Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Wagging his finger like a disappointed nanny, Saif Qaddafi warned as the revolution against his father began in 2011, “There will be civil war in Libya. . . . We will kill one another in the streets.” Now such killing is rampant. Saif himself, wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, is imprisoned in Zintan; his captors have amputated the digits he used when reprimanding his country’s citizens. Though he was sentenced to death in the summer of 2015 by GNC-controlled courts, he is unlikely to be executed anytime soon; he is a useful bargaining chip for those who hold him. Indeed, the whole sentencing appeared to be a gesture of defiance by the GNC against the international community that wants Saif Qaddafi sent to The Hague. In August 2015, pro-Qaddafi demonstrators took to the streets for the first time, chanting, “Zintan, Zintan, free Saif al-Islam.” From a distance, that old horror had begun to look attractive, especially to anti-Islamists in Benghazi, Sebha, and Tripoli.

CHINA

All the Food in China

Travel + Leisure, October 2005

Pleasure comes at a cost, and I gained eleven pounds on this monthlong eating trip. At the end of our sybaritic stay, during a foray to the trendy 798 area of Beijing where many of my artist friends had studios, my partner, John, and I stumbled on a boutique with an elegant mandarin jacket in its window display. I asked the saleswoman, “Would you have that in my size?” She looked at me with a respectful expression and said extremely politely, “Ah, no. I am so sorry. We make clothes for thin people here.”

Before my first trip to China, in 1982, I was warned that the food would be terrible, and it more than met expectations: greasy, gristly, dismal, prepared with that brutal indifference Communism seemed to celebrate, and served up gray and ugly. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore kept alive the Chinese culinary tradition, three tiny candles standing in for the greatest bonfire in the world. By the early nineties, the situation was somewhat better, as long as you stuck with simple things or ate in people’s homes. In the past five years, Chinese cooking has risen phoenix-like from the ashes, and divine food is now to be found in the country’s unnumbered restaurants. It is hard to understand how the Chinese have retained some semblance of sanity in a country so utterly transformed, because the China of today is as dissimilar to the China I first visited as Oz is to Kansas. Where miserable-looking people in tattered uniforms once tilled depleted fields while unconvincing workers celebrated the Communist state in unbearable factory performances, one now finds a level of efficiency and sophistication in the cities that leaves me feeling that New York is quite nearly a provincial backwater. Of course legions of peasants still labor in poverty, but the advances in China have spread through a broader swath of society than those in Russia. The improvement in the food reflects a profound social transformation: what was once reliably unpleasant is now often thrilling. While these changes are most obvious in Beijing’s and Shanghai’s smartest restaurants, they can also be found in country inns and at street dumpling stands.

I had the good fortune to do a culinary tour with the fashion designer Han Feng, who is warm and glamorous and sparkling with life, and who led us to both the fanciest restaurants in China and the best street food imaginable. “You won’t believe it,” she said on our second day in Shanghai as we drew near to Jia-Jia Juicy Dumplings, in the old Yu Yuan district, a grungy-looking stand where a huge meal costs about a dollar. Seated on plastic stools on the sidewalk, we gorged on dumplings filled with soup and pork, shrimp, or hairy crab (a regional delicacy). You dip them in rice vinegar with ginger, and when you bite down, first the warm soup floods your mouth, then you experience the smooth skin and the rich meaty filling. Mobs descend on the place in all sorts of weather, and the eight women who work there are crowded so close together that you wonder how they can move their arms. A great steamer sits outside, piled high with bamboo baskets, watched over by a woman whose face is constantly shrouded in vapor. But everyone smiles and laughs. “How can this be so good?” Han Feng asked us, glowing with pride.

She was the inventor of our trip—and it took some considerable inventing—and she is also the inventor of herself, as miraculous and unlikely as modern China in all its glory. Han Feng left the People’s Republic in 1985 to move to New York, but has recently taken a Shanghai apartment, relocated her production to her homeland, and started dividing her time between the two countries.