Light Snacks Will Be Served

The Guy Who Sat Beside Me

 

On a recent flight from Singapore to Bangkok, I sat next to an older gentleman with the thick, tanned forearms and friendly smile of an American who golfs a lot. There was an empty seat between us, and he was watching something on his i-pod, so I just smiled and nodded and unsnapped my laptop and started working. My eye was drawn to his Rolex - the diamonds on which were flashing from the outside light. He closed the shade. I stared at his wedding ring - made of what looked like several ounces of chunky white gold. Then I looked at my thin, little band and kept typing.

About half way through the flight we struck up a conversation. I had already made my judgments - executive, import/export, midwest and probably Chicago, electronics or maybe petroleum. These guys are usually pretty nice when I meet them, and remind me of America in a strange, paternal sort of way.  Like if I happened to sit next to my own father, without recognizing him, while he was on a business trip.

Turns out the passenger was in the seafood business, and was from the Pacific Northwest, but by way of Chicago (one point). What was most fascinating about our conversation was how convoluted his work was, a curious characteristic of our food chain these days. He was based in Seattle, and the lion's share of fish caught for his particular company came from the waters off of Alaska and Russia. 

But that fish - 'Cod,' he told me, which could pretty much be anything white and swimming these days, I thought - is then gutted, frozen whole and shipped to factories in China. In China, it is then cut into precise portions and dusted with breadcrumbs and sometimes also deep fried and frozen. Then, the cut and breaded fish boards another boat, floats back across the Pacific, and makes its way to Denny's, TGIFridays, freezer cases and other outposts of factory produced food nationwide. A fresh, wild fish, paraded around the world and frozen to nothingness, all for a shower of fucking breadcrumbs.

"The problem is, the Chinese have now learned how to soak the fillets in a (insert chemical name) and water solution and increase the weight!" he said, a little dismayed. "But the Indonesians don't. And, they're great at processing the shrimp with the tails still on, too. We just can't do that in America anymore...." he said, now sounding almost wistful.

I nodded my head with genuine interest. And I thought that the problem wasn't in the chemical bath, or the labor costs in keeping a shiny tail poking out of golden breading, but the ridiculous system itself. Then I returned to my work.

As he bit into the factory-made chicken pie that JetStar serves on that flight, I admired his wedding ring again. It really was a magnificent piece of gold, like a vein cut right out of the earth.      

Still Life, Toilet Brush

 

Taken at a hole-in-the-wall shophouse restaurant, in Bangkok's old town, sometime after midnight, in the bathroom, with my phone. Still, it manages a strange beauty, I think.  

Sweetbreads, Fish Heads

 

Last night, in Singapore's Durian-inspired Esplanade Theatre, I saw Andrew Bird put on a show. Bird is one of those rare performers that sounds almost exactly the same live as he does on albums, which might have to do with the fact that he's playing all of the instruments both live and on his albums. 

So Bird's up there punching pedals with his feet, looping tumbleweed whistles with staccato violin plucketry and mournful pulls on his bow and guitar chords and all sorts of other noises into what finally evolves into something like a band's wall of sound. It's pretty fascinating to watch. 

And then he played a song called Gray Matter, which he originally wrote as a song called Sweetbreads, and he sang it as it was on the original. Which has chorus that goes like this: "They call them sweetbreads, I could taste what you were thinking, ooooh, sweetbreads, that's the taste of neurons blinking."  

But before the song, the shy and sort-of-awkward performer said something (I'm paraphrasing here) like this: "This song is about tasting the brain, and, well, I rewrote it because I thought it was kind of upsetting. But, you know, we eat animal's hearts, and brains, and places where the soul is said to reside, and don't really talk about the implications of that very much. But we probably should, you know?"

I love eating sweetbreads, which come from the thymus or the pancreas of hoofed mammals, but that's not why I kept turning Bird's words over in my head. It also wasn't because I was stoned, because I was in a concert hall in Singapore. 

As he plucked his violin strings and sang of sweetbreads I thought about all the hearts and brains and feet I've eaten, and how even when you're eating them you don't really consider what that thing was doing a few hours or days before. And I made a note to think about it the next time I ate something in which "the soul was said to reside." And I did, at lunch, the very next day. 

I'm not crazy about Singapore's food like some people are (I find much of it is greasy, one-dimensional,  and sort of overrated). But I'm hip to the fact that there's some great cooking going on here too. And when I come to Singapore, the first thing I want to eat is curry fish head. Today, at the famous Banana Leaf Apolo I got my fix, as Bird's words fluttered around in my head. Looks like Mel Gibson has too.

But I digress. The fish's flesh was firm and sweet, the sour tamarind curry was fiery and complex, and really I couldn't imagine a better lunch. And as i plucked off the fatty, tender cheek of the fish, I considered it swimming around in the deep, scarfing up so many small creatures. I felt great privilege to be eating such a formidable looking fish's head; a head that would probably go to waste in the West. It just might just be where that animal's soul resides, I thought, because it's definitely the most delicious part of the fish. 

So, anyways, that's the taste of my neurons blinking.

  

Caption Writer Wanted For English Language News Organization:

"A vendor shows roasted rats on a highway in Korat province on Sunday. The rats, which are very popular and sold at a price of Bt180/kg are caught by farmers to prevent them from destroying rice fields. They have calories."

From The Nation. 

Amazing Quotes Dept.

"The Chinese society has generally less information bearing capacity than developed countries such as the U.S., which is an objective reality that no one can deny. Chinese intellectuals living in China should show understanding to the motherland's weakness. China will certainly and gradually change this reality, but the starting point of the change should be in the interests of the entire Chinese society instead of for the convenience or desire of a small group of people. In fact, both western politicians and media leaders understand this; those who do not understand this are either unwilling to understand China due to cultural arrogance or pretend not to know it. In fact, world countries including the U.S. do not permit the existence of a laisser-faire Internet world either. To combat terrorism after the "9/11" terrorist attack, the U.S. has permitted police to search civilian emails and even monitor their communications without permission. Western countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Germany and Sweden have also passed similar bills."

Oh, People's Daily. How I love thee. See the rest here. 

'Cause it's Friday

And cause my town is funkier than yours. 

Have a wacky weekend.

 

The Best Thing I Ate (many times) Last Year

Might just be Jay Fai's crab omelet. 

The restaurant is dear to me (I'm not alone in this regard) for many reasons, but mostly because it is manned by one formidable cook, Auntie Fai, who works gracefully over charcoal. She is a solo act, undisturbed by the heat of her coals, unfazed by the eyes of starving diners, and she is certainly one of Bangkok's best in the kitchen. 

Combine her effortless skill with two eggs, about 150g of lump crabmeat, a dash of fish sauce, a vigorous whip and some very hot oil and you've got yourself a Thai dish of distinguished simplicity. Over the past year Jay Fai has won me over with her omelets and her tum yum - a clear, herbal potion swimming with giant prawns that howls with spicy complexity. But it's this egg dish that pulls me back... and just the other day, she showed me how to make it. 

But I'm saving that for something rare and wonderful during these dark days... a paid gig. 

 

On the Water

 

I've had a good friend in town for the better part of a week, which, along with an impending and rather research-intensive writing gig has forced me out onto the mean streams of Bangkok for the past few days. Time spent on the river has also cemented my appreciation for things Bangkokian - there aren't many cities that hold the sheer volume of small wonders that this one does. 

 

Especially in the heart of the old city - on the old canals that snake through Dusit and Thonburi, on the river rat piers that groan under the force of tropical rains headed to sea, and on the boats that ply the Chao Phraya. 

 

On Google, Censorship and Heading South

I didn't leave Shanghai for lack of work, 14 months ago. In fact, I took a big hit moving to a small and comparatively insignificant country that is thick with writers and photographers. Being in Bangkok felt like getting fished out of a deep lake and thrown into an aquarium.

I did leave China for other reasons. My wife really wanted to go. At first I didn't, because I had studied and lived there for the better part of a decade (7 years, in Chengdu, Beijing and Shanghai). But the China that I fell in love with as a wide-eyed (and freezing) student in Beijing, as a long-haired backpacker in Yunnan, and as a wasting-away English teacher in Chengdu was not the China I found myself in in 2008. Change was afoot, but it wasn't the sort of change I had ever anticipated. Far from it, actually.

I'm reminded of this because of the controversy that lit up the interwebs yesterday (namely, that google has been aggressively hacked for information, and for that and reasons of censorship is now pondering pulling out of China entirely). This is not surprising to many China observers, and it probably won't do much to persuade the government there to open channels of information. But it is significant because it is perhaps the first major commercial reaction against China's increasing surveilance, censorship and secrecy.

I was affected by media censorship in a closer way than some. Each week I submitted manuscripts to the government agency that censored our harmless city magazine in Shanghai. We could not mention homosexuality or sex or politics or drugs in our text, even in a passing manner. Another media organization i worked for was wrenched from the hands of its foreign founder, because in China the government holds your publishing license. 

When I became a freelance writer, I was forced to get a work permit from an ad agency to avoid getting caught writing without proper papers. Deportation was always in the back of my mind, even if I was writing benign pieces about food and travel. Lack of papers was used to threaten me in a few instances, to quell restaurant criticism ('write that and I'll report you to the authorities!) 

The Chinese mechanism of foreign press control operates in two effective ways: it forces licensed outlets to watch what they say or risk being squeezed out, and it forces independent writers to censor themselves for the same reasons. I know several writers living there who won't speak out on this issue for their own good.  I probably would not have written this, while living there.

In the leadup to the Olympics I had already decided to leave a country that I'd spent many years attempting to understand, finally conceding that I didn't understand much about it at all. When I was a student in Beijing, I imagined a China becoming increasingly free and interconnected with the world. I didn't imagine a China that would appear increasingly isolationist, and occasionally frightfully nationalistic. But that seemed to me what was happening, and so we packed our bags and headed south to Bangkok. During our first week here, the government fell, and I wrote a story about it for The Atlantic. It felt strange and liberating.

I write this from a country that has its own set of problems - from corruption to class division to an impending political crisis of great magnitude. But every single time I walk into a store, and see shelves lined with books and magazines, or attend a lecture or a political demonstration, or page through the Bangkok Post, or sign on to this blog without a proxy, I am reminded of why I moved here, and why I no longer wanted to live there. 

I'm not writing this because I hate China. It's quite the opposite, actually. I genuinely love and care about that country and its people. I spent most of my adult life there, and feel just as strong a connection to it as I do to the place where I was born.  

Everybody's got problems. But when you don't address them, when you flat-out refuse to discuss them, that's when the shit really hits the fan. And I suspect that some day in China it will, because the relationship between the nanny state and its diverse and emotional people is a dysfunctional one, and it's getting worse. Google has simply shed light on this situation in a way that few other organizations could.

By building these barriers of secrecy and censorship that cause a company like google to pack up and leave, China might just end up tearing itself down.

 

Ningbo, 2007.

Jump and Jive

The first time I ate goong tem, Northeast Thailand's 'jumping shrimp' salad, I was in a public restroom. Well, actually I was on my way to the toilet, in Bangkok's Chatujak Market, paying the attendant 5 baht to use her facilities.

Before her was a bright, shiny salad of krill-like shrimp, dices of crimson and emerald chilies, chives, mint, and cilantro. It was beautiful. She saw my hungry eyes, laughed, and thrust her plastic spoon in my face. I chewed on the crisp prawns, and they burst in my mouth, still wriggling. Then the herbs popped, and the chilies exploded. It was the best thing I've ever eaten in a toilet, and better than most things I've eaten in fancy restaurants. That was six months ago.

Last week I found myself on the Mekong, just outside of Chiang Khan, as fisherman drifted just above the fast water at Kaeng Kood Koo, a swirl of river currents and restaurants that draws tourists. They were casting small mesh nets into the water, fishing for tiny prawns. I was in the perfect spot for a plate of goong tem. 

  

We sat under a thatch sala, on cushions in our bare feet, and stared out at Laos on the other side of the stream. I thought about how many majestic trees there were in Laos, and wished there were more on our side. Then a dish arrived covered by another plate. It was speaking to us. 

'Thop, plop, dunk!' it said, warning us of the action inside. A few determined little prawns wriggled their way out the sides, making a run for the water (sadly for them, the Mekong was an unhoppable distance away - maybe 200 yards). As I removed the lid, prawns popped like grasshoppers out of the dish - one flew up about two feet, and landed right in the middle of my spoon, like an acrobat. I gobbled him up, like an acrobat-eating ogre. They were sweet and fresh - not muddy or fishy - but most of the flavor from this dish comes from the lime juice, herbs and the roasted glutinous rice that, when ground, holds Isaan's salads together. 

Better than the bathroom!