alone write. Classes have kicked in and there’s no slowing down, and I’ve actually got my first Chinese test tomorrow at 9 am. So this might be a short post. But let’s see, what’s happened…

I think I ate some cow penis today. It might have been intestine, but that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and to be quite honest I will probably never know. You might be surprised to hear this, but it was pretty disgusting.  It was cut into pieces, and I picked one up and looked at it. It was the pink of overcooked hotdogs on one side, and some kind of incomparable pinkish-white on the other. I tried to take a bite of it but it was too rubbery to rip apart. This should have been my first, if not second red flag. But rather than put it down and say, “oh well”, I put the whole thing in my mouth and chewed on it, for a while. It didn’t taste good. It was kind of sweet, mostly flavorless, and definitely overpowered by the texture. I tried eating the peppers it came with, but they were fairly flavorless too, and plus, everything was touching. So for the first time in I believe my entire life, I left a full plate of food on the table.

But I certainly got the thought out of my mouth with dinner. Darren texted us before our Silk Road class, asking if we wanted to go to a place with really cheap and good noodles. Considering that Xi’an is allegedly the noodle capitol of China, I was overeager to sample a local specialty. I was also pretty hungry. So after class he took us to a little hole in the wall across the street from university, and ordered us something I can’t remember the name of now. But it was indeed a Xi’an specialty, and it was indeed delicious. Egg and tomato and peppers and square noodles that made music in my mouth. I’m digesting it right now, and let me just say that I have been very happy with my stomach’s reception to the local cuisine. With the exception of that spicy soup, I haven’t had any problems whatsoever.

Roommates come in tomorrow. We’re going to meet them at a karaoke, which is a little strange to me but I’m rolling with it. It’s especially strange because it’s at 2 in the afternoon. But that’s okay, I’m pretty anxious to meet this guy so I suppose the sooner the better. Though I am going to miss having a room to myself…

Oh okay here’s something that happened this week. We went to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda (sounds better in Chinese). If you’re familiar with Journey to the West, or Monkey as it’s known in the actual West, then it might intrigue you that this is where the main character came back to and put all of the scripts that he got from India. It also has some remains of a Buddha underneath it. It’s 6 or 7 stories tall, and something that struck me was that on the 4^th and 5^th floors, there were TVs hanging on the wall with a made-for-Chinese-TV movie about Buddhism playing. I just thought it was weird to have a TV in an ancient pagoda, but I suppose I’m going to have to get fairly accustomed to this kind of tension between the past and the present. Between tradition and modernity. It’s kind of a big deal in China. Bigger than I thought. I don’t mean to imply that it’s on the minds of every Chinese, because that is perhaps far from the truth, but it is certainly something that has struck me. I suppose I was expecting a modern city, but when I see the giant buildings and shops that stretch from street corner to street corner, selling glasses and haircuts and lingerie and headphones, I kind of forget I’m in China. I feel like I’m still in America, but everyone looks and speaks Chinese. There’s barely anything left that gives credence of a living culture. I’ll say it now and I’ll say it again—commercialism is not a culture. It’s culture’s cancer. It’s hard to notice it in America, because we’re in the thick of it, and as a Chinese proverb roughly goes, you can’t see the face of a mountain when you’re on it. So it was strange when, on the way to a restaurant the other day, I walked through an alleyway that looked like China. There were street vendors everywhere, different smells and sounds bombarding me from both sides, mopeds dragging five times their mass while weaving through the throbbing mass of people. There was even a fat little dog with a duck leg in its mouth. And I thought, “this is the China I imagined”. Then I was out of the alleyway, and on the corner of a six-lane street. Billboards, gyms, malls, everything that makes an American feel at home. Except for all the Chinese people. I wonder if what’s happening is right. What’s going to happen when that alley gets bought out by investors looking to corner the alleyway market? What’s going to happen if the whole world turns into America? The scariest part is that a lot of people would like that very much. But Lord knows I don’t want a white bread world.

Maybe I’m projecting my fears a little. True, there is rampant commercialism here, but there are also fireworks! In the street! A boy’s gotta stay optimistic about things like this, so I’m just going to get the food while it’s still steaming and hope it isn’t donkey dong.