Fuchsia Dunlop » People

Pearl Buck in China

Fuchsia — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:52:23 +0000

I recently finished reading Hilary Spurling’s masterful biography of Pearl Buck, the daughter of American missionaries who grew up in China and became a novelist who introduced many in America to Chinese culture (and won the Nobel Prize for Literature). It was an utterly absorbing read. Among other things it was a sobering reminder of the appalling poverty of pre-revolutionary China, and the extraordinary achievements of the communists in their early days in power – it’s easy to let the horrors of the Anti-Rightist Movement, the post-Great Leap famine and the Culture Revolution obscure this. And the episodes in which Pearl and her family were threatened and turned on by people in a place that felt like home will resonate, at least distantly, with many foreigners who have lived in China. (Peter Hessler, in River Town – another wonderful China book - described a nasty little event in Fuling, his home for two years, when a crowd turned ugly just because he was a foreigner. And it reminded me of the time I was nearly lynched by a hostile crowd in Chengdu, my beloved Chengdu, just after the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.)

Outside Pearl Buck's house in Zhenjiang

Funnily enough, I visited Pearl Buck’s house in the old vinegar town of Zhenjiang a year or two ago, without really knowing anything about her – the house is now a museum. It’s a colonial-style building on the top of a hill, and surrounded by modern apartment blocks. It was officially closed to the public on the day my friend Gwen and I tried to visit, because it was being used as the location for a Republican-era film. Fortunately the film crew let us have a snoop around, but it was a surreal experience because we kept stumbling across actors in Republican-era costumes (and almost literally stumbling across the power cables trailing all over the floors).

I wasn’t able to work out from Hilary Spurling’s book WHEN exactly Pearl Buck lived there – was it her marital home, or her childhood home with her parents? And is it normally filled with family photographs and objects that relate to her life? (It appeared to have been cleared and rearranged for the film.) If anyone has any information, please leave a comment here!

A Chinese view of Italian food

Fuchsia — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 15:47:20 +0000

The pleasures of cheese

You can read my piece about eating my way around Piedmont with Chinese restaurateur A Dai on the From Our Own Correspondent pages of the BBC’s website. Or you can listen to me reading it myself on their podcast for today, 13 November, on this webpage.

I’ll try to post a suitable photograph later!

Turin adventures

Fuchsia — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 09:49:07 +0000

I’m just back from a week in Turin for my first Slow Food Salone Del Gusto and Terra Madre. The Salone Del Gusto centres on a vast ‘Slow Food’ trade fair: two enormous halls filled with vendors of Italian delicacies, and (more interesting), a slightly smaller international hall where you can find extraordinary and wonderful foodstuffs, including ancient varieties of almonds from Uzbekistan, Yak’s milk cheese from the Tibetan Plateau, and dried mulberries and mulberry halva from the Pamir mountains. The simultaneous and adjacent Terra Madre is a gathering of some six thousand delegates from 161 countries, all of whom are in some way involved in sustainable local food production.

Funnily enough, I was a member of the Chinese delegation.

With A Dai in Cavoretto

I was there to accompany A Dai, the co-owner of the Dragon Well Manor restaurant in Hangzhou (龙井草堂). On Saturday we gave a joint presentation explaining the work of his restaurant, which specialises in what the Chinese call ‘natural, original, primordial’ (原生态) ingredients (what Westerners might call organic, artisanal food) and strives to preserve traditional cooking and food-production skills.

Diverse delegates

Over the course of the conference, we also met many wonderful people, including Vietnamese rice farmers, organic honey-makers from Jiangsu, NGO workers from D.R.Congo, Guinea-Bissau and South Korea, the fantastic and inspiring Australian chef Kylie Kwong and the Tibetan cheese-makers.

We also tasted what seemed like 5000 different kinds of salami and cheese, stocked up on fabulous chocolates at Guido Gobino, ate ludicrous amounts of meat and pasta, craved and fantastised about simple vegetarian food, and basked in glorious autumn sun. On our last day together, we drove into the Piedmontese countryside with Monica, a Slow Food volunteer. The autumn landscape

Autumn vineyards

was an exquisite patchwork of vineyards, purple, red, yellow and green. For lunch, we visited a restaurant run by friends of Monica’s, where we had the finest meal of the trip, a feast of raw veal, taglioni with white truffles, agnolini, bollito misto, cardoons and peppers, and robiola and castelmagna cheeses. Later, we visited her aunt and uncle for coffee, and played 1930s waltzes on their wind-up gramophone.

A few memories of the trip:

The view over Turin from our lovely old hostel in the hills of Cavoretto, with snow-capped mountains in the distance.

The Congolese delegates looking at my badge and saying: ‘But you don’t look Chinese.’

White truffles

The scent of white truffles.

Helping a confused Tibetan monk to find his bus home.

A Dai and Monica discussing football for an hour in the car, despite having no common language. (A Dai knows all the teams, the players, the football chants.)

Tasting and comparing honeys from Uganda, Japan, Italy and many other countries.

Running into football legend Giovanni Trapattoni in the rural restaurant – which, as you can imagine, made A Dai’s trip!

The culinary delights of Suzhou

Fuchsia — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 10:13:05 +0000

The garden of the Master of the Nets

You can read my article about Suzhou cuisine in today’s Financial Times Weekend.

Here are a few photographs from my various trips there: one of my favourite garden, the Garden of the Master of the Nets (网师园)；one of the Wumen Renjia restaurant courtyard, and other of the wonderful Mrs Sha, who runs it; and a couple of food.

Wumen Renjia

Mrs Sha Peizhi

Some appetisers

Delicious eel and pork noodles at Zhu Hong Xing

El Bulli

Fuchsia — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:17:03 +0000

The legendary Catalan chef Ferran Adria announced last night that he would be closing his restaurant, El Bulli, after the next two seasons. As I think I mentioned, I went there for dinner for the second time in October. Anyway, you can listen to me on BBC Radio today, on Newshour, talking about Ferran Adria and his work.

General Tso’s chicken (again)

Fuchsia — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:11:37 +0000

Francis Lam has written an interesting piece on the history of General Tso’s chicken for Salon.com. And I think it may clear up one of the niggling little questions that has been perplexing me since I gave a paper on the subject last month, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In the discussion that followed my talk, I realised that I didn’t have any idea how to explain the fact that, although the Taiwan-Hunanese chef Peng Chang-Kuei seems clearly to be the originator of the dish, and although the Chinese name of the dish on the menu of his restaurant in Taipei is Zuo Zongtang’s chicken (左宗棠土雞－ Zuo Zongtang is the full name of General Tso), he translates it as ‘Chicken a la Viceroy’. It didn’t occur to me to ask when and how the English name was changed from ‘Chicken a la Viceroy’ to ‘General Tso’s Chicken’ – and I’d resolved to ask Chef Peng and his son about this detail next time I talk to them.

Anyway, Francis’ article does suggest an explanation, which is that two other chefs in New York, David Keh and T.T.Wang, who had trained in Chef Peng’s Taipei restaurant and adopted many of his recipes, started calling the dish ‘General Tso’s chicken’, two years BEFORE Chef Peng opened his own restaurant in New York. Did Chef Peng adopt their translation for his own NYC menu?

Does this make sense, Francis, Ed Schoenfeld, Jennifer 8. Lee, my fellow General Tso sleuths?

(The photo on the left is of Chef Peng clinking glasses with Henry Kissinger in his New York Restaurant)

Feeding the Buddha

Fuchsia — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:32:27 +0000

My old friend Volker, who readers of ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’ may remember as my original partner-in-crime at the Sichuan cooking school, came to stay at the weekend. I hadn’t seen him for over three years, mainly because until two weeks ago, he was on a Tibetan Buddhist retreat at the Lerab Ling Temple in the South of France, which lasted, in traditional Tibetan fashion, for three years, three months and three days. As you can imagine, we spent the weekend spinning a lovely web of memories of Chengdu, discussing Buddhist philosophy, and eating.

Volker, for the past three years, three months and three days, has been living on very wholesome but rather plain biodynamic food in the temple canteen, and he has been completely overwhelmed by the riot of flavours of the past few days. He arrived at lunchtime on Saturday, and I greeted him with a pheasant and apple stew, mashed potatoes, stir-fried mushrooms and a salad of lettuce, fennel and apple. Then we ate some magnificent Vacherin Mont d’Or cheese with some bread I’d made that morning. After a brisk walk in the darkening afternoon, we spent a few hours drinking oolong tea and eating gingerbread from the Stuttgart Christmas market (Volker had been visiting his parents nearby). And then, for supper, a bowlful of mapo doufu, which sent Volker into great flights of nostalgic rapture (!), with Chinese cabbage, stir-fried with dried shrimps and steamed rice.

On Sunday, we went for dim sum at Royal China in Bayswater, which was fabulous as always, and then walked around Hyde Park, from Kensington Palace to the Albert Memorial, to the Serpentine and finally Speakers’ Corner, where we listened to an obscene and hilarious black raconteur from the Bronx holding forth on women, sex, power and money.

Later, we jumped on a tube to the East End, where we drank fine coffee and ate brownies, and then visited a chef friend who offered us foie gras and Chablis in his kitchen. And then on to a bar for cocktails and snacks. ‘Oh no!’ said Volker, as we made our way home, ‘I’m being attacked by the daughters of Mara!’ (As Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, on the brink of his enlightenment – Volker explained – the daughters of Mara, all the distractions and seductions of the impermanent world, attacked him, but the Buddha turned all their weapons into flowers. Volker, I fear, may not have the same powers of resistance: he sent me a text message today, while I was at work, that read ‘devouring leftovers and feeling bliss’.)

P.S. Susan, if you’re reading this post, Volker sends his regards. He’s still talking about that dim sum lunch in Hong Kong.

Fusion food in Shoreditch

Fuchsia — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:14:44 +0000

Non-Chinese cooks often consider Chinese food as a complete world apart from other styles of food, but I find that Chinese cold dishes mix well with dishes from other traditions. I often rustle up some kind of Sichuanese chicken salad, dressed in a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, chilli oil, Sichuan pepper and perhaps a little Chinese vinegar, for a party, and it always seems to go down a storm. The spicy cucumber salad from my Sichuan book is another favourite – incredibly easy to make in advance, unusual and delicious.

Supper at my friend Anissa Helou’s place last week turned out to be a polyglot feast, with Gujarati snacks she commissioned from the mother of her newsagent, a magnificent Lebanese tabbuleh, a Sichuanese chicken dish and fish-fragrant aubergines, served cool. We all thought they went together rather nicely.

Altogether, it’s been an incredibly varied fortnight, foodwise: my first visit to the River Cafe in London for a close friend’s birthday (fabulous langoustines with marjoram), a Sichuanese supper at my place for my ‘kitchen sister’ Lipika, a glorious home-made bouillabaisse at another friend’s house, hog roast in a West London garden, extended family picnic in Waterlow Park (with another Sichuanese salad as my contribution), cocktails at Loungelover and dinner at my favourite Vietnamese place, Song Que, with Anissa and visiting food-writer Anya Von Bremzen! Anyway, enough of all that, tonight I’m off to a deserted Scottish island to make bread and attempt to catch fish.

Through Chinese eyes

Fuchsia — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:55:01 +0000

Columbia Road Market, London (www.icimages.com)

A Chinese woman I met the other day has fallen in love with London. Why?

Because ‘it’s so crappy and dirty, the streets are narrow and you see old buildings all around. It reminds me of Beijing in the 1980s. Nowadays you can’t find anything like this in Beijing, it’s all modernity and skyscrapers.’

I was amused by her comments – but not entirely surprised. They brought back vivid memories of my tour of California with three Sichuanese chefs, who were looking for the American Dream and bitterly disappointed by the reality of modern America.

The tables are really turning. Westerners go to Shanghai to ride on the Maglev train at 400km an hour and to drink cocktails at the top of the Hyatt. Chinese people come to Europe for a glimpse of primitive, olde worlde charm!

Here is the text of the piece I wrote in 2004 for the BBC programme From Our Own Correspondent, about that US road trip with the chefs. (It’s no longer on the BBC website)

********************************************

These days, China is one of the world’s hottest travel destinations. Travellers go there from the West for a glimpse of an exotic ancient culture, made recently fashionable by kung fu films. Or they go to see a nation shedding its communist past and modernising at break-neck speed. But what’s it like for Chinese tourists visiting the West for the first time? Fuchsia Dunlop found out when she accompanied three Chinese chefs on a sightseeing tour of California.

Since my companions don’t speak any English, we talk only in Chinese. And as always with speaking another language, it’s not only my words that are becoming foreign. As we drive through the sun-dappled landscape of the Napa Valley, I find myself looking at America through Chinese eyes. One of the chefs compares the hills, shrouded in early-morning mist, with the romantic Qingcheng Mountains in Sichuan. The view of San Francisco across the Bay from Sauselito reminds him of the skyscape of Hong Kong. And the city’s steep hills evoke the sloping roads of Chongqing, Sichuan’s Mountain City.

In San Francisco, we stumble upon a Remembrance Day Service in the Grace Cathedral. None of the chefs has been inside a Christian church before. Incense drifts over a hushed crowd of worshippers; pipers in full Scottish regalia play mournful tunes. And finally, a cloud of paper poppies falls from the ceiling, shimmering down like blood-red snow. Because I’m with my Chinese friends, I notice the eerie beauty of the service, and I’m taken back in an instant to my own first visit to a Chinese temple, when the strange gilded statues and coiled incense brought me out in goosepimples.

I quickly notice a cultural gulf between our aims in sightseeing. I gravitate towards the historic temples of San Francisco’s Chinatown, to narrow streets and small cafes. The chefs want to see skyscrapers and glitzy shopping malls. So instead of relaxing in the Bohemian neighbourhoods of San Francisco, I end up taking them to Los Angeles and driving them around the mansions of Beverly Hills and the swanky designer boutiques of Rodeo Drive.

They even persuade me to take them to Disneyland, where we ride the rollercoasters, buy souvenirs and take hundreds of photographs. And as I pose for a picture outside Mickey Mouse’s House, it strikes me that this must be some kind of karmic retribution. For years I’ve been dragging bemused Chinese friends round picturesque teahouses which to them are miserable hovels, and backstreets that I find charming but they think should be demolished immediately. And here I am, to my surprise, paying homage at the temples of Western consumerism and the American Dream.

On our last day together, the chefs want to buy some gifts, so we go to a famous department store. But as we stroll around, our quest takes a desperately comic turn. Everything we pick up – leather wallets, fashion accessories, beauty products – turns out to be made in China. We literally can’t find anything that is locally produced. ‘And it’ll look really stupid,’ says one of the chefs, ‘if my friends notice their gifts are Chinese after all.’ In the end, we leave without buying anything.

As the days go by, I realise that the chefs’ have a travel plan that is more alien to me than I’d thought. Because they are just not interested in exploring American history and culture, and they don’t want to see spectacular scenery – they’ve got plenty of that at home. What they do want is to see how America measures up to the American Dream. They’re all familiar with the stereotype of America as the richest and most advanced nation in the world, its lifestyle as the holy grail of development. And they want to see it in all its brilliant modernity, to understand how far China has to go to catch up, and whether the struggle will be worth it.

Given their high expectations, it’s not surprising they are disappointed. Even lovely San Francisco doesn’t fit the bill. ‘If that’s going to be the end result of China’s development,’ says one, ‘Then I’m really in despair.’ The extravagant mansions and leafy avenues of Beverley Hills are more promising – ‘this is what we should be aiming for’, says one of the chefs. But perhaps it’s a shock that the gilded life of the Hollywood elite is such a tiny part of what we actually see. The rest is simply ordinary: people going about their lives, vagrants begging on the streets, cheap consumer goods.

The American Dream is a myth which has not lost its potency in China. But China itself now has gleaming skyscrapers, luxurious apartments, private cars and designer clothes aplenty for those who can afford them. It takes more than that, these days, to impress a middle-class Chinese tourist. And ironically, considering the tough scrutiny given to their visa applications, after a couple of weeks my companions can’t wait to get home.

When I’ve seen them off at the airport, I meet up with a friend in Los Angeles. We laze around on Venice Beach, eating ice cream and chatting. And since I’m not comparing the experience with anything, it feels like pure joy, what with the blazing sunshine, the fine Italian ice cream, and the gentle rush of the Pacific on the sand. And I have to admit that contrary to all my expectations, I’m enjoying California more as an English than as a Chinese tourist.

N.B. The photograph above was taken by the travel photographer Ian Cumming. He’s an old friend of mine, and we travelled together to Xinjiang in 2002 – where he got roped into the search for a whole tandoor-roasted camel that I describe in my Shark’s Fin book, and various other food-related activities. Our trip led to a collaboration on an article on Xinjiang food that appeared in the Observer Food Monthly. Unfortunately you can’t see Ian’s amazing photos of the trip on the Guardian/Observer website…

Last of the line

Fuchsia — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 07:11:12 +0000

The other day I went out fishing in a lake in Zhejiang. At the edge of the lake I met an old man and his wife who were living on a sampan. They were sitting at either end of their boat, patiently hooking tiny worms at intervals onto two long, long fishing lines. Apparently this takes them several hours every day. The old man had a mug of tea to sip as he worked, and a pack of cigarettes. In the small living space in the well of the boat were their simple possessions: rolls of bedding, a few clothes in a bundle, a calendar, an old-fashioned wireless and a clock. Some half-shelled soybeans were lying in a bowl on the floor.

The fishermen I was with say that just a few decades ago the only way to get around this area was by boat, along the canals and through the lakes, and that boat-dwellers were fairly common. These days there aren’t many left. The old man I met, who grew up on a boat, said his three children were all migrant workers in cities – he’s the last of the line (if you’ll forgive the pun).