Chinese Food?
When most people think Chinese food they think of deep fried chicken balls covered in sweet and sour sauce, wonton soup, chop suey, spring rolls and fortune cookies (fortune cookies were actually invented in San Francisco). Although when I lived in Taiwan (which can be considered a part of China) I didn’t see any of these dishes, not once. Before I left to go live there, I was all excited because I loved Chinese food, boy was in for a disappointment. Not to say these dishes didn’t exist there but I never found them and they definitely weren’t a normal part of your average Taiwanese diet. I figured going to Vietnam that spring rolls would be everywhere considering they are called Vietnamese spring rolls but the only places that seemed to serve them were overpriced restaurants geared towards tourists and they didn’t taste all that good.
Pigs blood soup, deep fried chicken feet, fermented two month old rotten eggs, raw gooey worm like creatures from the depth of the ocean, and any part of chickens and pigs including the brains, anus, eyeballs and penis would be more a more accurate description of actual Chinese food. It seemed to be that at any time if it was ever considered alive, they would deep fry it and eat it. I never really heard or saw any wildlife (including birds) even when I wasn’t in the cities, all there seemed to be was mutant huge insects. It was a running joke between a friend and I that the Taiwanese had just simply eaten everything. Some of the most disgusting things you can imagine were considered delicacies and they would just go nuts for it. I remember one time I ducked into a place to get dinner and the man working there offered me what looked like deep fried chicken shaped like a doughnut. I ate it and it didn’t taste all that bad. When I asked him what it was he made motioned his arms like a chicken and pointed to his ass. At that point I could only ascertain that I had just ate the asshole of a chicken. I had learned a valuable lesson that day, if it tasted good and you weren’t quite sure it was, it was best to not ask and leave it that way.
I’m not saying all the food there was bad, there were some amazing dishes and it was cheap too. One could go out with a group of a few friends and eat some great food, have a few Taiwanese Pijous (beer) all for about twenty dollars for the entire table. One of the fanciest and most expensive restaurants in Saskatoon is called The Samurai which serves Japanese Tapenakyi for about 40 dollars a plate. I ate those same dishes multiple times a week for 5 dollars and it was just awesome. You just had to know where to look and know how to order the food in Chinese. It wasn’t until after about a year of living there that I wasn’t just eating McDonalds and fried rice all the time because I sort of figured out the good restaurants in town and learned how to properly order food. I also lost about 50 pounds while I was living over there and was eating plenty of junk food and I wasn’t really exercising all that much.
They also had a knack for bastardizing foods Western food like putting sugary mayonnaise and corn on pizza and what was considered steak was a dried up piece of thin mystery meat covered in this sugary sauce that somehow you had to eat with chopsticks. I learned how to say ‘I don’t want corn’ pretty quickly because they seemed to want to put it on everything. Hamburgers just didn’t exist there and you had to go into Taipei and eat at TGI Fridays or get McDonalds if you wanted an actual burger. I have to say thank God for McDonalds, you can say what you want about their food but since they’re all over the world and they all taste pretty much the same, it can be comforting because you know exactly what you’re getting and how it’s going to taste. Also because of the abundance of McDonalds in the downtown areas you were never too far from a sit down toilet if you were out and about and the need struck, otherwise you’d have to go on a squatter (which actually is the natural preferred position that we’re meant to poop in).
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when a friend and I ducked into a Chinese food restaurant in Calgary’s Chinatown and we ordered this meat dish on the menu which was pork, chicken and lamb. I guess after living back home for so long that I had sort of forgot what actual Chinese food was and I should have known better. They brought out our “soup” and when I started swimming the spoon around in the soup to see what it was, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw this come up.
It looked like an infant baby’s lifeless hand was coming out to strangle me. I had just been served chicken feet soup. It was amazing the amount of memories that just came flooding back from the smell of that soup. Chinese soup seems to be whatever animal parts they have lying around, they throw it in a pot of boiling water and bam there’s your soup. What we consider soup is like not even close to what they eat there. Then our main course came out which was basically just fried hunks of meat complete with all the skin, bones and gristle. I guess it was edible but not really all that enjoyable. The Chinese know nothing about presentation, in Western cuisine, we don’t really want our food looking like the animal it came from but with Chinese food that seems to be the goal. Needless to say we were still hungry after leaving that restaurant and had to go somewhere else for a second lunch.
So next time when you’re at a Chinese buffet take a second and realize that what you’re eating is not really considered Chinese food at all and be thankful your plate isn’t full of raw octopus and pig brain.
