Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Few foreigners go to Shaoxing, and it is hard to understand why. The canals are romantic and dreamy, and the Qing dynasty houses are built right down to the water; the windows are adorned with carved wooden screens, and women kneel beside the water to scrub laundry; the canal boats are as intimate as gondolas, and the boatmen use their feet to push the big oars. You can always see the grand pagoda on the hillside just beyond the city, and on the day we were there, someone was listening to Beijing opera at high volume, and the music echoed down the byways. To get to and from the canal boats, you travel by bicycle rickshaw through winding, enigmatic streets too narrow for cars. We ate at Xianheng and had several variations on chou doufu, some palatably mild. I took more eagerly to another local fermented specialty: Shaoxing rice wine. We also had eggplant with a peppery okra-like vegetable, and caramelized-pork buns, sweet and rich. For dessert there were sticky rice cakes with black sesame seeds, an almost bitter flavor, and honey. Han Feng led the toasting, and we felt ready to burst with food, alcohol, and pleasure. We realized that we were having an average of twelve dishes at each meal, and that we were having two meals a day, and that we were going to be in China for twenty-one days, which meant that by the time we left we would have tried more than five hundred dishes. We took some deep breaths.

For the Chinese, there are two great cuisines—Sichuan and Cantonese. Travelers know Cantonese because it is the cuisine of Hong Kong, but Sichuan province is still off most tourist maps. Sichuan natives talk about peppers the way other people talk about sports teams. Their cuisine makes Mexican food seem bland, but the heat is layered and complex, the different kinds of hot spices mixed and remixed, toasted and fresh, soaked in different agents to create a range of intense pleasure and exquisite pain. The trademark Sichuan pepper is hua jiao, which is in fact not a pepper at all, but the dried fruit of the prickly ash shrub. Amazingly potent, it makes your mouth numb, but it is a wonderful numbness. You can feel it setting about its anesthetic work as soon as you taste it, yet at the same time it seems to make your taste buds somehow more intensely awake. It’s almost as if whatever you’re eating has been stewed in cocaine. Strange and distressing at first, it becomes an object of longing.

We had lunch at My Humble House, a very unhumble restaurant in Chengdu in a park surrounded by bamboo groves and waterways. The style is upmarket modern Chinese, with giant scholars’ chairs, a silk-draped four-poster bed on which you can loll, pools of carp, halogen lights, and tables scattered with silk rose petals. The food is Chinese fusion—incorporating the influence not of Western food, but of the multiple branches of Chinese and Southeast Asian cuisine—so, for example, the traditional Cantonese shark’s fin soup is made here with the addition of creamy pumpkin.

Sichuan is justly famous for its teahouses. Most Chengdu businessmen leave their offices in the afternoon and conduct business over tea. Women go to play mah-jongg, gossips to gossip, children to play. We went to Yi Yuan, the most beautiful teahouse in Chengdu, in a restored Ming garden with a dozen courtyards, reflecting pools, pavilions, walkways, gaming tables, great sculpted lake rocks, and bridges framed by pines. We sat at a table next to some Buddhist monks and drank perfumed tea.

On entering China Grand Plaza for dinner, I felt as Marco Polo must have at the gates of the Forbidden City. Here in what I had foolishly thought was the middle of nowhere was dazzling opulence. You walk through enormous doors into a vast lobby, where a pianist is playing Chopin on a concert grand, and see porcelain and furniture that could easily be in one of the world’s better museums. China Grand Plaza includes an art gallery, a spa with three gigantic heated pools and a bevy of gorgeous masseuses, two karaoke bars (one of which has a glass ceiling in which fish swim), four restaurants, and hotel guest rooms. The feeling is of extravagant elegance with a touch of Goldfinger.