"Serve the People"

Do westerners really want to try authentic Chinese food? Jen Lin-Liu's food memoir Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey through China leaves the question open as it discusses the opinions of restauranteurs that she gets to know on her journey.

I enjoyed reading her stories about people she met. Through these people she introduces you to a history of recent events in China and how they affected individuals in the food business, often assigned to work in food prep or service by the indifferent bureaucracy of the Communist era.

I also liked her descriptions of food: "I blew on the noodles impatiently, then risked a first bite amid the steam and burned my tongue," she wrote. "Nevertheless I knew that I was in the presence of the best noodles I had ever eaten. They were thin and chewy: the broth was smooth and slightly spicy. I detected hints of peanut and sesame, which smoothed out the chili-and-coriander flavored soup." (p. 123)

She tastes. Then she works in a small, working-class noodle shop learning to grate the dough. She discovers how much strength and energy a cook must exert. Through her experiences she also makes the reader see how different it is to make dumplings or noodles for home use or make them fast and in enough quantities to make a living at a small restaurant in a huge Chinese city. Recipes in the text underscore the way that ingredients are used in each situation -- I may never try one, but they contributed to my grasp of what I think she was trying to say.

Lin-Liu differs from most westerners writing about Chinese food because she rarely makes comparisons between American mainstream Chinese restaurant cooking and that in China. Her main experiences with Chinese food in the US were with home cooked meals and family memories of holiday food celebrations, such as moon cakes. At home, moon cakes were a seasonal treat filled with lotus root which is extremely sweet and indulgent. Each cake was divided and shared by her whole family. In China she learned that moon cakes had become a status thing, given as gifts or as bribes (with money or other valuable stuff in the wrapping) -- but never eaten. Poor people bought them from the richer recipients and resold them.

The author was raised in California; her parents had immigrated from China via Taiwan. They were amazed when she decided to spend years in China attending cooking school, apprenticing in noodle shops and upscale restaurants, and writing for restaurant guides. The result is a good read!

What did Mao Eat?

"Chairman Mao adored red-braised pork," Fuchsia Dunlop learned from the dictator's distant relative -- also named Mao. She found Chairman Mao's native village of Shaoshan to be full of such relatives. They still profit, she observed, from a lively tourist industry of Chinese visitors who revere the one-time leader.

Mao's family home was carefully preserved: "no opportunity for communist propaganda is missed." Throughout Shaoshan's province of Hunan and the rest of China, Dunlop found a surprising view of Mao as "the last great leader of China.. ..They smile a little sadly when they reflect on his 'mistake,' the Cultural Revolution, but they forgive him: after all, doesn't everybody make mistakes?"

Dunlop's book Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China combines her experiences traveling, learning Chinese, discovering a wide range of Chinese regional cooking, and exploring villages and cities where Westerners rarely travel. In visiting Mao's home in Shaoshan, she focused on the kitchen with meat-smoking racks over an old wood-burning range and an open fire with a blackened kettle suspended above it. Dunlop talked to a local official about Maoist cookery and collected the red-braised pork recipe with its seasoning of star anise, ginger, and chili. Another tourist might have had a different focus. Hers is always on food.

To the end of his life, she found, Mao's eating habits were those of a Hunanese peasant. He told a Soviet envoy "that you couldn't be a revolutionary if you didn't eat chillies." He disliked Chinese haute cuisine, and preferred rustic dishes such as steamed bacon, smoked fish with chilli, bean curd, cabbage, wild vegetables, and "the coarse grains that were normally the last resort of the rural poor."

Above all, Mao despised those who ate well and wasted food to show off their wealth or power while others went hungry. Throughout the book, Dunlop documents the destruction of Chinese traditional court and restaurant cooking during the Cultural Revolution. She also frequently mentions the mass starvation caused in 1958 by the Great Leap Forward. Peasants were forced into collectives and their cooking pots were melted down to make steel. A mass wave of self-deception and bad faith resulted in a famine during which at least thirty million people died. She often remarked on the lasting impact of these events on the food preferences and habits of people she met.

Dunlop's ability to create a vivid image of history through her own experiences is amazing. Her tour of Mao's home town is only one of many chapters. As she apprenticed in restaurant kitchens, ate at home or in restaurants with many common and not-so-common people, and learned several regional languages, she learned food and culinary customs of China. The combination of food history, political and social history, and personal experience makes her book extremely readable.

(Quotes about Mao: p. 175-179)