Editor’s Note: This is Part Three of a three-part series exploring Hugh Battye’s book, A Tale of Two Chinas. In Part One, Battye shared an account of his fifteen years living in the mainland and in Part Two, he shared an excerpt from chapter 17.
At the Hui wedding in Minhe, I was goaded into eating a fisheye, which turned out to be a strange portent of my experience back in Liuji that same evening, where I was returning after a couple of weeks absence. At the end of a hearty supper of noodles on the kang, Sophia left for the kitchen and reappeared with the crowning delicacy that they had kept specially for my arrival: a pair of boiled sheep’s heads. I managed a tongue, an eye–think fisheye multiplied by a factor of eight–and some other bits and pieces, before deciding that I had done sufficient duty on the politeness stakes to justify turning down one of the brains, which, upon my refusal, Sophia immediately devoured with relish.
Sheep’s head is widely regarded as a specialty in Northwest China, a fact that is reflected in a popular saying, which is used as a metaphor for unscrupulously flogging fake goods:
挂羊头，卖狗肉
Gua yangtou, mai gourou
Hang sheep’s head [but] sell dog meat.
For Chinese Muslims, the contrast between the two products is further heightened, since dog meat is not halal, and dogs themselves are also regarded as unclean. In the village setting, whether among the Muslims or the Han, dogs are usually kept for the sole purpose of guarding the house, and therefore left continually chained up or in a cage. Such treatment naturally makes them more vicious, to the extent that, following a number of dicey encounters, I started to develop my own kind of “Chinese countryside cynophobia” syndrome. It was, therefore, contrastingly refreshing when, in the summer of 2015, my Ganhetan friend Issachar invited me to join him and his friends for a twenty-four hour stay in Chuimatan, which involved a celebratory lunch for someone who had been accepted into college, an evening of KTV, and, most memorably, the chance to hang out with his beautiful golden retriever, Bella. On discovering that the dog was in fact a male, I explained to Issachar that “Bella” was a girl’s name, but we then agreed that it did not actually matter too much, since Bella himself would not be unduly concerned about the fact. However, to try to stop myself from continually thinking of the dog as a female, I decided to know him as “Baylor,” since that was similar to how Issachar pronounced it. Gender aside, what struck me the most about “Baylor” was his almost miraculous transformation during those couple of days, from the aggressive, barking guard dog couped up in the cage back in Ganhetan, who consistently looked like he wanted to kill you, to the sweetest pet imaginable. Nurture, as well as nature, clearly does matter. However, modern sensibilities must be set against the reality of life in the countryside, without sophisticated alarm systems for the open-planned siheyuan housing. By marked contrast, in high-rise Lanzhou, where such natural alarm systems are not needed, lapdogs roam the streets and parks in the prettiest colored frocks, followed by their proud mistresses who have recently retired from their government day jobs. The losers in the urban context are, in fact, cats, who are kept on leashes or in tiny cages at the entrances to small restaurants and businesses, in order to be utilized against intruders of the rodent order, all at the owner’s leisure, and without any undue inconvenience caused by the inconsiderate feline tendency to wander off.
Back in Jishishan, my joyful time with Baylor nearly ended in total disaster. Concerned that he did not get enough exercise, I decided to take him for a short run down the lane in Liuji, where we were visiting one of Issachar’s friends on our way home. We were not long into our excursion when I somehow managed to inspire the dog to sprint headlong into the front of an oncoming tuolaji (tractor). Bouncing straight off the front wheel, he rolled onto the side of the lane, while the driver of the vehicle, in a brazen act of liability-avoidance, carried straight on without so much as a turn of the head. Baylor, for his part, immediately jumped up again, and I was greatly relieved to see that, while he was clearly shaken, and now boasted a large black tire mark imprinted on his side, he had managed to survive the ordeal intact. The incident did, however, have the effect of bringing a swift conclusion to my brief foray into animal welfare promotion in rural China.
Sheep’s head was not the only specialty I was served by my host family. When I first arrived, the cage in the corner of courtyard contained eight cute-looking white bunnies, and for a while I naively wondered whether there was such a thing as a pet in the countryside in China after all, my intuition strengthened by an (incorrect) notion that rabbits were not halal. By the time of my return after the same wedding in Minhe, however, the rabbit population had decreased by three, and, sure enough, later that month they also appeared on the menu. Most of the time, however, meals were less exquisite: noodles of various sorts, bread, vegetables, and meat for special occasions. The most popular meat dish was the dapanji (“big plate of chicken”), which was exactly as described–one big plate containing a whole chicken chopped up, head, feet and all, and mixed together with potatoes and noodles. Dairy products, by contrast, play a minimal role in the diet of the region, except for when someone becomes sick, in which case the patient is suddenly inundated with huge trays of eggs together with boxes of long-life milk packets, as if the well-wishers are trying to realize their whole annual protein quota in the space of one week. In Ayyub’s case the accumulative effect was heightened, owing to the fact that he distinctly disliked both products, which meant that the periods of his convalescence turned out much for my benefit. I had supplies of milk for weeks on end, and every so often Sophia would cook a meal with the aim of getting through as many eggs as possible. My record in one go was two boiled eggs for a starter, followed by the lion’s share of her fifteen-egg, mixed-dish gastronomical magnum opus.
Fruit, likewise, is not usually consumed as part of regular meals, but during the summer a huge watermelon chopped up and distributed among family members forms a regular antidote to the thirst-inducing heat. Melons, however, are not only valued for their taste. One day, Hakei, our genial, middle-aged neighbor, came round to make use of the broadband internet I had had installed at our house, in order to download a television series on his smartphone. As his token of appreciation, he handed me what looked like a relatively small watermelon but then went on to explain that it was not actually for eating. It was, he told me, a “kan-gua”–a “look-melon”, something to be enjoyed for its aesthetic value, as one would a flower. Following his advice, I proceeded to place the said “look-melon” at the back of my desk, and there it remained, accompanying me in my study and reading over the following weeks and months. Meanwhile, I also discovered that another fruit that I had hitherto taken for granted as commonly appreciated around the world, the lemon, was quite unknown in this countryside region. One evening, Sophia walked into my room, grabbed one of the lemons that a friend from Linxia had recently gifted me to slice and put in my tea, and asked if I wanted to consume it with them there and then. I declined (I was already in bed anyway), and left them to it, suitably impressed in my mind that they “even eat lemons neat here.” Awhile later, over dinner, I mentioned casually how I had put some ningmeng (lemon) in my tea. “What?” They asked.
“Ningmeng.”
“Sorry?”
“Ningmeng.” When I could see they did not know what I meant, I used a pair of chopsticks to pull a slice out of my thermos mug.
“Oh, that thing is so sour!” they replied. “We tried eating it but had to spit it out straight away!” It then dawned on me that they had never actually heard of the lemon fruit and had simply assumed it was some kind of small melon that should be eaten straight.
The family highlight of the year was the grand picnic held during late spring, where they gathered with friends and relations at the foothills of the Jishishan mountains to cook savory favorites on makeshift fires: boiled mutton, the “big plate of chicken,” various vegetable dishes and square noodles. Even on such a special occasion, however, one of the main preoccupations of the day was to scour the mountain slopes for juecai, a wild green vegetable that could either be sold or kept for personal consumption. Determined not to join in with what I considered such an arduous task on the one big family day out of the year, I would sit reading my Kindle or take on one of the hills nearby. The second year I attended, while the family were busy vegetable-picking, I climbed one of the slopes to a considerable height, taking the time to appreciate the grandeur of the shrubbed-lined mountains opposite, their hues of lavish green set below the traces of snow which still dusted the rocky peaks. Returning elated and triumphant after my conquest, I was immediately brought back down to earth by Nainai in her trademark Linxiahua.
“Juecay a li lia?” Where is your juecai? Indeed. What was the point in climbing a mountain, if you came down with nothing to show for it?
The concept of exercise for its own sake was quite alien to most of the villagers; farming was arduous work and many aspects of life already revolved around the physical. It seemed, therefore—not unreasonably—somewhat strange for someone to engage in an activity in order to deliberately make themselves tired. Apart from the obvious fact that I was a “researcher,” without, from the point of view of the villagers, either a clear goal (Nainai had not heard of the concept of a PhD), or an obvious means of a good income, my middle-class credentials were also clearly shown through my hobby of running. As soon as Nainai saw me about to set off in a t-shirt on a cool day, she would invariably laugh and shout out “Ganmo liu!”–“You’ll catch a cold!” And while wearing a t-shirt per se, for a younger man, was a cultural norm in warmer weather, I never observed an adult wearing shorts in any temperature. When I lived in Ganhetan, I would try to show sensitivity by running in tracksuit trousers, especially when my route took me past the Naitou gongbei; eventually, however, my enthusiasm for contextualization waned—after all, jogging itself already felt completely out of place. In Liuji, as part of my regular routine, I would run the five miles down the main road to Dahejia, carrying a backpack containing a towel and a change of clothes in anticipation of my subsequent shower at one of the Muslim ablution places in town. Oftentimes, a car or motorcycle would slow down beside me, the driver grinning and pointing to the empty front seat, or patting the saddle behind him, while continuing to drive along parallel at my speed, for ease of what, over time, would become a familiar conversation.
“I’ll give you a lift.”
“No thanks, I’m fine.”
“I’ll give you a lift.”
“No thanks, I’m fine.”
“But it’s a long way to town, I’ll give you a lift.”
“Thanks, but I’m duanlian shenti–exercising my body!”
“I’ll give you a lift.”
“I’m doing this on purpose!”
The annual picnic in the mountains was the nearest the family got to a holiday. The urban class assumption of a designated number of days off work in a year, with the time and money to go traveling, was far from the experience of most of the villagers. For the working aged men, any travel was usually to and from their workplaces or projects, while for the younger married women, downtime involved returning to their parents’ home–niangjia–for a few days. Centrally designated holidays, important for the middle class, would largely go unnoticed in the villages, where agricultural and migrant labor hours were based on necessity rather than convenience. And, in fact, the solar calendar itself, while the official calendar (gongli) in government and educational circles, was seldom used outside those domains in the countryside, where important dates were invariably referred to using the lunar “agricultural calendar” (nongli). This resulted, for me, in regular referrals to Lanzhou University’s handy joint calendar, as I converted the dates of haiting and other events from lunar to solar, as one might Fahrenheit to Centigrade. Even among the urbanites, the lunar calendar is still the one that really counts, a verity exemplified by the strange atmosphere at New Year’s Eve celebrations in the mainland, where, beneath all the smiles and toasting, everyone knows that in reality there is still around a month to go to the “real thing”. It’s the “New Year but not quite.” And back among the villagers, January 1st does not even register as anything noteworthy, apart from the fact that the millennial number that they have been taught since their youth to designate the year by, has yet again increased by one.
