Light Snacks Will Be Served

21 Years On, And Thailand Too.

 

An old friend who lives in China is in town this week, and so that country has been on my mind. Even more so because today marks the twenty-first anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. After seeing blood run in the streets of my own city last month, the horrible events that took place in the alleys around Tiananmen seem more immediate to me than ever before. What happened in Thailand was very different than what took place in China, but the parallels are also uncanny. 

I wonder how many mainland Chinese are remembering that day today, or considering how close a group of students and sympathetic politicians really came to overthrowing their government. 

China today is far more affluent than it was 21 years ago. But it is not necessarily more free. There is access to more information, but there are more controls on that information than ever before. What saddens me, from an ideological standpoint, is that the economic miracle of China - lifting so many millions out of poverty - seems to have largely justified this regime's quashing of any opposition. 

Last summer in Taiwan I spent a few days with Wuer Kaixi, and he said something to me that I remembered this morning, as I began to read tweets remembering the Fourth of June, 1989: 

"There are things you should get used to, and there are things one should never accept." Kaixi said that one night as we drank Baijiu from Yili, Xinjiang (his ancestral home) and discussed censorship in China. He's right, but I'm afraid that the message has been lost in prosperity. Today, Thailand is also less free than it was just weeks before. Censorship rears its head, in the name of progress and reconciliation.

Has stability bested democracy? Is that what the future holds?

            

On Isolation, Inclusion and Democratic Principles

I'm riding the Shanghai metro on the way to dinner. A man and wife, who probably rode the train from the main railway station, are standing beside me. Their thick, farmworker fingers are gripping the large, plaid fiberglass bags of the countryside that probably hold all that they own. And between them they're holding hands. 

They look terrified - too afraid to speak, and totally unable to comprehend the sounds and smells and faces surrounding them on that train. It is as if they have been lifted from another planet and stuffed into that subway car. This is not a wide-eyed look of wonder, it is one of confusion and fright. I smile at them, and this seems to upset them even more. 

I kept remembering that image last night, as I sat up late reading a story called 'The Good Cook,' written by Barbara Demick in The New Yorker. It's an unsettling tale about a woman who tries to feed her family in North Korea's period of famine in the 1990s. She is a resourceful cook, a loving wife, and a budding entrepreneur. Despite her best efforts to sustain her family, cooking with food scraps and finally foraged weeds and tree bark, she loses her husband, her mother-in-law, and finally her 25-year-old son to starvation. It's an incredible and awful sort of story, and in that woman's fear and fake belief my mind kept turning to the couple in the subway car. I'm not sure why, besides the fact that maybe those two Chinese people were realizing that life outside -- like Ms Song, the North Korean woman in the story who ends up in Seoul -- was played with a completely different deck of cards than the ones they'd been dealt.

As the world fixates in China's rise, on Olympic Games and World Expos, the frightened couple on the train seems less relevant. But they're still there, hundreds of millions of them, struggling to figure out how they benefit from all of this. 

Cut to Bangkok. Over the past month or so, the so-called 'rural hordes' have descended on the city. This Red Shirt movement (the UDD) is largely criticized for its overly simplistic understanding of Thai politics. And they have a deeply flawed figurehead in Thaksin Shinawatra. There are many reds that are Bangkok-born, too, and highly educated, but I'm going to focus on the country folk here, because that's where the memories last night led me. 

What strikes me about Thailand's democracy is that, while it is maligned on all sides, there is a growing awareness that people's voices count, and someday might count just the same. It is an encouraging, empowering ideal. There is a growing awareness that there are ways to effect change in what has been a largely stagnated, class-based society.  People from the countryside can march on this cosmopolitan city of 12 million, they can shout for change and even pull smiles from office workers shuttling to lunch in their tailored suits. They don't look afraid, they look confident.

And this is exciting, and should be mentioned more. North Korea's Socialism, or even the far freer Chinese model, serves to alienate people from the state by drawing them so close to it that they can't see its form. Here in Thailand the reds march, yellows shut down airports, Newin's blues trade sides, newspapers and radio stations exchange barbs and insults, and it all seems pretty damn dysfunctional. But people know the hand that they've been dealt, and they can at least try to reshuffle the cards. 

It's a heck of a lot harder for other people, in other parts of Asia.   

Update: I wrote this post not to defame China, which has done wonders to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last three decades. I wrote it because I think a lot of people in Thailand, and particularly in the English language Thai media, and even more specifically the Thailand-based foreign pundits that populate discussions on the web and elsewhere here, lack any sort of real world perspective and/or appreciation for what they've got. This isn't North Korea. Or China, for that matter. It's a young democracy.    

Amazing Quotes Dept, V2

It's been a roller coaster month in the world of Chinese politics. And today I was shocked, and quite proud, to read this piece by Yang Yao of Peking University  (I'm an alumni!), in Foreign Affairs. It seems risky in the extreme to write this, but his argument is dry, measured and intelligent. Do read it all. Here's a teaser:

Popular resistance and economic imbalances are now moving China toward another major crisis. Strong and privileged interest groups and commercialized local governments are blocking equal distribution of the benefits of economic growth throughout society, thereby rendering futile the CCP's strategy of trading economic growth for people's consent to its absolute rule.

Wow.

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. 

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.

On Uighurs, Asylum and the Increasing Reach of China in SE Asia

Last Saturday, Cambodia repatriated 20 Uighurs who had fled to that country from China, seeking political asylum in the wake of the riots that shook Xinjiang last July. What followed those riots in China was a widespread crackdown on Uighurs and several executions, as that huge western province was basically closed off from the outside world.  

This, from the New York Times:

The agreements on Monday followed the decision by Cambodia on Saturday to deport 20 ethnic Uighurs at China’s request, despite Cambodia’s having signed a 1951 treaty banning the forced repatriation of refugees who face persecution at home.

The Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim group, were involved in ethnic rioting in western China in July that killed at least 197 people. They were smuggled into Cambodia about a month ago and applied for asylum at the United Nations refugee office in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.

Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur leader who is living in the United States, wrote in an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that Cambodia’s decision to deport the 20 Uighurs was “no doubt influenced by enormous Chinese pressure, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.

I think this is a trend the region will swiftly get used to. Just as the United States, during its period of rapid economic and political expansion in the years following WWII, spread its reach into Latin and South America, Europe and Asia, China is doing the same thing here, and in Africa and the Central Asia. 

But the Chinese are far more pragmatic and less demanding than the Americans ever were - they don't even attempt to veil their strategic interests in good faith or idealism. Instead, the return of the Uighurs is merely a transaction. 

What exactly is China doing in Southeast Asia? is a question more reporters should be asking. (The idea of the Chinese Communist Party funding the reconstruction of Buddhist temples in Cambodia, as the above article states, just rings with cruel irony; it's laughably depressing.)

Recently, I spoke with a Tibetan activist here in Bangkok, and she told me that the Dalai Lama has not visited Thailand since 1993. This is significant: Imagine if the Pope didn't visit the country with the highest proportion of Roman Catholics on earth in nearly two decades. While it's true that Thais and Tibetans study different schools of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is an enormously respected figure here, as there is no greater figurehead for Buddhism today. You want to know why he doesn't come? Well, let's just say Thailand's economic cooperation with China probably has something to do with it.

Another disturbing trend, in my opinion, are countries in this region looking to China as a model for controlled economic growth because it is anchored by a system that restricts freedom of information and free speech. Every time the Thai political machine starts to spin out of control, for instance (a problem that has to do with the spread of bad information, for sure, but also a convoluted political/military relationship, widespread corruption and a great socioeconomic schism) people here look to China and admire its rock-solid political footing. Bangkok remains static, while Beijing charges ahead... 

Every time Malaysia sentences a woman to a few lashes from a bamboo stick because she drinks a beer, they can be sure the neighbor up north will not speak out. Or if Cambodia decides to harbor a political fugitive, or Burma imprisons a Nobel-winning pro-democracy activist. The greatest difference between American hegemony, which I am by no means supporting, and the emerging Chinese model, is that Chinese one has no moral code. It has no nuance. 

And that is something to worry about, unless this government decides that their power demands some sort of social and political responsibility. 

This is something to worry about. And it stifles progressive democracy taking root here in Southeast Asia.  Which is just exactly what the CCCP wants, anyways. 

A Voice of Reason

According to Beijing writer Eileen Wen Mooney, Beijing restaurant cooking is not what it should be. It's a sad but familiar story that I've also written about here and here. And I used to look forward to trips to Beijing - a town I think is far more progressive and quality driven in the Chinese restaurant realm, in comparison to Shanghai. 

Hat tip to Chris St Cavish, who writes about Chinese food (and morbid sandwiches) here. Chris and I have blathered about this topic until nearly blue in the face. 

At some point, the status-driven dining habits of the Chinese needs to change. Slow food, and good techniques need to creep their way back into kitchens. It might only happen when the last shark bleeds finless on the bottom of the sea, and the last abalone is plucked from some barren forest of kelp. But still, it will be progress. 

Noodle Diaries: My Lanzhou La Mian

About a month ago, I was in China. While there, a travel magazine (which I'll link to at a later time) asked me to write a piece about an iconic Chinese dish. I thought about it long and hard. There are so many one wonders where to start.  

After going back and forth with the editors we decided on Lanzhou La Mian - the enigmatic pulled noodles of Lanzhou. These noodles have spread across China with remarkable speed (keep in mind, naysayers, that today's restaurant industry there is really about 35 years young).  

Lanzhou la mian are remarkable in the sense that these noodles (which, according to my research, were popularized in Lanzhou in the early 20th century) are now represented in every small to midsize city in the mainland. There are hundreds of outlets serving the dish in Shanghai and Beijing. It's impossible to say, but I would put the number of Lanzhou la mian stalls in China in the tens of thousands. 

But here's the thing: when researching this dish, there's not a great deal of information available (and next to nothing in English). So I got on the phone, spoke to street cooks and chefs, and starting trying to formulate a recipe. The problem here is twofold: Chinese cooks don't like sharing secrets, and the ones that did share were clearly lying to me. Here's a recipe: Fill large stock pot with water. Add bone and carrot. Cook for a long time.

After many shakes of the head, wasted phone calls from Bangkok to Gansu, I decided to go at this the best way I knew how: by taking a trip to the store. I had already devoted a lot of thought to what makes a great Lanzhou la mian stock - and two stuck out in my mind (I've probably eaten a hundred or so bowls of the stuff. Most were unmemorable). 

Once, while just outside Lanzhou on a bus to Xiahe, I ate one that was so thick with dried and salted yak meat it seemed like a bowl of curried beef jerky. In the best way. (There are arguments for and against cumin and tumeric. Some purists don't like it. I think the best Lanzhou la mian has both - and these flavors are evocative of Gansu's silk road roots).  

Another bowl was - and still is - the best Lanzhou la mian I've ever had, and it was cooked by a family from Qinghai in a tiny shop on Wending Lu, in Shanghai. That shop was razed long ago and is now (I think) a pet store that sells Chihuahuas to girls in Gucci ankle boots with purple contact lenses. But that's another story... 

So I tried to recreate that old neighborhood favorite with beef and carrots and daikon radish, some star anise and cassia bark, a few leeks and an onion. I got the best and cheapest cut of beef I could find (in this case, knuckle steak) from my local market, and put it over the flame. 

After about three hours the beef was soft without breaking apart, and the soup was rich and beefy, but it was missing something... color and a hint of cumin. I added 3/4 of a teaspoon of tumeric, and an equal measure of cumin after I had strained the stock and there it was... as close to the beef noodle soup in my mind's eye as I was likely to get. The one I stopped for on my way to work in Shanghai, or on my way home on weekends as the sun began to rise. 

Here's a basic recipe (I did not pull my own noodles, though you should, and are welcome to try. Dried Chinese wheat noodles are a lazy but workable substitute):

2.5 lbs beef rump, knuckle steak, brisket or any inexpensive cut, cut in 2" cubes

10 cups water

2 medium carrots, peeled, cut into large chunks

1 daikon radish, peeled, cut into 5 sections

2 leeks

1 bulb garlic, skin on, cut in half

15 black peppercorns

1 piece cassia bark

3 star anise

Bring above ingredients to a boil, making sure to skim off any foam (there will be a lot at first, to avoid skimming off your spices, add them when the foam has subsided). Lower to a simmer, cover, and cook for 3 hours. Remove beef, strain stock, and return to pot. Season with salt and tumeric and cumin to taste (4-6 Tbsp of Soy sauce adds some richness, too). Serve by pouring stock over pre-cooked wheat noodles, with generous amounts of chopped coriander, spring onions and chili oil or chili sauce (Chinese la jiao) and some slices of beef.

Best paired with a lukewarm, watery lager - preferably in collapsibly thin plastic cups. Suntory or Reeb is best. 

Dragon Well Manor

I struggled with how I should write about Dragon Well Manor - but I felt like I should. The reason for the indecision was that Fuchsia Dunlop had already written a long-form article about this restaurant that was timely, informative and also really pretty. It's an admirable bit of food journalism, and if you are interested in Chinese food you should read it.

So anyways, how to write when it's all been written? I decided to write about the writing, which drew me to the restaurant in the first place. 

Amidst all the twittering, blogging, gossiping and personality-driven bullshit that has come to define popular food writing today, I don't think most people appreciate how difficult it is to write something beautiful and true and honest about food. Writing that takes time and research - time which many writers who are succeeding in digital media spend talking about themselves (rather than their subjects). 

While I'm talking about the forgotten art of a good stock in my own article about Dragon Well Manor, I might as well be addressing what's going on in my own industry. Which is another sort of corner-cutting, derivative decline. 

Reading a well crafted story about food these days also feels like time gone by.   

 

Scenes of Food and Fall in Shanghai