Eating bizarre foods that are unthinkable in the West - rotten eggs, scorpions, tarantulas, dog, fermented tofu, salamander, badger - becomes alarmingly normal after some time spent in China. Wet markets are more like horror shows, macabre Bacon paintings: gruesome crucifixions of all too familiar animals, the smell of burning hair from a dog being nonchalantly blowtorched, rows of dried cats hung from their necks on racks, macerated civets and badgers, flattened pigs heads, live blackbirds in cages, half-dead fish inverted and floating dead-eyed in their stagnant tanks, the air damp and hot and putrid. Sometimes, often, these foods were as awful as they sound (dog: dry, chewy, flavourless; century eggs: sulphureous, putrid, repellent) but sometimes they were surprisingly delicious. Rotten tofu, a specialty of the area, had a marmite tang, and scorpions, when dusted with hot chili powder, had an addictive crunch. I developed a particular taste for pig’s ear stirfried with green peppers, enjoying the soft crunch of the cartilage, primally satisfying to bite through.
According to the villagers, with whom I was quickly surrounded after arriving in the remote mountain settlement, I was the first white-skinned person to have ever visited there. The demographics of the village were weirdly polarized: lots of small children, and lots of the elderly. Everyone of working age was in the city, working twelve hour shifts in sweatshops and factories to earn just enough money to sustain their dependents back home: the hope was that the next generation would be able to go to school, and have better lives than their parents. The village itself was beautiful - those working in the factories must be homesick for the forest that presses against its margins, for the birds that perch on the low roofs that curl up at each corner, for the smell of smoke and cooking billowing from doors, windows and chimneys, and for the playing children that roam freely in groups between houses and gardens. I imagine the displaced parents faceless and nameless, masked and anonymous on some sterile factory production line, performing with deft, practiced fingers some task of unbearable, mind-numbing monotony; the city around them sprawling and uncaring, their lives regimented, twelve hours on, twelve hours off, the air tanged with metal and chemical. The air here was rich and complex, and the human and the natural so chaotically interwoven that to distinguish between the two was pointless.
Despite, and indeed because of, the novelty of my appearance, the villagers, with the typical generosity and hospitality of those who have very little, decided with immediate co-ordination between various households and families, to cook up a feast of their traditional foods. I could understand nothing of what the old man hurriedly pulling on waterproof shirts and trousers from a fine mesh bag seemed to be explaining to me. Even with my flimsy beginner’s Mandarin, he was speaking an entirely different dialect that even my Chinese companions could not understand. It was a hot day, and I had no idea why he was covering himself in coats, putting on Wellington boots and pulling on a thick woolen hat that covered his ears. When he was done, he picked up a rusted hand saw, the old bag that the clothes were in, and started off into the forest. I followed, but he held out his hand in a way to signal that I should stay back, until finally, when I had reached a large log horizontal on the floor, he gestured for me to stop and take cover. He pointed upwards at the tree he was beneath. He was going to climb.
The tree branch fell with a crash and was followed by a low and angry hum. The wasp nest that had been attached to it was surrounded now with a buzzing cloud: this was the man’s prey. A wasp nest was allowed to grow and develop, despite the danger it posed with the proximity to the village, carefully watched and observed, until it was deemed ready to be harvested. Unlike with bees, what was being harvested was not sweet and delicious honey, but the thick, enslimed larvae that occupied the nest, each in their own perfectly fitting hole. Their heads, or tails, squirmed and pulsed, protruding from their now unprotected hexagonal cells: once the man had transferred the nest from the tree into the mesh bag, he started to pick out the fat larvae one-by-one, his hand protected by a rubber glove and sealed inside the bag, letting their writing bodies fall to the bottom. The live wasps that had become trapped in the bag, which were not the small and annoying yellow jackets I was used to, but black and enormous and more like advanced military hardware than animals, were furiously fighting to escape. Their fate was to have their heads efficiently pinched between the fingers of the man, likewise falling twitching to the bottom to rest in the pool of their still alive offspring. Once the task was complete, the nest was discarded and the bag was passed to his wife.
The larvae and wasps were quickly transferred to a wok and fried over fire in with ginger, garlic, and deep-red dried chilies. The fire sparked and flared with the impact of the pan: high drama. The wife deftly agitated the enormous pan back and forth with the practiced movement of a Michelin-star chef, the insects and chillies popping in the oil. When she judged the dish was done, she transferred it to a bowl: a gleaming mound, shining appetizingly. We sat on the beaten earthen floor to eat, bowls of steaming rice handed to us. The children who had now gathered around as excited by the dish as I was, chatting animatedly with their bowls in hand, waiting to be served. Small cups were filled from a jerrycan with harsh, bitter homemade alcohol. Warmth spread through my body. The dish was delicious. One of the most delicious and memorable things I have eaten. The crunch of the black exoskeletons perfectly balanced the soft, salty explosions of the maggots that burst satisfyingly on the roof of the mouth, something like an earthy, woody caviar: unctuous, decadent and generous.