Salad Seasons

Spring is here. Forsythia spatters the parks and gardens with speckles of bright yellow. Cherries have begun to bloom, both the pale pink and the deep. Light zephyrs whisk through the greening willows. Magpies hop about, looking hopeful.

And, more importantly, the local supermarket has begun selling pasta salad again.

It was during my last trip to Beijing that I first realized pasta salad has actual, you know, seasons. That was a dozen years ago, when I first made the acquaintance of the Beijing summer specialty known as liangpi 凉皮, "chilled skin." The name may not sound terribly appetizing out of context, but in the gasping, humid heat of a Beijing August, anything with the word "chill" in it is pretty welcome.

Or so it seemed to me, as I stopped by the street vendor's cart and peered at his display: neat cubes of diced wheat gluten, fresh green-and-white heaps of shredded cucumber, slivers of tough beancurd peel, bouquets of fresh coriander, six or seven different sauces and, of course, the "skin" itself, which is actually wide-cut fresh pasta made of mung bean starch.

"Try it," said one of his customers, a middle-aged woman who was digging into her portion right there by the cart. "This is real Beijing fare, a traditional summer snack. You'll love it." I didn't need to be asked twice. I stepped right up and requested a helping, plenty spicy and with all the trimmings.

The middle-aged woman was right. I did love it. Chewy, tender and slippery-cool all at the same time, fragrant with coriander, rich with sesame and breathing a curious, heady, almost perfumed heat -- I had never tasted anything like it. Soon I was visiting the cart almost every day, bringing my own metal rice box so as to avoid using the styrofoam cartons supplied by the vendor. (Who thought I was off my rocker. "It's to protect the environment," I told him, but he just shook his head. Crazy foreigners.)

But, before the mooncakes left from the Mid-Autumn festival had been quite eaten up, the streetside liangpi gave way to luzi 炉子, "stovelings," which turned out to be sweet potatoes roasted in their jackets and sold from makeshift ovens fashioned out of large barrels and lugged about the city by bicycle. There were also chestnuts, both fresh and roasted. A friend taught me how to make chestnut-chicken soup. With its pale slices of chicken floating in a deep, dark broth seasoned with ginger, clove and juniper, it seemed the essence of autumn.


Then the winds rose. Yellow leaves fluttered to the sidewalks. The skies grew high and blue. Frosts set in. Piles of pale winter cabbages lined the streets like stacks of firewood. Local eateries served a rough and warming concoction of dried mung bean noodles and pickled cabbage, with pork or without according to taste. The steamed buns at the local state-run bakery were equally hearty, filled with pork and seasoned turnip.

Then, long before I was tired of turnip buns, the winds changed. Willows fluttered pale green branches. Little round toddlers were gradually divested of their magnificently colored woolly coats and jackets, one layer at a time. The luzi man told me that this was his last week selling sweet potatoes. He was most apologetic, but actually I didn't mind. The buns and pancakes at the local bakery were now filled with a pungent chutney made of chopped fennel greens, extraordinarily addictive.

When I had eaten my fill of the fennel buns (which took a while), there were tiny, leaf-green cabbages about the size of a softball. Cooked with ginger and vinegar, they made a delightful accompaniment to the miniature guotie 锅贴 or "pot-stickers" sold just outside the university gate. Unlike the various sorts of "pot-stickers" or "Peking ravioli" sold in the West, these had wrappings made of a yeasted dough rather than a pasta. They were cooked in a large press something like a waffle iron (but without the cleats), producing a delicious, intensely flavored little gobbet that managed to be crispy on the bottom but, as Mr. Woodhouse might have said, "without the smallest grease."

The days grew warmer and another kind of guotie appeared, this time wrapped in pasta and filled with a mixture of minced pork and summer squash. You could almost feel the sunshine on the broad-leaved vines. It was like eating a garden.

I was home by the time liangpi season was in full swing again. I returned for a couple of months in the autumn, but, before I had a chance to make any chestnut-chicken soup, and I found myself back home again. I didn't return for a long, long time.

Nowadays the snack stalls have nearly vanished from the streets of Beijing. If you want liangpi salad you have to visit the deli counter in a supermarket. Most people blame the grand municipal tidying effort that preceded the Olympics, during which nearly all street food was banned or at least greatly restricted, but I think we were headed in that direction anyway. Outdoor markets are disappearing. We shop indoors now. Heaps of exotic produce decorate the supermarkets all year round. They hail from every region and represent every season.

There are gleaming mounds of multi-colored peppers, purple eggplants and deep green cucumbers. There are leafy branches of kale and rape, celery cabbage and spinach, watercress, lettuce hearts, rocket, mustard, fennel, chives, cilantro and many other things I don't recognize. There are impossibly slender scallions and thick leeks, lotus roots and fresh bamboo and mushrooms of every variety. There are apples, pears, peaches, lemons, melons, berries and pineapples. Some of them are packaged in plastic, some of them are sold loose. They are nearly all spotless.

The maids soak all our produce for an hour or two before cooking it, in an effort to leach out the pesticides. My hosts import as much of their fruit as they can, for the sake of their children. But the imported fruit isn't organic either, and of course the fuels burned in its transportation merely add to the burden assumed by earth and air, seed and water.

It is natural to be tempted by the prospect of having what we want when we want it. It is hard to ask the question:

Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry, thirsty roots?

And it is harder still to answer it.

Elephants on the Metro

If you stand on platform 13 at Zhichunlu Station just opposite the stairs, you'll see a number of posters lining the divider between the inbound and outbound rails. One of them shows a pair of elephants walking away from the viewer across a wide, green-brown plain. The sky is streaked with pink. One of the elephants is full-grown. The other is a calf.

When I first saw the poster, I thought it was intended to provide metro passengers with something pleasant to look at while they waited for their trains. "Well done, Beijing!" I thought. "What's nicer than elephants?" Then I saw the copy:

Mom! I've got teeth now!
Mom, I've got teeth now!
Hey Mom, I've got TEETH now!
Mom?
Mom, aren't you happy for me?

And, to the far right of the poster: "It should be a happy event, when a baby grows its first teeth. But, because people are greedy for ivory, countless elephants are needlessly slaughtered."

I've loved elephants all my life, and I'm on about a hundred lefty email lists, so I'm familiar with the story. Nevertheless, as I looked at the poster and read the copy, I felt my eyes begin to water and my throat begin to swell. The feeling lingered long after I had boarded my train and left the station.

No doubt this was partly because that's precisely the effect the ad was intended to elicit. The spectacular beauty of the picture, too sweeping and glorious for sentimentality, the rhythmic economy of the imagined dialogue -- this ad's authors really knew what they were doing.

And I think that's another reason I felt such a substantial response. I'm the daughter of a former speechwriter and communications consultant. A powerful respect for the friendly art of persuasion is bred in my bones. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I memorized Mario Cuomo's keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention. This had nothing to do with political commitment -- I didn't have any at that age, apart from a transient and imperfectly formulated regard for the Communists. I memorized the speech because very little makes me happier than really good rhetoric.

But I'm pretty sure it wasn't just the combination of quality advertising and a sympathetic message that left such a marked impression on me. I think it was something else, something altogether larger and at the same time more personal.

On my first trip to China in the summer of 1990, I lived in a student dormitory at the Harbin Institute of Technology. For no particular reason that I can think of, except that conservation was much on my mind in those days, I decorated my door with handmade notices advising their readers to "Protect the Planet: Plant a Tree," "Save the Rainforests," and, in pride of place, "Protect Our Elephants: Don't Buy Ivory."

I suppose I wanted to practise writing slogans in Chinese. That was probably the main part of the attraction. But I think I also wanted to put down roots, short though my visit was to be. I think it seemed to me that if I transplanted, through communication, the thoughts and wishes that I had at home, then I would somehow be at home in Harbin as well.

I don't know that I ever felt at home in Harbin -- I was only there about a month. However, I did communicate; I did elicit a response of sorts. A student in the English department, a very nice young man who came to visit the dorm quite frequently, eventually scrawled the following riposte: "Protect Young Girls: Don't Let Them Go Crazy." Shop-worn at home, my slogans were apparently too eccentric to be taken seriously in a Chinese context, even on a college campus.

Later on the same trip, my classmates and I were taken shopping in Beijing. We visited all sorts of places selling all kinds of Chinese artifacts. Eventually a shop assistant led me over to a counter selling exquisite ivory carvings -- figurines and palaces and rural idylls, all in the most meticulous detail imaginable. Small wonder that some have said, "Wisdom hath alighted on the hands of the Chinese." But when I saw the carvings, and the shop assistant's pleasant smile, I pitched into her. "How can you sell this stuff! Don't you know that elephants have died for these things? Do you really think they are worth the life of a beautiful animal! How can you think I would buy this trash!" She was quite surprised, but she nodded politely. I wonder if she still remembers now.

If she does, I wonder what she thinks about it. Was I just rude? After all, she wasn't the one who killed the elephants and hacked out their tusks. She was just working in a shop that sold the results, and it's not as if she had a lot of choices in her life. No one had invited her on a summer exchange program to study language and culture in a foreign country.

Or does she look back and think that she saw one of the first pebbles drop into the pond? Does she pass that poster, ever, and think to herself, "This is commonplace now, but I remember when it was as bizarre as the blue-eyed foreign ghost who came from across the ocean to wave her finger in my face and tell me what she knew?"

Of course, I wouldn't really claim to have thrown one of the first pebbles. I have played virtually no active role in environmental conservation. I sign petitions, that's about it. But I do have this funny feeling, being in China now and seeing the stupid, pen-and-ink ads I posted on a door in a dormitory in Harbin nearly twenty years ago done properly, done by experts, and posted in a bustling metro in the middle of a world capital. I feel rather as if I had been waiting for a friend to arrive, waiting a long time, and now at last I am hearing a knock at the door.

"Anglers and Honest Men"

Gentle Anglers --

Flyingfish is pleased to report that she is back to skimming the surf after a few weeks running deep and quiet.

I'd like to be able to say that I was busy with something particularly exciting or worthwhile during these last few weeks, but, though I did meet with some excitement of a modest sort down on the ocean floor -- auditing a lecture on World Literature at Peking University, for example, and finally finding out what wildherb dumplings taste like after over a decade of unsatisfied curiosity -- the main reason for the protracted silence was nothing more than writer's block.

Here's the way I look at it, though. We are given to understand that writer's block from the desk of Ted Sorensen once saved the entire planet from total annihilation. I don't mean to suggest that my writer's block has anything like that much going for it, but at least while I've not been running my computer I've been saving electricity. And that, in the shadow of the local cooling towers, seems rather worthwhile after all.

It seemed particularly worthwhile a couple of days ago, when I paid a visit to the Purple Bamboo Garden. While I was there, I met a pair of young women who turned out to be quite knowledgeable tea-fanciers. They were seated on a balustrade in a hillside pavilion overlooking a lake. They were enjoying some tea, and when I came to explore the pavilion they very civilly offered me a cup. As we discussed its flavor and aroma, one of the young women remarked that the water was rather hard and slightly brackish. This led to a rehearsal of the various sorts of water used in making the best tea: water from rivers, from lakes, from wells and springs, and, best of all, water swept as snow from the branches of the winter-flowering plum. This last was my contribution to the discussion, recollected from a favorite passage in Cao Xueqin's famous novel The Dream of the Red Chamber:

黛玉因問: "這也是舊年的雨水?" 妙玉冷笑道:「你這麼個人，竟是大俗人，連水也嘗不出來。這是五年前我在玄墓蟠香寺住著收的梅花上的雪，共得了那一鬼臉青的花瓮一瓮，總捨不得吃，埋在地下，今年夏天才開了。我只吃過一回，這是第二回了。你怎麼嘗不出來﹖隔年蠲的雨水那有這樣輕浮，如何吃得。」

Dai-yu asked, "Is this last year's rain-water as well?" Miao-yu gave a withering smile. "Can you really be so vulgar? Fancy not even being able to taste the difference in the water! This comes from snow I swept from the branches of a winter-flowering plum tree when I was living at the Coiled Incense Temple on Darkbarrow Mountain five years ago. I stored it in that demon-green jar and, as I couldn't bring myself to use it, buried it in the earth and didn't open it till last summer. I have only drunk it once before; this is the second time. You really can't taste the difference? Whenever did last year's stored rainwater have this sort of lightness and effervescence!"


(Gentle Anglers will please note that I owe my translation of 鬼臉青 as "demon-green" to the late David Hawkes. I do not have his remarkable translation Cao Xueqin's novel before me, but, if memory serves, that was the way he rendered it. As I felt his choice could not be bettered, here it is before you.)


My companions in Purple Bamboo Garden agreed with me that tea made with swept snow is indeed the height of refinement -- or rather, the idea of it seems to be the height of refinement, for, as one of them pointed out, such pure tastes are beyond us now. Our water is polluted. It is dirty even as it patters down from the sky; it is dirty, even when it settles in white, crystalline flakes on the branches of the winter-flowering plum.

As I left the park and caught the number 534 bus home, I thought about how often I had encountered the idea of a life close to nature presented as a literary aesthetic, and how often this aesthetic had been linked with the ancient world. I suppose this is partly because, years ago, I wrote an undergraduate thesis about the description of trees in a selection of antique poetic traditions, and a central element in this thesis was a discussion of the various ways in which the relationship between nature and culture emerged in those traditions.

And, no doubt, it is partly because I am attracted by the aesthetic itself. Of course this is scarcely surprising, since more or less everyone from Vergil to Tao Yuanming to William Bulter Yeats has professed himself terribly keen to cast off the madding crowd and get down to planting some beans. I don't mean to say that I plan to go in for the material culture associated with this aesthetic. The realities of the rural life are probably not for me. I can't stoop and I can't be in the sun, so gardening is pretty much off the table in any case. But the poems are nice. I've always liked them, especially when hungry (that is when it is particularly pleasant to read about vegetable gardens), and I suppose I always will.

That my frame of reference is largely confined to the ancient world does not mean, of course, that I suppose this aesthetic to be missing from the modern world. Quite the contrary. Just last Saturday I was invited to hear a lecture on eco-poetry at Peking University's Institute of World Literature. I wasn't able to go, but, even without having heard the lecture, I know for sure that one particular difference between the aesthetics of then and now would have emerged. The literary value of a life lived close to nature used to lie in its simplicity, its deliberate rejection of ambition and strife. The personal refinement associated with choosing such a life was based partly on an ideal of finely-tuned sensibilities and a keen awareness of pure beauty. But now the natural world has become problematic -- not just in real terms, but as an aesthetic. A keen awareness of beauty has been supplanted -- or at least supplemented -- by a keen awareness of fragility. Whether or not a "nature" poem is about the earth that crumbles away beneath the poet's feet, the crumbling earth is its inescapable context.

As I thought these things, I was reminded -- not for the first time -- of E.B. White's remarks on a related subject in his essay Sootfall and Fallout:

These nuclear springtimes have a pervasive sadness about them . . . The rich brown patch of ground used to bring delight to the eye and mind at this fresh season of promise. For me, the season has been spoiled by the maggots that work in the mind. Tomorrow we will have rain, and the rain falling on the garden will carry its cargo of debris from old explosions in distant places. Whether the amount of this freight is great or small, and whether it is measurable by the farmer or can only be guessed at, one thing is certain: the character of rain has changed, the joy of watching it soak the waiting earth has been diminished, and the whole meaning and worth of gardens has been brought into question.

When I think of this passage, I always find myself picturing President Kennedy standing by the window in the Oval Office, watching the poisoned rain slanting down outside and soaking the White House lawn. I don't know where I saw this picture. Perhaps it was at the Kennedy Library. Or perhaps I just imagined it after reading a description or hearing an interview.

It is not possible to reach either Mr. White or President Kennedy now, or I would try to offer them some words of comfort. What I have to say is not much, but sometimes a little is enough.

On Saturday (when I failed to attend the lecture on eco-poetry) I taught a lesson on modes of transportation. It was rather heavy going after a bit, so, to keep the conversation rolling, I asked my students what they thought the vehicles of the future would look like. Well, that got plenty of action. Apparently there will be lots of electric cars and hybrids, cars that run on solar power, other (new word) "eco-friendly" cars, and -- the piece de resistence -- a solar-powered robotic flying unicorn. When I asked the student who made this last contribution "Why a unicorn?" she responded, "It's aerodynamic." (Not that she knew the word either in English or in Chinese -- hey, she's seven -- or even paid attention to the word when I taught it to her, but she's sure thinking about the concept. As well she ought: she plans to be an inventor.)

Both Mr. White and President Kennedy spoke of the blight our activities would one day bring down on "generations yet unborn." Earlier in Sootfall and Fallout, Mr. White remarked that the Cold War was being fought with the lives of future generations, rather than with those of living, existing young men. It is a ghastly thought. I don't deny the truth of it, but I offer this observation: perhaps those future generations are up for the fight.