Not eating wild snakes
I try to limit the dinners I attend with Lam that involve people I don’t know for a variety of reasons. My odd eating habits and political opinions often throw a wrench into Chinese sociality which depends upon eating together as a way to gloss over differences and create guanxi (relationships). The dinner I had last Thursday is one such example where I made an exception to this rule because I was going with Lam and two of his friends who I like and know well.
One of the two is Lam’s best friend and the CEO of the software company that Lam is associated with in a peripheral and entirely satisfactory way for all concerned. The other friend is a fellow alumnus of Lam’s art institute from the sculpture department, like Lam, who also teaches at Shantou University in the design school. The sculptor, poor guy, was put in charge of seeing that the design school has a new sculpting workshop with all sorts of machines for welding, firing, wood-working, painting, etc. This involved a large expenditure of time and head-aches on his part because finding machines and companies to do the work for the university was difficult. It’s not a large assignment (read high profit project), and being a university, the administration wanted lots and lots of paper trail (invoices, and estimates and such) which make it difficult for companies to make their typical profit margins based on an accustomed proportion of non-tax income. It was so hard to find construction companies to work on such a small and paperwork-demanding project, that the workshop has taken a year longer than expected to reach its current stage of semi-completion. With the time delay, the Design School began to get ancy (funding could disappear) and the paperwork demands were eventually relaxed somewhat. Hence, Lam’s sculptor colleague, through Lam’s architecture and landscape design connections to the construction industry in Shantou, was able to find a local company to install the high-capacity ventilation required for the workshop.
Since this is business and this is China (but networking over food is hardly particular to the Middle Kingdom), an expensive dinner is the expected way to celebrate the semi-completion of the project, thank those involved in providing one a way to make money and to cement social ties with an eye to future endeavors and cordial relations.
As such, this sort of dinner is not the sort of gravy train that I tend to hop onto since they are usually long, boring, and involve lots of expensive food (read meat), drinking of expensive hard liquor, and are essentially about male bonding. I’ve learned that if I go, I basically get to eat around the meat and occasionally grunt agreement with people. It’s not that I’m shy of speaking up in front of “the menfolks,” it’s just that normally there isn’t much I can add to the conversation since I’m usually not an integral part of the client-entrepreneur relationship.
This time, however, Lam said that the business person involved was someone he knew pretty well and basically liked, plus his software friend was coming along for the ride anyway because software friend was also friends with another friend of client guy who was coming along as well. And since I know, like and find it easy to talk to both software guy and the sculptor, it should be a less alienating dining experience than usual. And to top it all off, we were heading out to a riverside restaurant in Chenhai where Lam thought there would be lots of fish (instead of meat).
Ah for assumptions, you, and me - or in this case Lam and I…
The evening of eating with Lam’s friends and close acquaintances started out well enough despite the rain that’s been spattering Shantou for the last couple of days. Since there was no need to impress, I headed down to the back gate armored against cold and rain in hoody, jacket, gloves and sneakers to meet up with Lam and his two buds waiting in the Jeep (all of which ended up being very useful). We all had a pretty good time in the car, gossiping about the lives of and critiquing the work of Chinese intellectual icons as well as Lam and the sculptor’s colleagues at the design school. While listening to a Kumbia King’s CD Lam had picked up the day before, we also discussed cool new computer technologies (I was in the car with a bunch of techno-geeks) and what direction the market was going (apparently on-line gaming). So far so good. Interaction copacetic.
The trip out to Chenhai, a suburb of the city that fades quickly into paddy fields, and the river took about 45 minutes before we met up with the car of client and client-friend (skinny guy with glasses) to follow them to the restaurant. Restaurant did not turn out to be the one with fish as the main menu. Instead the client drove to a new place, also on the river (more or less) even farther out than Lam had been before. The client asked sculptor if there was anything he didn’t eat, sculptor said no and then the client ordered a bunch of things in Shantounese. After sitting down at the table, we were equipped with a hot plate and a large pot full of broth with some spices and veggies floating in it. We were going to eat hotpot.
Hotpot, while it can indeed be delicious, is a bit of a social problem for me because everything that gets served ends up going into the soup. So there’s no way for me to eat anything that hasn’t been cooked in meat broth once some form of meat has been dumped into the soup. Second, all forms of prestige food that go into hotpot are meat. Since this was a thank you for the money making project dinner that meant that there was going to be a lot of prestige food involved. Finally, any reluctance to eat can be interpreted badly with social consequences of loss of face either for the host or for the guest. Not good.
Also not good…The area in front of the kitchen was covered with tubs of live creatures in water, most of whom were not fish and cages of live animals, most of whom were not chickens or pigs. All of whom are either squeaking, squawking, splashing or snorting in discontent in their various tubs and cages.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, sculptor happened to ask me about my eating habits. I don’t know if he did it deliberately so that I wouldn’t have to bring up the subject on my own, but I believe so. He’s had dinner with me many times before after all. I’ve found that my Chinese friends are far more worried about my eating huge amounts of food than I am. After all given how much I tend to devour while I’m over here, I’m hardly likely to keel over just from “missing” one meal. Upon hearing the words, “I don’t eat meat,” client guy immediately said, “Oops! Everything we ordered is meat. What shall we order in addition?” Conversational chaos and intense negotiation immediately ensued.
Communal eating Chinese style makes it impossible for the idiosyncrasies of the one NOT to affect and be commented upon ad nauseum by the many. Add to that the fact that the default topic of conversation in China is not the weather, but rather food and the Chinese attitudes towards it and you get what happened last night -endless discussions of Chinese eating habits and questions about whether or not I shared them, was disgusted by them, or had heard of them. So in addition to being the person who made everything less socially smooth (client guy looks slightly bad for not finding out about my habits sooner and perhaps this makes restaurant choice less than optimal), I was also the person who stood out as the slightly batty, gustatorily unsophisticated, and trouble-making non-conformer.
Not that I usually worry about being non-mainstream, particularly in China, (there’s really no way to be an ex-pat otherwise), but I prefer to do so in such as way that mostly affects myself, rather than those who choose to associate with me. I often prepare my own friends a while ahead of time about the whole, “no meat” issue. In this manner, by the time I’m actually eating, it’s not a surprise and most of the questions and negotiations are already out of the way. Either that, or I try to finesse the situation by quietly not eating things I don’t want which is not always effective since one way of being a good Chinese host is dumping the choicest bits of food (meat, again!) into your guests’ bowls. Nevertheless, a food tempest in social situations that are not supposed to be about me always makes me want to shrink. Hence, once “No meat,” flys out of my mouth, I often feel like I somehow have to compensate (bad cultural relativism conscience), so my anti-meat requirement is usually followed almost immediately by a lame and somewhat timid, “but I eat fish,” offering.
As it was on Thursday night. Only it didn’t end there, since client friend (skinny dude with glasses) happened to ask about whether this had to do with me being an environmentalist. Which it bloody well does, but most likely not in the fluffy warm-fuzzy way that skinny guy thinks. My environmentalism is part of a whole anarchist, neo-marxist, social justice, feminist, anti-hegemonic mindset that client guy and skinny were never going listen to because networking in the form of dinner is about creating social lubricant not about acknowledging differences. While I have talked in depth to Lam about these sorts of things and would be perfectly happy discussing such with software dude and sculptor at other times, this dinner was not the place to indulge in political pontification, I mean, discussion.
So not only was I a logistical eating issue, I was also a judgmental environmentalism issue. The non-universal nature of the environmental movement - “developed” nations telling “developing” nations that they cannot make the same mistakes the developed nations did (and do) make, developed nations (USA is paradigmatic) using the bulk of the world’s natural resources, motivating the manufacturing, and propagandizing resource-heavy lifestyles through images of the good life - makes being a foreign environmentalist a touchy thing in China. Especially if you are also an anthropologist and have to make nice with one’s cultural-relativism impregnated conscience.
At this point I’ve come to a détente with my cultural relativism. I will not engage in practices I do not agree with but will not proactively oppose them either - unless I am asked to help in doing so by a local. Nor will I actively seek to discuss most of these topics, but when they do come up, even if the situation is not ideal for actual discussion, I will not lie about them either. It’s an uneasy balance that does not always work out as well in practice as it does in theory. Like most compromises, this particular détente often results in no one involved actually being satisfied, conscience included.
Let me also state that I do not believe that I am a proselytizing vegetarian or a proselytizing environmentalist. Telling people what I think they should eat is stupid. Not only because my eating habits relate to my entire world view, one I am aware that most people do not share, but also because telling people what to eat is essentially a waste of time. Especially in the past few years, it’s been hammered into me that it’s nearly impossible to get someone to change their mind about something if they already have a set opinion. The most you can possibly do is offer information if people ask for it, and make counter-arguments if they choose to discuss it with you - which they rarely do. A la Perez-Reverte, pushing opinions on people doesn’t work - you end up with American politics where people from opposing camps stand up and nearly simultaneously shout what they think from podiums for media sound bites. No one actually discusses or even listens critically to anything. For this reason, in the gospel of Felix, there are forums where you are going to be just slightly effective and forums where you are not. This restaurant and the social situation I was in was the latter.
Worse still, this restaurant was famous for wild-caught food (remember the non-chickens and the non-pigs in the cages making lots of noise and ready to be eaten) which client guy was happy to note since this means that the snake meat the others were digging into was even more prestigious. While I have made a certain amount of cultural relativistic peace with Chinese habits of eating animals like dogs and cats (which involved the adoption of two felines), the continual prestige of eating wild caught animals and the even greater prestige attached to rarity just grates. And passing “protective” legislation is a waste of time while that prestige exists; illegal restaurants serving “protected” species often cater to rich government cadres and their entrepreneur hosts. It’s not like there’s a whole lot of wild diversity left in China. “Development,” population increases, and the resulting expansion into previously less intensively used ecosystems, have effectively put a time limit on what few viable wild populations still exist through “indirect” extermination due to habitat destruction. But directly prioritizing one’s taste buds and prestige over the existence of the few wild animals left in the area seems even more egregious, particularly when there’s so much fabulous Chinese food that does not depend on China’s last surviving wild fauna as ingredients.
(For those who read about Shantou’s penchant for “fake” food: I’m not proclaiming that these snakes were definitely wild caught. Who knows? The snakes involved might have been domestically raised and therefore were “wild-caught” fakes. Nevertheless, the actual status of the snakes being devoured notwithstanding, their wild-caughtness, real or imagined, was part of their desirability and corresponding incredibly high price. Hence, somewhere out there poor Chinese are going to continue to comb the hills, fields and rivers for the few animals that are left because there is always a demand for “real” wildness. And who is going to convince them not to when they can earn the income of months in one sale to those who cater to gourmet Chinese tastes?)
Result: a social compromise in which no one was entirely satisfied. Despite the presence of people I like and could normally converse with, I can’t say anything I feel good about without essentially making a useless critique of choice of restaurant, menu, and client’s eating preferences. On the other hand, I’m not going to lie either - even to appease my own cultural relativism - so I basically try to shut up. Then I get frustrated listening to narrow and strongly tweaked conceptions of the environmental movement while skinny guy mentions that the environmental movement is strong overseas in Europe and hearing client guy say that it couldn’t be. Nor can I join in the related conversation about how the Chinese eat everything and the following discussion of the various tablemates’ experiences eating non-quotidian meats, like dog, cat and others. And, I nearly bite my own tongue not to start pontificating when they discuss their varied opinions about whether wild caught tastes better. Finally, because of the few statements I do allow myself to make and Lam's proportionately small intake of wild snake, the others make jokes about Lam having to follow along with me which is insulting on a variety of levels to him, me, and our relationship. And the evening ends with client guy and skinny guy taking one of the snakes home (it was already paid for and killed) because people had filled up on the non-meat stuff that was ordered, in effect, for me and were, hence, not able to finish the prestige items on client guy's carefully concocted menu.
Great evening, huh? I just love being an expert in intercultural communication.
Luckily, Lam thinks I’m wonderful, doesn’t care what client guy thinks, and believes I should start an NGO which, based on this dinner, I’m sure will be a roaring success
Post Script (added Jan 23rd) Poor Lam woke up this morning after a nightmare where he, many members of his family and a bunch of his colleagues from the university went out to the countryside to eat dinner. Since many of those involved were Lam's family, he offered to pay. The bill came to about 2000 RMB, a ridiculous amount in the "poor" countryside, apparently in the dream he hadn't bothered to check prices first before ordering. He then asked the restauranteer to give him an itemized bill and discovered they had all been eating wild-caught snake which explained the price. At this point, more or less, he woke up. Interpretations???
.
One of the two is Lam’s best friend and the CEO of the software company that Lam is associated with in a peripheral and entirely satisfactory way for all concerned. The other friend is a fellow alumnus of Lam’s art institute from the sculpture department, like Lam, who also teaches at Shantou University in the design school. The sculptor, poor guy, was put in charge of seeing that the design school has a new sculpting workshop with all sorts of machines for welding, firing, wood-working, painting, etc. This involved a large expenditure of time and head-aches on his part because finding machines and companies to do the work for the university was difficult. It’s not a large assignment (read high profit project), and being a university, the administration wanted lots and lots of paper trail (invoices, and estimates and such) which make it difficult for companies to make their typical profit margins based on an accustomed proportion of non-tax income. It was so hard to find construction companies to work on such a small and paperwork-demanding project, that the workshop has taken a year longer than expected to reach its current stage of semi-completion. With the time delay, the Design School began to get ancy (funding could disappear) and the paperwork demands were eventually relaxed somewhat. Hence, Lam’s sculptor colleague, through Lam’s architecture and landscape design connections to the construction industry in Shantou, was able to find a local company to install the high-capacity ventilation required for the workshop.
Since this is business and this is China (but networking over food is hardly particular to the Middle Kingdom), an expensive dinner is the expected way to celebrate the semi-completion of the project, thank those involved in providing one a way to make money and to cement social ties with an eye to future endeavors and cordial relations.
As such, this sort of dinner is not the sort of gravy train that I tend to hop onto since they are usually long, boring, and involve lots of expensive food (read meat), drinking of expensive hard liquor, and are essentially about male bonding. I’ve learned that if I go, I basically get to eat around the meat and occasionally grunt agreement with people. It’s not that I’m shy of speaking up in front of “the menfolks,” it’s just that normally there isn’t much I can add to the conversation since I’m usually not an integral part of the client-entrepreneur relationship.
This time, however, Lam said that the business person involved was someone he knew pretty well and basically liked, plus his software friend was coming along for the ride anyway because software friend was also friends with another friend of client guy who was coming along as well. And since I know, like and find it easy to talk to both software guy and the sculptor, it should be a less alienating dining experience than usual. And to top it all off, we were heading out to a riverside restaurant in Chenhai where Lam thought there would be lots of fish (instead of meat).
Ah for assumptions, you, and me - or in this case Lam and I…
The evening of eating with Lam’s friends and close acquaintances started out well enough despite the rain that’s been spattering Shantou for the last couple of days. Since there was no need to impress, I headed down to the back gate armored against cold and rain in hoody, jacket, gloves and sneakers to meet up with Lam and his two buds waiting in the Jeep (all of which ended up being very useful). We all had a pretty good time in the car, gossiping about the lives of and critiquing the work of Chinese intellectual icons as well as Lam and the sculptor’s colleagues at the design school. While listening to a Kumbia King’s CD Lam had picked up the day before, we also discussed cool new computer technologies (I was in the car with a bunch of techno-geeks) and what direction the market was going (apparently on-line gaming). So far so good. Interaction copacetic.
The trip out to Chenhai, a suburb of the city that fades quickly into paddy fields, and the river took about 45 minutes before we met up with the car of client and client-friend (skinny guy with glasses) to follow them to the restaurant. Restaurant did not turn out to be the one with fish as the main menu. Instead the client drove to a new place, also on the river (more or less) even farther out than Lam had been before. The client asked sculptor if there was anything he didn’t eat, sculptor said no and then the client ordered a bunch of things in Shantounese. After sitting down at the table, we were equipped with a hot plate and a large pot full of broth with some spices and veggies floating in it. We were going to eat hotpot.
Hotpot, while it can indeed be delicious, is a bit of a social problem for me because everything that gets served ends up going into the soup. So there’s no way for me to eat anything that hasn’t been cooked in meat broth once some form of meat has been dumped into the soup. Second, all forms of prestige food that go into hotpot are meat. Since this was a thank you for the money making project dinner that meant that there was going to be a lot of prestige food involved. Finally, any reluctance to eat can be interpreted badly with social consequences of loss of face either for the host or for the guest. Not good.
Also not good…The area in front of the kitchen was covered with tubs of live creatures in water, most of whom were not fish and cages of live animals, most of whom were not chickens or pigs. All of whom are either squeaking, squawking, splashing or snorting in discontent in their various tubs and cages.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, sculptor happened to ask me about my eating habits. I don’t know if he did it deliberately so that I wouldn’t have to bring up the subject on my own, but I believe so. He’s had dinner with me many times before after all. I’ve found that my Chinese friends are far more worried about my eating huge amounts of food than I am. After all given how much I tend to devour while I’m over here, I’m hardly likely to keel over just from “missing” one meal. Upon hearing the words, “I don’t eat meat,” client guy immediately said, “Oops! Everything we ordered is meat. What shall we order in addition?” Conversational chaos and intense negotiation immediately ensued.
Communal eating Chinese style makes it impossible for the idiosyncrasies of the one NOT to affect and be commented upon ad nauseum by the many. Add to that the fact that the default topic of conversation in China is not the weather, but rather food and the Chinese attitudes towards it and you get what happened last night -endless discussions of Chinese eating habits and questions about whether or not I shared them, was disgusted by them, or had heard of them. So in addition to being the person who made everything less socially smooth (client guy looks slightly bad for not finding out about my habits sooner and perhaps this makes restaurant choice less than optimal), I was also the person who stood out as the slightly batty, gustatorily unsophisticated, and trouble-making non-conformer.
Not that I usually worry about being non-mainstream, particularly in China, (there’s really no way to be an ex-pat otherwise), but I prefer to do so in such as way that mostly affects myself, rather than those who choose to associate with me. I often prepare my own friends a while ahead of time about the whole, “no meat” issue. In this manner, by the time I’m actually eating, it’s not a surprise and most of the questions and negotiations are already out of the way. Either that, or I try to finesse the situation by quietly not eating things I don’t want which is not always effective since one way of being a good Chinese host is dumping the choicest bits of food (meat, again!) into your guests’ bowls. Nevertheless, a food tempest in social situations that are not supposed to be about me always makes me want to shrink. Hence, once “No meat,” flys out of my mouth, I often feel like I somehow have to compensate (bad cultural relativism conscience), so my anti-meat requirement is usually followed almost immediately by a lame and somewhat timid, “but I eat fish,” offering.
As it was on Thursday night. Only it didn’t end there, since client friend (skinny dude with glasses) happened to ask about whether this had to do with me being an environmentalist. Which it bloody well does, but most likely not in the fluffy warm-fuzzy way that skinny guy thinks. My environmentalism is part of a whole anarchist, neo-marxist, social justice, feminist, anti-hegemonic mindset that client guy and skinny were never going listen to because networking in the form of dinner is about creating social lubricant not about acknowledging differences. While I have talked in depth to Lam about these sorts of things and would be perfectly happy discussing such with software dude and sculptor at other times, this dinner was not the place to indulge in political pontification, I mean, discussion.
So not only was I a logistical eating issue, I was also a judgmental environmentalism issue. The non-universal nature of the environmental movement - “developed” nations telling “developing” nations that they cannot make the same mistakes the developed nations did (and do) make, developed nations (USA is paradigmatic) using the bulk of the world’s natural resources, motivating the manufacturing, and propagandizing resource-heavy lifestyles through images of the good life - makes being a foreign environmentalist a touchy thing in China. Especially if you are also an anthropologist and have to make nice with one’s cultural-relativism impregnated conscience.
At this point I’ve come to a détente with my cultural relativism. I will not engage in practices I do not agree with but will not proactively oppose them either - unless I am asked to help in doing so by a local. Nor will I actively seek to discuss most of these topics, but when they do come up, even if the situation is not ideal for actual discussion, I will not lie about them either. It’s an uneasy balance that does not always work out as well in practice as it does in theory. Like most compromises, this particular détente often results in no one involved actually being satisfied, conscience included.
Let me also state that I do not believe that I am a proselytizing vegetarian or a proselytizing environmentalist. Telling people what I think they should eat is stupid. Not only because my eating habits relate to my entire world view, one I am aware that most people do not share, but also because telling people what to eat is essentially a waste of time. Especially in the past few years, it’s been hammered into me that it’s nearly impossible to get someone to change their mind about something if they already have a set opinion. The most you can possibly do is offer information if people ask for it, and make counter-arguments if they choose to discuss it with you - which they rarely do. A la Perez-Reverte, pushing opinions on people doesn’t work - you end up with American politics where people from opposing camps stand up and nearly simultaneously shout what they think from podiums for media sound bites. No one actually discusses or even listens critically to anything. For this reason, in the gospel of Felix, there are forums where you are going to be just slightly effective and forums where you are not. This restaurant and the social situation I was in was the latter.
Worse still, this restaurant was famous for wild-caught food (remember the non-chickens and the non-pigs in the cages making lots of noise and ready to be eaten) which client guy was happy to note since this means that the snake meat the others were digging into was even more prestigious. While I have made a certain amount of cultural relativistic peace with Chinese habits of eating animals like dogs and cats (which involved the adoption of two felines), the continual prestige of eating wild caught animals and the even greater prestige attached to rarity just grates. And passing “protective” legislation is a waste of time while that prestige exists; illegal restaurants serving “protected” species often cater to rich government cadres and their entrepreneur hosts. It’s not like there’s a whole lot of wild diversity left in China. “Development,” population increases, and the resulting expansion into previously less intensively used ecosystems, have effectively put a time limit on what few viable wild populations still exist through “indirect” extermination due to habitat destruction. But directly prioritizing one’s taste buds and prestige over the existence of the few wild animals left in the area seems even more egregious, particularly when there’s so much fabulous Chinese food that does not depend on China’s last surviving wild fauna as ingredients.
(For those who read about Shantou’s penchant for “fake” food: I’m not proclaiming that these snakes were definitely wild caught. Who knows? The snakes involved might have been domestically raised and therefore were “wild-caught” fakes. Nevertheless, the actual status of the snakes being devoured notwithstanding, their wild-caughtness, real or imagined, was part of their desirability and corresponding incredibly high price. Hence, somewhere out there poor Chinese are going to continue to comb the hills, fields and rivers for the few animals that are left because there is always a demand for “real” wildness. And who is going to convince them not to when they can earn the income of months in one sale to those who cater to gourmet Chinese tastes?)
Result: a social compromise in which no one was entirely satisfied. Despite the presence of people I like and could normally converse with, I can’t say anything I feel good about without essentially making a useless critique of choice of restaurant, menu, and client’s eating preferences. On the other hand, I’m not going to lie either - even to appease my own cultural relativism - so I basically try to shut up. Then I get frustrated listening to narrow and strongly tweaked conceptions of the environmental movement while skinny guy mentions that the environmental movement is strong overseas in Europe and hearing client guy say that it couldn’t be. Nor can I join in the related conversation about how the Chinese eat everything and the following discussion of the various tablemates’ experiences eating non-quotidian meats, like dog, cat and others. And, I nearly bite my own tongue not to start pontificating when they discuss their varied opinions about whether wild caught tastes better. Finally, because of the few statements I do allow myself to make and Lam's proportionately small intake of wild snake, the others make jokes about Lam having to follow along with me which is insulting on a variety of levels to him, me, and our relationship. And the evening ends with client guy and skinny guy taking one of the snakes home (it was already paid for and killed) because people had filled up on the non-meat stuff that was ordered, in effect, for me and were, hence, not able to finish the prestige items on client guy's carefully concocted menu.
Great evening, huh? I just love being an expert in intercultural communication.
Luckily, Lam thinks I’m wonderful, doesn’t care what client guy thinks, and believes I should start an NGO which, based on this dinner, I’m sure will be a roaring success
Post Script (added Jan 23rd) Poor Lam woke up this morning after a nightmare where he, many members of his family and a bunch of his colleagues from the university went out to the countryside to eat dinner. Since many of those involved were Lam's family, he offered to pay. The bill came to about 2000 RMB, a ridiculous amount in the "poor" countryside, apparently in the dream he hadn't bothered to check prices first before ordering. He then asked the restauranteer to give him an itemized bill and discovered they had all been eating wild-caught snake which explained the price. At this point, more or less, he woke up. Interpretations???
.