There's a chicken on the roof
There’s a chicken on the roof. So I hear. I haven’t actually confirmed this report because, contrary to popular belief, I’m not insane and feel that introducing myself to the home of a chicken is just asking for avian flu. Bird flu. I haven’t heard or read any accounts of people getting this recently. Does anyone else know what’s going on? I was reading an old issue of The Economist about three weeks ago and it mentioned something about an initiative to inoculate every bird (not just birds that humans eat, but the ones that flap around above us in the sky and trees) in Southeast Asia. Then, Matt mentioned a similar initiative for here in China. Are these initiative writers crazy or just stupid? How do you POSSIBLY inoculate every bird alive in a country? I think they must be playing a joke on society.
This morning, I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business and lost in a reverie of thought regarding whether or not a person can go crazy from thinking too much when I saw what looked like a cat flying by through the window next to me. I peered out the window, waiting for the cat to fly by again, and came face to beak with an enormous “song bird”. I put this description in quotations because the bird’s song is more like the gargle of a soprano. It’s very high, and sweet almost, but still a gargle. But forget the song, the bird is HUGE! I think its wingspan would be the length of one of my outstretched arms, for real. It tried landing on a branch close to the window but bounced once, twice and then slide off because the branch couldn’t manage its weight. I see these birds all over the schoolyard. They’re like robins on steroids and very alarming. Could these birds give me avian flu? I lock my window at night now (even though I’m on the fourth floor and there aren’t any ledges for people to climb in from) because I can just imagine these big birds developing the use of their grippy little claws and sliding the window open to ask if I mind feeding them some of that delicious oatmeal they see me munching every morning.
Back to the chicken. Apparently Russell and Bing-bing plan on killing this poor creature at some point, cooking it and eating it. It’s all a little too close to home for me, personally. You think you’d hear a chicken living on the roof but the thing is surprisingly quiet. I wonder if its existence is illegal? I see a lot of chickens and roosters around Wuhan. The first thing that got my attention was how big they are. Now that I know what a live chicken’s size is “in the wild” I understand why people don’t want to encounter turkeys in the wild. They must be huge!
There is a restaurant on the way to school that has a wide bit of sidewalk in front. Protecting the sidewalk are always tarps draped over wooden stakes stuck deep into barrels of dried cement. The tarps also protect pool tables with the felt ripped up and missing one or more legs. It’s the place where billiards comes to die. (And that’s not the only thing dying here: the tables often double as cutting boards or chicken-plucking stations.) In the center of the maze of tables sit a few card tables that are usually full of Mahjong players but which can double as tables for consuming food on. I’ve not eaten at this restaurant yet, even though it interests me greatly. I can’t make myself go just yet because dividing the street from the sidewalk sit cage upon cage of large bunny rabbits and chickens. Sometimes a cage will have one of each inside. Can you imagine being born a rabbit and then living your life with a chicken in your cage? Chickens really scare me. There’s something very prehistoric about them and that flappy red thing on the top of the head is just wrong. (I think the flappy red thing is found on a rooster only, but have you seen a chicken foot up close? They are just not good.) And bunnies are so soft and floppy and a little dense. Actually, chickens seem pretty dense too; maybe that’s why the two make good cage-mates.
One morning, as we turned the corner and immediately drove away from the restaurant, I turned to see a woman in big rubber boots and a lacy white shirt reach into a cage and yank a bunny out by the ears. The rabbit’s feet were running a mile a minute in the air and the chicken started flapping around the cage in a fit. The animals knew exactly what was about to happen and that’s just too real for me. I like not being able to see that my food used to have a twitchy little face and people in China feel the opposite, but not because the Chinese are cruel – it all has to do with freshness. If you see your rabbit kicking right before it comes to you on a plate with cauliflower, you know exactly how long that meat has been sitting around. With all of the potential diseases floating around, you can understand this desire.
I read somewhere recently that 19 people died of Japanese encephalitis in a city up north. Very north. This is one of the inoculations I opted out of when I went to the travel doctor. I believe it would have cost me somewhere upward of $900. Supposedly the disease is spread through mosquitoes and pigs. I’ve been eating less meat. Looks like all of the popular ones are covered with some sort of disease now: bird flu, mad cow, and Japanese encephalitis. Since I hardly ever remember the names of meat anyway, I’ve been eating my meals without it unless the cook feels sorry for me and throws it in for good measure. Meat is seen as a sign of wealth and comfort since during the Cultural Revolution there wasn’t any. To decline meat when it is offered to you is considered rude and strange behavior.
And then there is seafood. I’ve been told not to eat seafood unless I have to because the water the fish live in is terribly contaminated. You start to decide that the dangers are relative, though. I mean, I walk around the polluted city everyday, what’s it going to hurt to eat a contaminated fish every once and a while? And this all leads to my lunch with Eileen during the October holiday. We were walking from the branch school to the main campus and passed through a section of street that bustles with activity in the mornings on the drive to school. We hadn’t eaten yet and chose a restaurant where the chef was shirtless and puffing on a dangling cigarette dangerously close to his wok. I’m sure I’ve eaten countless ashes and they must only add to the flavor because everything in Wuhan is delicious.
The chef’s chatty wife scooted us into the restaurant, cleared a space at a dingy table and practically bullied us into two chairs. I ordered the old standby – qie zi (eggplant) and something else that the wife wanted us to try. She handed us a small bowl of salted peanuts and two cold beers. The restaurant was the epitome of dirty and oily and grungy, but this has become my litmus test for delicious food. The nastier the environment, the better the food. I mean, these people aren’t there to clean, they’re there to cook!
The food came; we ate and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Eileen brought up a very interesting discussion about killing one’s own food. We were first eyeing the rooster in the cage under the table of vegetables and then wondering what exactly the chicken’s lifespan was about to be. Did they buy a chicken a day? Was the chicken for them or for a very special guest? Then Eileen told me that she could kill a chicken if she had to and she didn’t even seem to be particularly frightened by the idea. I’ve met many people with this same attitude and I’ve come to the following conclusion: how on earth am I able to eat meat and have the kind of aversion to killing anything that I do? It seems to go against logic, really.
And it was right about here in the conversation when we glanced towards the door and saw our hostess/sous chef open a cooler and retrieve a giant, twisting, wriggling fish, place it on the floor and bludgeon its head repeatedly with the handle of her large chop knife. She then carried the lifeless carcass to the table with the rooster underneath and proceeded to rip its face open – the fish’s that is. She couldn’t get a good purchase within the fish’s mouth and her husband’s wok was sizzling and ready so he turned to her and ripped the fish in half with one tear. I was ill. The sounds, the visuals, it was just too much. But, husband and wife must have done these things repeatedly for the duration of their time in the cooking business and before that even, I presume. I could barely get past the fact that she had laid the fish on the floor, right where we had walked in off of the street. The streets are filthy, and I don’t need to tell you that. I looked at Eileen and asked if she could have ripped a fish open like that and she said she’d never done it like that. She’s been deep-sea fishing and has had to process her catch, so she’s familiar with the exercise. As I said before, where have I BEEN!?!
So, no, I don’t eat meat so much these days. Aside from the potential health risks, I just have a hard time eating things that used to walk and talk (sort of) and have faces. It might be getting a little overboard because my carrot last night looked so sad to be cut into slices that I at him whole. You’ve heard of people who don’t eat vegetables or fruit that they have to harvest because they’re killing them, right? They eat fruit that’s already fallen from the tree or vegetables that have fallen off of the vine. I wonder if they only eat root vegetables that have been dug up by some varmint and left with a nibble or two taken out. My question is, where do these people find the time to gather like that? I’ll leave you to ponder this behavior.
