A groaning board of Chinese cuisine

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A female trio of Chinese food lovers – two in China itself and one in New York – explore the eats and the culture

July 20, 2008

Christine Sismondo

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Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper:

A Memoir of Eating in China

by Fuschia Dunlop

Norton, 320 pages, $24.95

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Serve the People: A Stir Fried Journey Through China

by Jen Lin-Liu

Harcourt, 321 pages, $26.95

FROM 'SERVE THE PEOPLE'(HARCOURT)

Serve the People: A Stir Fried Journey Through China by Jen Lin-Liu, Harcourt, 321 pages, $26.95

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The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

by Jennifer 8. Lee

Hachette, 307 pages, $28.99

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On March 30, 2005, 110 Americans hit a national lottery jackpot.

That may not sound like all that many. In fact, that number was 30 times higher than the probability for hitting five correct numbers in a U.S. Powerball lottery. The unexpected, statistically anomalous pay out? Nearly $20 million in total. Numbers like that just don't happen without some kind of explanation. So the lottery officials launched an inquest.

It wasn't some sort of fancy computer fraud. Nor was it an error on the lottery's end. Nor were the winners all connected by blood, employment or region. It turned out that the only common bond these people shared was a penchant for sweet and sour chicken balls and a willingness to follow the sage teachings of Confucius.

It was the fortune cookies. Or, rather, five of the six numbers printed on the fortune found inside the cookie.

Well, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the ubiquitous Golden Dragon fortune cookie was the common denominator in those 110 people's lives, since, to hear a few writers tell it, Chinese food – of one sort or another – may well be one of the universal cultural experiences.

Of course, Chinese food can be radically different from place to place. Fuchsia Dunlop is a remarkable human who took off from England to China way before it was cool to do so, and dove headfirst, into Sichuan cooking and culture. The result is Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China.

Dunlop divides Chinese cooking, itself, into four main cuisines: grand northern (roast meats, rich soups and expensive delicacies); specialties from the eastern provinces (drunken shrimps, freshwater crabs and water chestnuts); minimalist Cantonese (translucent shrimp dumplings, ginger, green onions and soy); and her true love, spicy Sichuan.

Dunlop went to China as a student, but the academic side of things didn't work out so great. As she came to realize that fact, her brief depression and feelings of isolation were assuaged by breakfast dumplings in hot chili sauce. She managed to forge connections with locals through food and, soon enough, was revitalized and had new direction.

That probably makes it all sound a lot easier than it was. Dunlop was the first Westerner ever to train at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and, between the language barrier and the novelty of being a Western intellectual slumming it at cooking school (cooking is an extremely low-status trade in China), she had her fair share of challenges.

But Dunlop's determination is amazing. She not only became an accomplished chef but also managed to write three cookbooks and, now, the memoir, in which she manages to relate her story and simultaneously explain the cultural context of the cuisine.

Dunlop also experiences a taste transformation, which she describes as "going native." Although she describes herself as an "adventurous eater" before her trip to China, preserved duck eggs, the skinning of live rabbits and epic nose-to-tail eating does manage to turn her off – initially. She is continually presented with concrete evidence that the Chinese really do eat everything.

By the end of her odyssey, she eats with the best of them, evidenced by her plucking a caterpillar right out of a garden and eating it live.

Not bad for a Westerner. Especially when you consider that even Jen Lin-Liu, author of Serve the People: A Stir-Friend Journey through China, actually grew up eating "authentic" Chinese food in America and still couldn't stomach the abundance of jellyfish, fish heads and chicken feet. She, too, is devouring them by the end.

Lin-Liu had moved from America to Shanghai to work as a freelance journalist. She was lucky enough to land just as the American market for stories about China was budding. Despite career success, she felt alienated. Not at home with either the ex-pat community (since she was Chinese) nor with the native-born Chinese (because of her relatively poor language skills and strange accent), Lin-Liu decided to try to learn about the culture through its most easily accessible commodity.

"If I can't connect with the people, at least I'm going to connect with the food," she decided.

Like Dunlop, she then went to cooking school, moving from Shanghai to Beijing to enrol in a rather bizarre-sounding culinary institute where she listened to hours of food theory – much of it, she says, of questionable accuracy. If you want to learn about how eating fish heads will repair brain cells and how eating spicy food improves the complexion, this would be the cooking school for you.

Lin-Liu manages to secure some private instruction on the side and, later, apprenticeships, through which she actually masters the art of making noodles.

And much, much more, of course. Lin-Liu's book is highly entertaining, in part because she manages in the end to truly delve into the culture and history of the country and its food. While she makes dumplings with her first mentor, a history of the unhappy marriage between cuisine and Chairman Mao unfolds.

our final guide never actually went to cooking school. But that's okay, too, because Jennifer 8. Lee, a Chinese-American newspaper writer who grew up in New York, takes an entirely different tack. She's interested in a more esoteric side of Chinese food – its cultural meaning and how it's been interpreted outside of China.

In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, Lee points out that eating Chinese food is universal in America. She says there are twice as many Chinese restaurants as there are McDonalds. What's more, the menus are roughly standardized. Travel almost anywhere in America (or Canada) and you can pick up a tasty General Tso chicken for a decent price as easily as you could satisfy a Big Mac attack.

Sure, General Tso chicken isn't "authentic." But who really cares about what's authentic and what isn't? Is it even a valid category? Lee critiques the snobbery that goes along with that categorization, rightly pointing out that food is always about exchange between cultures. Lee then explores the origins of those most inauthentic Chinese food dishes: General Tso (Taiwan), Chop Suey (America) and, of course, fortune cookies (Japan via San Francisco).

It's the fortune cookies that really intrigue her. In fact, Lee's odyssey into Chinese food begins with the Powerball lottery story mentioned earlier. Lee traces the history of the fortune cookie that led them to their destiny.

And what about Wonton Food, the company that picked the winning Powerball numbers? Should we all start playing the lotto with fortune cookie numbers?

Maybe so. They hit another jackpot that same year and 83 other lucky people won the lottery.

Just how do they do it? It's obvious if you think about it.

Ancient Chinese Secret.

Christine Sismondo is the author of Mondo Cocktail: A Shaken and Stirred History (McArthur & Co.).

Interview: Mark Shuttleworth

'Linux is a platform for people, not just specialists'

In a future undominated by Windows, Ubuntu hopes to be the provider of a service ecosystem for free software

Glyn Moody
The Guardian
Thursday May 22 2008

Canonical chief executive Mark Shuttleworth

In 1999, the South African-born Mark Shuttleworth sold his internet company, Thawte, which provided digital certificates for websites, for more than $500m (£254m). After spending $20m on a trip into space, he started the Ubuntu project - named after an African word meaning "Humanity to others", or "I am what I am because of who we all are" - which has since become the most popular GNU/Linux distribution.

Technology Guardian: To what extent did your space trip feed into Ubuntu?

Mark Shuttleworth Going to space and seeing the Earth from a distance makes it very clear just how interdependent we are. So I wanted to do something that was really global; free software is a phenomenon that is truly global.

TG: What are the implications of choosing that name?

MS That this is a platform for people. Linux has come from a tradition of being a platform for specialists. We articulated the challenge for us very clearly in our name: "Let's make this something that we can proudly give out to people who are not passionate about technology."

TG: How does your company, Canonical, fit into this?

MS [Ubuntu] has its own release cycle. It has its own governance structures. Canonical plays a significant role in those, and we are the largest underwriter of all the work that gets done. We make sure that it releases on time; that it's available globally; that it meets criteria; that it works across a certain portfolio of hardware that third parties have asked us to certify. But we don't take credit for all of the smart thinking that happens in Ubuntu. In fact, in almost every release there's been an idea that came from volunteer participants that turned into a profoundly important feature in that release.

TG: I gather that you had a rather unusual way of picking the people you originally employed at Canonical.

MS I simply read a large amount of correspondence between the developers on one of the projects that is key to the way we do Ubuntu, the Debian project. It's amazing how much jumps out in terms of the way people think, the depth of their experience. So open source is not only a great way to develop your own talent and skills, but it's also a great way to get a job, and a great way to go looking for people.

TG: What's the business model for Canonical?

MS Our business model is entirely based on services around our software. Because Canonical plays such a key role in Ubuntu, even though it doesn't monopolise access to it, we're a preferred partner for Ubuntu. Whether it's technical support, which we think people are more likely to buy from us than from anybody else, or whether it's engineering, customisation, or the enablement of the platform on particular hardware, Canonical has a privileged position.

TG: How close are you to breaking even?

MS Not close. It will require time and ongoing investment. We've positioned ourselves for what we see as the future of software - unlicensed software, people having access to the software that they want at the time that they want it. The service ecosystem around that software will fund it. And if we are the company that has best anticipated that future, then we will be best positioned to benefit from it.

TG: How did the deal to put Ubuntu on Dell PCs come about?

MS We found out about it after it was a fait accompli. [Dell are] very much a numbers-driven company. They asked their users what they wanted to see. They had a lot of data and that data pointed to us. That was a little unsettling, because we didn't have a relationship. But it was a significant step up in our corporate profile. It will be very interesting to see what we're able to do with companies like Dell, which are aimed at a wider audience. That's my number one challenge: how to make the Linux desktop something that you want to keep on your computer.

TG: Will you be coming out with a tailored version of Ubuntu for the ultraportable sector?

MS We're announcing it in the first week of June. It's called the Netbook Remix. We're working with Intel, which produces chips custom-made for this sector.

TG: Do you think that GNU/Linux will ever become a significant force on the desktop?

MS I think that depends on how people define a desktop. If people continue to define a desktop as the thing that they run Microsoft Word on, then Windows will retain its position. My sense, though, is that people are increasingly defining the desktop as the thing that they get access to the internet from. In that case, there's a real possibility that we're able to shift people onto different platforms. I think it's the emergence of the internet as the killer application, the thing that describes what you want from the computer, that opens the door to us.

TG: Recently you publicly criticised the ISO for the way the way it handled the voting on Microsoft's OOXML; how seriously do you think ISO's credibility has been damaged by that episode?

MS Very seriously [for] anybody who is passionate about open standards. The ISO process has traditionally worked very well; it's quite an academic, considered process, but it really wasn't designed to handle a case with very, very vigorous corporate lobbying and an enormous amount of money being spent to try to get a particular outcome. And with hindsight, there were a number of very serious flaws in the process.

TG: As Ubuntu gains in importance, do you feel that you have an increased responsibility to speak out in this way?

MS I think we all have a responsibility to contribute to the public discourse. I have a level of economic independence, which is perhaps a good and a bad thing, but at the very least my opinion can't be bought that easily.

Curriculum vitae

Age 35

Education University of Cape Town, Bachelor of Business Science, 1996

Career

1995-99 Founder and chief executive, Thawte Consulting

2000 Founded HBD Venture Capital

2001 Founded the Shuttleworth Foundation

2004-present Chief executive of Canonical Ltd, founder of the Ubuntu project,

Family Single

Hobbies Travel, technology, internet, science fiction, snowboarding

About this article

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This article appeared in the Guardian on Thursday May 22 2008 on p5 of the Technology news & features section. It was last updated at 09:45 on May 22 2008.

We've come undone: The short history of an un-trend

May 25, 2008

Ryan Bigge
Special to the Star

"Me fail English? That's unpossible!" – Ralph Wiggum, The Simpsons

Bridezilla. Man-crush. Affluenza. Vajayjay. Frankenfood. Crackberry. There are plenty of vogue words that jockey for position on Wordspy.com, the lexical equivalent of the Billboard Top 50.

Meanwhile, each week in Ideas, the Sunday Star publishes "The week's best invented words," releasing a pack of fresh neologisms into the ether.

While most new words have a half-life of weeks, some survive infancy, manage to become part of the lexicon proper, and are eventually recognized by spell-check.

Through overuse, some new words, such as the infamous metrosexual, even earn the ignominy of appearing on Matt Groening's annual list of Forbidden Words, published in his comic strip Life in Hell. (Past winners include tofurkey, blogosphere, monetize, synergy and phat.)

There is nothing out of the ordinary about the birth and death of fad lingo, a linguistic cycle akin to hula hoops or crocs. But a vogue prefix? Now that's a little more un-usual.

The un-trend first went mainstream in 2002 with Ikea's Unböring Manifesto, and the last few years have given us unmortgages, unconsumption, undesign – even unwords. And that's only the start.

Steven Hall's 2007 novel, The Raw Shark Texts, includes something called un-space, described as "the labelless car parks, crawl tunnels, disused attics and cellars, bunkers, maintenance corridors, derelict industrial estates boarded-up houses" – and on and on, concluding with, "the pockets of no-name-places under manhole covers and behind the overgrow of railway sidings."

Meanwhile, unschooling is experiencing a resurgence, along with ungifting and unconferences.

And last July, the Sunday Star published "The Untourist Guide" to Toronto.

I could keep unspooling examples such as these for many more paragraphs, but that would be unwise and undoubtedly uninteresting. I'll conclude my list of examples with a mention of the ultimate un-titled un-book, UN, Dennis Lee's 2003 collection of avant-garde poetry.

Why has un- become the prefix of the moment? Perhaps because we live in an undo culture, thanks to computer software that allows us to retrace our steps by hitting CRTL-Z. Our ability to reverse our mistakes with impunity is not only a digital convenience, it's a metaphor for our ideal relationship with the world at large.

Or perhaps, in our continuing efforts to distinguish ourselves from the herd, we seek out new, fresh experiences that require a radical inversion of traditional approaches and outcomes. We've become jaded seen-it-alls, tired of the predictable, always seeking out the opposite, be it undesign or untourism. Thus, the un- prefix has become shorthand for an idiosyncratic, thinking-outside-the-unbox approach.

Socio-cultural guesswork aside, it is clear that un- bends the eye and the ear in an effective manner, thus calling attention to itself. At the very least, its frequency of use justifies this unarticle.

Our obsession with the opposite, at least in an advertising context, can be traced back to 7UP, which, starting in the late 1960s, advertised its effervescent little bottle with the slogan "There's no cola like The Uncola."

With television and print ads that played with the prefix (the un and only; un in a million), Uncola was a clever campaign. But for Ben Yagoda, professor of journalism at the University of Delaware and author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, using un- today is, well, a little unoriginal. Reached via email, Yagoda argued that Uncola "was clever at the time, but `the unmortgage' 30 years later is not."

They might roll off our tongues somewhat awkwardly, but words such as ungifting (giving donations instead of presents at Christmas) or unconference (a gathering at which participants determine the content of sessions) are grammatically kosher for word-nerd Yagoda.

At their worst, he suggests, such unwords "come off as kind of self-consciously cute" similar to the use of the suffix "age" on TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (e.g. slayage, sparkage, kissage).

Unlike a particular word, there appears to be less danger of wearing out un-, given its promiscuity. Caution, of course, must still be exercised, lest the double negative make its appearance.

In the pilot episode of Pushing Daisies, protagonist Ned admonishes his new business partner, Emerson Cod, for using the words zombie and undead. "Nobody wants to be un-anything," Ned says, "Why begin a statement with a negative? It's like saying I don't disagree. Just say you agree."

His witty banter would please the late George Orwell, who famously waged war against the double negative in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language."

As Orwell wrote, in a footnote, "One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."

And so, this article has reached its unbeginning.

Back to TianAnMen (Square in Beijing)

Now exiled in London, a banned Chinese author who lived though the exhilaration and horror of Tiananmen Square revisits its meaning.

May 25, 2008
Geoff Pevere

The Book:

Beijing Coma
by Ma Jian
translated by Flora Drew
Knopf Canada,
592 pages, $34

On June 4, 1989, Dai Wei, the narrator of Ma Jian's epic historical novel Beijing Coma, takes a bullet in the head while attempting to flee the government crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Plunged into a decade-long coma by the wound, the former student activist, a key pro-democracy player in the demonstrations that so riveted real-world attention, is buffeted by memories – of his life, his loves, his political experiences and, most tragically, the terminal wound afflicting his country.

"I am still living, in what Buddhists refer to as the stinking skin-bag of the human body," Dai Wei ruminates after nearly a decade of semi-oblivion.

As the son of musicians persecuted as "rightists" during the Cultural Revolution – among other atrocities, his long-imprisoned father remembers seeing near-starved political inmates mutilate and eat the bodies of the freshly-executed – Dai Wei represents the latest generational turnover of doomed dissidence. But political activism, like human flesh, has a way of forgetting pain and regenerating itself, especially when stoned on its own sense of invincibility.

This is the book's most dramatically sustained and audacious metaphor. The trauma inflicted on Dai Wei's body is inextricable from that imposed on the nation. As the nation powers into the global economy, even Dai Wei's body becomes a commodity. At first his urine is sold as a kind of magic healing tonic, then his cash-strapped mother arranges for the removal and sale of his kidney.

In the same way that Dai Wei is left to lie in catatonic semi-consciousness as his memories swirl around the drain of cognitive decline, so the events at Tiananmen Square – anywhere from 300 deaths (state figures) to 3,000 (student calculations) – have disappeared into a vortex of revisionist cleansing.

Already notorious for writing novels banned in his homeland due to their criticism of China's policies on human rights and Tibet, the now London-based Ma Jian here launches his most sustained and intricate indictment of his former country.

Ma Jian was himself present at Tiananmen in the weeks of May leading up to the state's massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators – previously in self-exile for two years, he returned to China during the brief "Beijing Spring". As novelist, he painstakingly recreates the cycle of idealism, arrogance, confusion and despair that characterized the experience of demonstrators on the ground in the square.

Initially mobilized into action by the death of the reformist former Secretary General Hu Yaobang in April 1989, the largely university-based protesters quickly find themselves dissembling into competing factions and squabbling petty ideologues.

Although prone to sometimes numbingly pedantic debates over the most politically correct protocol, Ma Jian's young would-be revolutionaries are also painfully human. Some are characterized by their body odour and childish resentment, others by their stubborn idealism and romantic allure. (As much as he reflects on the events leading up to the tragedy, Dai Wei fixates on sex, love and the smell of a former lover's foot.) Arguing over the protocol of press conferences and wording of banners, buffeted by conflicting rumours of state response, the demonstrators leave themselves ripe for slaughter long before the rumble of tanks is heard at the perimeter gates.

As witness to, participant in, and ultimate casualty of the events, the flesh-imprisoned Dai Wei is especially vulnerable to torturous musings over what went wrong:

"A light so bright it's almost black hovers above my bed," he observes. "If I'm to die now, I won't feel many regrets. I've been lying here for ten years. I have retrieved every detail of my life. There is nothing left for me to remember. If I'm to die now, I won't feel many regrets, only grief and guilt about the students who died before me."

As horrifying as the author's rendering of the ultimate crackdown is – replete with harrowingly vivid descriptions of bodies crushed by tanks and ripped open by exploding bullets – the infamous slaughter isn't itself the primary object of critical regard in Beijing Coma. Ma Jian focuses more on the collapse that precedes the crush. If anything, this is what marks the novel as both daring and controversial.

It's one thing to damn the Chinese government for doing what it had already proven itself only too willing and able to do in the past. It's quite another to suggest that the demonstrators were nearly as complicit in their own slaughter as those who gave the order to shoot.

Set mostly in 1999, two years after the "handover" of Hong Kong and in the thick of the country's preparation for an Olympic bid – which leads directly to the demolition of the building where Dai Wei lies – Beijing Coma manages to shine a harsh light of history even through the smudged prism of the present. While occasionally choked by a dizzying overabundance of incident, character and detail, especially of the politically windy variety, the book still yanks atrocity out of the shadows and holds human arrogance and folly to account.

By the end of Beijing Coma, Dai Wei has learned that many of his former Tiananmen comrades have become successful 21st century Chinese capitalists. Like their country, they're marching forward, not letting history get in the way of progress.

Author and broadcaster Geoff Pevere is The Star's book columnist. He appears weekly.