Day 9
Anyone who has been reading these emails from China will recall that I have been fed some pretty strange things. The Chinese truly waste nothing, and in fact they prize parts of the animal we throw away. Feet from chickens, ducks and geese are considered superior to the legs. Truthfully, they do have more flavor; you just need to get past the difficulty of extracting what little meat there is, and at least I need to not think about what these feet have been standing in! I have eaten things that were not quite dead yet (recall the live lobster), most every major organ apart from brain, and plenty of things I cannot identify and probably wouldn’t want to know anyhow. After 6 years of this, I feel I have been more or less desensitized to the unusual features of true Chinese cuisine – or so I thought…
Today I was met at the hotel by Matthew and his wife. Matthew is a customer but I have known him for many years now and we are on very friendly terms. I have met his wife before, and though she does not speak English, we seem to get along well too. They took me for lunch to a Hunan-style restaurant not far from the hotel. They try hard to be good hosts, a real Chinese virtue, and as such I was presented with the prize parts from each dish. Most of these were pretty tame albeit spicy: some slices of green vegetable that looked like celery but tasted more like asparagus but with a great smoky flavor, some really good tofu, and a really, really big fish head! I am not sure where the rest of the fish went, but the head was all we got. The head had been steamed and then cooked in a very spicy clear broth with green onion and garlic. I have been served the head of smaller fish in the past so this did not strike me as unusual
Warning!! Those with weak stomachs should probably just skip the next bit…
So what do you do when the smiling wife of your host with obvious pride presents you with the marble-sided eyeball from the fish. I concealed the panic which immediately ensued. The possible options flashed quickly through my brain:
Could I politely decline it? Say I am allergic? Present a note from my Doctor? Crap, I have no such note – should have planned ahead! No, this would seem very ungrateful. I can’t decline it.
Accept it with a smile and let it sit uneaten? Maybe I can hide it under the growing pile of fish bones and skull parts already on my plate. Maybe no one will notice. Remembering I often tried this with my peas as a child with no success (Mom always knew what I was up to), and realizing Matthew’s wife is also a mom, I knew she too probably possessed that maternal “third eye” (ironic choice of words, don't you think). No dice.
Option three. Eat it. I had to accept my fate… Time to “man up” and take one for the team!
I am proud to say I ate it without gagging, making faces, or doing as they say in Japan “the Bush thing”, which is to throw-up in the lap of your host as Bush 1 did to the Japanese Prime Minister. I ate it, I chewed it, I followed instructions and spit-out the hard part (we will call that the lens, I did not want to look too closely at what was probably staring back at me), I swallowed what remained, and I prayed silently but really hard that they would not offer me the other eye, which they thankfully did not. Someday I should really look into getting my own reality show…
By the way, it tasted like fish.
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