Chongqing Family Reunion

Full of duck heads and quail eggs, we went for a walk along the Yangtze river. The wharf was lined with yachts getting ready for the three-day cruise to the Three Gorges, or the longer journey to Shanghai.

The island of downtown Chongqing ends in a point where the Yangtze meets the Jialing, and this is usually a sightseeing spot, but that day it was under construction and closed off. Next to the construction site there was a slate gray windowless building. Inside was an exhibition about the future of Chongqing: panoramic pictures of what downtown would look like when construction was complete.

The skyline of downtown Chongqing is already impressive, but in the new version two enormous towers loomed over everything from right where we were standing. We stopped to watch a video explain the planned development of infrastructure surrounding the city. Under the video was a scale model of all of Chongqing, each area lighting up when it was mentioned in the video.

We left the construction site and fought for a cab, and half an hour later we were on a dirt road surrounded by jungle. Dark brick houses sat far back in the trees and others balanced on the edge of a cliff over a river. This is where Shushu and Ayi lived and raised their daughter until she was nine and they moved to Chengdu. It's also where most of Ayi's siblings and their families still live.

The family congregated in the middle of a quiet intersection. Ayi is the oldest of five sisters and a brother, the youngest. Instead of using their names, they were all referred to by their birth order. There was Two-Aunt and her husband Two-Aunt-Dad, Three-Aunt and Three-Aunt-Dad, and so on down to Five-Aunt/Five-Aunt-Dad and then the brother, Jiujiu.

We walked to a lean-to in front of a small house and everyone stood under it and smoked and chatted. Next to the doorway was a sink and a cutting board where a woman was chopping up fish.

Five-Aunt-Dad pours the rice wine 

Fish chopped, we went inside. The living room was big enough for two round tables: one for men and one for women. In the middle of each table was a large pot of deep red soup, into which the fish pieces were dropped. While we waited for the soup to boil, Five-Aunt-Dad poured cups of baijiu.

After dinner we went for a walk. In the darkened street a man approached us and exchanged a few words with Shushu, then led us down an unlit alley. In the alley was an unmarked door. The man opened it and beckoned us in.

Inside was a small room with a desk, a sofa, a stack of old newspapers in the corner, and what looked like a dentist's chair. On the desk was a pool of candle wax and a few metal tools.

Shushu got in the dentist's chair and five minutes later his tooth was pulled.

This was Shushu's best friend from his Chongqing days, he later told me. His friend had been the dentists for Shushu's work division. He was retired, but kept this little office as a private practice for his friends and family.

Five-Aunt-Dad in front of Shushu's daughter's old elementary school 

Shushu stuck a piece of cotton into his mouth, his friend bid us goodnight, and we kept walking. On the right now was the Yangtze, further downstream from where we'd been earlier that day. The sky was clear and we could see the moon reflecting in the water. For once there was no sound of cars honking.

Five-Aunt-Dad pointed into the dark across the water.

Lemme tell ya somethin', he said in his Chongqing accented Mandarin, the words running together into a single utterance.

See that island? he asked. Then his finger pointed to a large black shape next to it. What he said next I couldn't make out, but with Didi translating it into his school-taught People's Language, I understood him to be saying there was going to be a new bridge connecting the little island to the Chongqing mainland.

The unpaved road led us up a hill and we came to a row of houses. We walked into a gap in a wooden fence and to the back of one of the houses. This was where Five-Aunt-Dad lived with his daughter. We sat on the couch and Five-Aunt-Dad served us tea from a thermos while he explained the Chongqing fruit business.

Five-Aunt-Dad then showed us his fruit warehouse, right next to where he lived. As fruit season had just ended, there were just a few piles of pomelos and oranges left in the corner to share with friends. This turned out to be what sustained me on the train trip back to Guangzhou the next day. We sat on stools around a crate as Five-Aunt-Dad gave us samples of each variety of pomelo.

It was already well past 10pm, but we jumped into Five-Aunt-Dad's three-wheeled buggy and barreled down the dirt road back into town. We came to a big apartment complex and started peering into first floor windows, looking for the rest of the family.

The tenants in these apartments had started private majiang parlors. For some hourly rate you can sit in their living room, playing majiang, drinking tea, and smoking until any hour of the night or morning. We found the other aunts and uncles engrossed at two tables, barely acknowledging our entrance, silent except for Four-Aunt-Dad's bitter exclamations whenever he lost. The tenant sat in the corner looking exhausted.

They played for another hour and then everyone went back to the intersection where we first met. It was near midnight, but the lights were on in a little food stand. We took seats on little plastic stools and waiting while the woman rolled and cut noodles by hand under a camp light. Ayi's mother, wielding a devil's pitchfork, sat next to me, and everyone laughed as we tried to communicate.

Chongqing snacks

I met my adoptive aunt and uncle the next morning for brunch. Because of all the levels in the shopping mall-karaoke parlor-park-apartment complex, it took us a while to find each other. We finally did, though, in front of an H&M buried in a hillside.

We walked from the H&M down the hill to a food court whose stalls were famous for selling authentic Chongqing snacks.

Left: Grilled skewered wood ear mushroom, potatoes, quail eggs, broccoli, shiitake mushrooms, tofu skin, and something slimy made from beans. Right: Sour-and-spicy yam noodles.

Steamed pork dumplings.

Marinated dry tofu. The shop that sold this was actually more famous for its marinated duck heads.

Starch noodles in spicy sauce

To be continued...

Chongqing

Chongqing, also known as the Mountain City, is a metropolis built around the confluence of the Jialing and Yangtze rivers in west-central China. It was part of Sichuan until 1997, when the government split it off into a separate province due to its enormous population. 

Last Friday at 7:45am I took the bullet train from Chengdu. I took turns dozing and watching the terraced hillsides go by in a blur, the only sound in the train an advertisement for dried lean beef strips, playing on repeat. The train ride used to take 12 hours, but now the high speed rail gets there in two hours. 

In front of the train station there was a bus to the monorail station. The monorail took me to a subway. From the subway station I took an escalator up and found myself in a shopping mall, still three floors below ground. I went up to the ground level, went outside, and reviewed the directions to the hostel on my phone.

Go to the third floor of the shopping mall and exit the door near the wedding banquet hall, said the directions.

I went back inside, up three more flights of escalator, and found the wedding banquet hall. Next to it there was another door that led to a street (the kind you can walk on, etc.).

Take a left, go into the Taiwanese karaoke parlor, and take the elevator to the eighth floor, read the next step in the directions.

I walked through the sparkly gold lobby and into a glass elevator. We were already on the third floor. The fourth through seventh floors looked like typical apartment building hallways, but on the eighth floor the door opened onto a park. 

Go through the park and into the first building on the right, said the instructions. 

The hostel was an apartment on the 35th floor to which some extra bunk beds had been added. I had one roommate, a Singaporean named Sherman, who had bleached hair and all white clothes and wore toe socks and toe shoes. He said he used to be a world music composer, but now he was writing a novel instead.

"Small noodles" (小麵) with a fried egg, a common Chongqing street snack. The sauce has the "málà" spicy-numbing flavor combination characteristic of Sichuanese hot pot. 

Savory tofu pudding (豆花). You take a piece and dip it in the spicy garlic-sesame sauce and then eat it.

Downtown Chongqing at night. The small tower in the middle with the dome was the tallest building in Chongqing when it was built; now it's possibly the shortest.

 

This and below: The Hongyadong (洪崖洞, literally "Flood Cliff Cave"), a big old complex on the banks of the Jialing river.

Where the Jialing river meets the Yangtze, seen from outside the Hongyadong.

Sauces for sale in the Hongyadong.

In my apartment at 6:02 I hear an ice cream truck version of Für Elise start outside. I grab the blue plastic bag from the trash can, tie it up, kick on my flip-flops, and run downstairs. Outside, people carrying bags of the same color and widely varying sizes are converging from all directions on the truck, which is parked down the street. Actually, there are two trucks -- a big garbage truck and a smaller pickup behind it. We throw our blue bags into the big one and watch them get compressed by the metal door. There are big plastic tubs set behind it where people dump their compost and restaurant workers take turns pouring a day's worth of leftovers. The compost truck takes my empty water and yogurt bottles. I notice some people putting their bottles in a separate heap nearby, which is being watched over by an old woman. She tells me she's a private recycling enterprise. Noticing that some people put their recycling in the pickup while others choose her pile, I ask her what the practical difference is. She shrugs.

The internet already has enough postcard pictures of places like Hong Kong on it. That's my excuse for not posting any good photos. 

It was a two-hour flight from drizzling, cool Taipei to sunny, humid Hong Kong. Then a 45-minute bus ride from the airport to a bus stop right in front of the hostel near the south tip of Kowloon. The hostel is in the Comfort Building, a thin wedge between two bigger commercial units in one of the big buildings that take up whole blocks and almost feel like cities unto themselves. 

To get to the hostel, I walked down the narrow hallway and crammed into a small elevator that was just big enough for two other people plus me and my backpack, and went to the sixth floor. The sixth floor of this sliver of building was in turn partitioned into six units. Opening the door of the hostel partition, I was greeted by an empty desk with a long, narrow hallway behind it.

I walked down the hallway and found a TV, a refrigerator, and an empty bottle of Macallan 12 year, but no people. I had the contact info for the host, a mysterious entity known by the moniker Tabi88. I texted them that I'd arrived. The reply came almost immediately.

I can see you're in the common room.

I looked around and saw a camera on the ceiling down the hall, pointed at me. 

Your room is to your left, bed #0. 

Thanks, I texted back, realizing I was never going to meet or find out anything about this Tabi88 entity. 

The view west out the window of Tiger Curry, a cafe that specializes in Japanese style curry pasta and cheesecake. It's in one of the numerous expensive-looking shopping malls that line the west side of Kowloon.

Fish balls ("fish eggs") and fish slices in egg noodle soup.

Near the hostel

7-Eleven, Mr. He, and New Foods

There's a sports center with a gym not far from my apartment where I usually go for exercise. Afterward, I typically go to 7-Eleven for soy milk, a tea egg, and an onigiri.

As an aside, 7-Elevens in Taiwan are the opposite of 7-Elevens in the States. The version in the States, of course, is best known for its 48oz. Slurpees and food items made primarily from leftover industrial waste and discarded cattle feed, which can hospitalize an otherwise healthy person if eaten in any significant quantity. That's about all it has to offer.

The version in Taiwan is different. For one thing, it sells items that resemble real food: sandwiches, pasta, onigiri, almond slivers with tiny dried fish, the aforementioned tea eggs. It's still all laced with preservatives, and it's still a minefield of industrial sludge shaped like potato chips, but the point is that things with nutritional value can be had.

Then there's everything else: the clean bathrooms (again, no need to buy anything to use one), the ATMs (no transaction fee), the clean, bright seating areas inside and outside, the free WiFi, and the all-purpose vending machines, where you can buy things like plane tickets, train tickets, bus tickets, and concert tickets, print out contracts, get a passport photo taken, make photocopies, deliver or receive packages, or do pretty much anything else that would otherwise require you to go to some specialized place that does only one of those things. I'm pretty sure they also print wedding certificates, though I haven't tried.

So usually I go there for my post-exercise snack. For the sake of variety, however, today I went to the lunch cafeteria next door. It was in a small shack that looked like it was caving in. A couple people who had just ordered were waiting outside the open entrance, and a woman with an apron was standing over a cart with two cauldrons of hot liquid. I ordered a shrimp fried rice and the woman told me to sit, nodding in the direction of the door of the adjacent building.

Inside was a long room of tables with people eating. Every seat was taken except for one table at the back, where an old man was sitting by himself, facing the wall. I sat down across from him.

He looked up and smiled at me, revealing long, crooked, discolored teeth with several large gaps, and asked where I was from.

Mr. He (pronounced like "huh") is 70 and worked in real estate from high school straight until his retirement. He's one of nine children, eight of which are boys, and has five sons. He's been married and divorced twice, and now lives with his girlfriend of 18 years. His dream is to travel around the world, but he's afraid of flying and so has only been as far as Korea and Japan.

Why don't you take a boat? I offered. You still look plenty young to travel the world.

Thank you, he said. You've comforted me.

He asked me how old I was, and when I told him he nodded approvingly and laughed. Good! He reached into a bag and produced a seaweed snack, which he offered to me. Then he pointed at his teeth and laughed again.

You don't brush your teeth? I ventured.

Five times a day! he replied. He reached into the bag again and produced a toothbrush and rinsing cup to prove it.

Maybe that's a few too many times, I caught myself thinking.

Mr. He took his phone out of his pocket and showed me a video of cats in a cage.

These are my cats, he said. I have twelve cats, and two dogs.

I wanted to ask why they were all in cages, but thought better of it. We exchanged phone numbers, and wished each other the best of luck.

These are dishes I had last night at a 熱炒 ("Hot fry") restaurant. Clockwise, from top-right: Birds-nest fern with small dried fish; Deep-fried oysters and basil; Sweet and sour Asian swamp eel; Whole squid with ginger; Basil omelet. Not pictured but consumed: Deep fried, breaded pineapple shrimp balls with frosting and rainbow sprinkles on top.

A chandelier store, I assume.

This gloopy dessert, which I had two nights ago at the 寧夏 night market, is made from grass jelly (仙草). Inside, hidden in the jelly, are fun things like boiled balls of glutinous rice flour (湯圓) and pinto beans. Another dessert I had here, which was even more of a gastronomical revelation, is a pungent, sweet and sour, pinkish soup made from fermented rice (I'm pretty sure it's made with koji). The version I had contained large glutinous rice flour balls stuffed with sweet black sesame paste. I was so excited about this that I forgot to take a picture.

The entrance of a temple.

This past weekend I went to Taichung (台中). Here are some photos and episodes from that trip. 

A karaoke house in Taichung. The night special lets you sing from 11pm until 8am, and includes a buffet with things like noodles, miso soup, porridge, and ice cream. 

萬能青年旅店 playing to a packed house at TADA方舟 in Taichung.

Downtown 台中.

Square in front of the Science Museum.

Fish and onions with deep-fried soybean paste granules.

Taichung's annual international jazz festival. This is one of several stages scattered throughout the city parks. 

These four pictures are from the coffeehouse I stayed at, 艸田空間 ("Grass Field Space"). Run by three artists and longtime residents of Taichung, it's actually more like a community center than just a coffeehouse. Two of the artists, Ahuan and Xiaolian, live in the rooms behind Grass Field Space. While I was there, friends were constantly coming and going.

On Saturday night they invited two local farmers to come and talk about the problems with industrial eggs and chicken, and the difficulties with small-scale, traditional farming. I was at the jazz festival that night and when I got back around 10pm the presentation was already over, but people was still talking in the living room. They talked about slaughterhouses, raising goats and the need to keep them separated to avoid a critical mass that would lead to violence, and of course the ethics of killing other animals, on which topic everyone seemed to have a different perspective. I had a hard time following the discussion after that, partly because I was tired and partly because it seemed to be getting more and more abstract as the night went on. Around 2am everyone else moved to the patio and I fell asleep on the living room couch to the sound of voices and the occasional snap of the mosquito zapper.

The next morning at about 11 I woke up to a low chime sound and the smell of frying butter. Xuezong, who runs 松竹本部 ("Pine Bamboo Headquarters"), a teahouse he opened together with the artists at Grass Field Space, was sitting on the patio in the same spot where I'd last seen him the night before. Another friend, a pharmacist who had just come back from Germany, was asleep on the floor in the living room. Xiaolian and Ahuan were carrying plates of vegetables, beans, seitan, omelets, and rice porridge with pumpkin slices to the patio table.

While we ate we talked about crop circles. Ahuan showed me a picture of a crop circle from Brazil that looked like a big spiral with a smaller baseball next to it.

The spiral is the world, and that's the motor, he said, pointing to the baseball.

I asked him how he knew it was a motor. He pulled up a YouTube video of a three-dimensional yin and yang construction. It started with two flat circles, and then lines started filling in the space between them. At one point Ahuan pointed -- there! -- and it did indeed look like the same shape. He explained that the yin and yang shape and this motor design are just two dimensional representations of a black hole.

After breakfast, five of us went to a warehouse in the alley behind the coffeehouse. They had bought this building recently and were using it temporarily as a storage space for the materials and props they needed to run an annual music festival, the first of which was last February. All the buildings they used during last year's festival they had built themselves with these materials, which appeared to be mostly scrap lumber and dilapidated furniture.

A few of us climbed up an unfinished staircase and stepped into the loft, completely filled with boxes except for a narrow uneven walkway and a small room in the back with bedding and a mosquito net.

Guests sometimes stay here, Xuezong informed me.

From the loft, we climbed up a wobbly metal staircase lined with thin, nailed-together plywood, and came up to the roof. The roof had another structure built on top of it, made mostly from tied-together bamboo and corrugated metal. Again, it was mostly full of boxes and furniture, and at one end there was another empty room with bedding and a mosquito net.

Ahuan built all this, Xuezong said. People often ask him how he learned all this stuff. He always tells them that humans originally have the ability to build shelter. But we didn't learn any of it in school, so now we have to teach ourselves.

We made our way up a narrow cardboard ramp into the DIY roof structure, careful not to prick ourselves on the nails sticking out of the plywood railing. In the front there was a balcony with a charcoal grill, looking new in comparison to everything else. Xuezong was hauling another box up from the street below, using a thick rope.

There's no place to put it! he shouted down to Ahuan, shoving it into a corner.

As we climbed carefully back down, Xuezong told me they were going to turn this place into a performance venue.

We just need to take care of all this stuff first, he said.

Looking at the boxes behind chairs behind broken pianos behind stacks of paper behind more boxes, I asked how they could be so calm in the face of such a great task.

We wait until it's sunny and we're feeling good before doing any work, Ahuan told me, beaming.

These two pictures are from Pine Bamboo Headquarters, the teahouse. Most of the furniture, the cabinets, and the bar itself were either salvaged or made from salvaged materials by Ahuan, Xuezong, and friends.

The space has housed poetry readings, a pickled plum workshop, and other events. The menu consists of a few kinds of black tea grown in 日月潭 ("Sun Moon Lake", where I happened to be a few weeks ago -- post forthcoming) and a sandwich. Xuezong is teaching himself how to make Japanese snacks so he can expand the food menu.