To China... and Beyond!

Beijing’s Famous Foods

Jessica Marsden — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:58:35 +0000

No first trip to Beijing is complete without Peking duck.

I may not be traveling much these days (the next trip on the calendar is not till October, poor me), so for posting-inspiration today, I’m turning to my Chinese textbook.

Our first lesson in “listening class” concerned the famous foods of Beijing. A Taiwanese teacher was asking a teacher from Beijing for his tips on eating in the capital. As this is a rather old textbook, the recommendations were a touch out-of-date. The uber-famous Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant has been displaced by newer, chic-er duck specialists, and a Beihai Park restaurant that once served food to the emperor now mainly serves tourists.

Nowadays, this is what I take my visiting friends to eat:

1. Peking duck: Can you come to Beijing without eating Peking duck? Vegetarians aside, I don’t think so. It would be like failing to see the Great Wall or the Forbidden City — definitely ill-advised. After a disappointing experience in April, I’ll insist that future guests go do Da Dong (just west of the Dongsishitiao subway stop) for their duck. It’s on the pricy side, but the quality is far better than anywhere else I’ve tried. And the side dishes, whose names are all taken from a classical Chinese poem, are exquisite.

2. Jian bing: Jian bing (煎饼) are the Chinese equivalent of a crepe, in which a thin buckwheat pancake is cooked quickly on a griddle, then topped with a thin layer of egg. The pancake is then folded up with a sheet of crunchy deep-fried dough, a scattering of cilantro and scallions, and a swipe or two of salty or spicy sauce. Street vendors sell them from carts, as do some small snack restaurants/windows. A great breakfast to energize you for a few hours in the Forbidden City!

3. Jiaozi (dumplings): On a map, Beijing just barely counts as part of China’s vast northeast, an area I have yet to explore. But its cuisine fits in squarely with that of the “Dongbei” provinces — lots of wheaten noodles and dumplings, and less rice. Jiaozi — steamed, boiled or fried crescent-shaped dumplings — merit their own dining category here, and specialist restaurants have more types of jiaozi than you could imagine. I’ve written before about Xian Lao Man — go there!

4. Sichuanese: But this list is about Beijing food — why is Sichuanese on the list? Cuisines from all over China have outposts in Beijing, but the capital seems to have adopted Sichuanese as its own. I find the spicy-numbing effect of Sichuanese peppercorns to be surprisingly addictive, and classic Sichuan dishes like dry-fried string beans (干煸四季豆) and the oddly-named fish-flavored eggplant (鱼香茄子) have been hits with my guests as well. I’m still looking for the perfect Sichuan restaurant in Beijing, but Chuan Ban, run by the Sichuan provisional government, is a good place to start.

I’m sure that I’ll find many more restaurants to add to this list over the course of the next year. Look for many more posts on the subject — and let me know if you’ve know somewhere I should try!

Snapshot: Hong Kong by Star Ferry

Jessica Marsden — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:10:30 +0000

Maybe it’s the effects of a week in Beijing, where two sunny days immediately after my arrival quickly gave way to an as-yet-unbroken streak of opaque skies, but this shot of the Hong Kong skyline has me yearning for bluer climes. I snapped this shot from the Star Ferry back in 2008, when a long work-related stint in Hong Kong gave me a few days to explore the city. The Star Ferry has to be one of the best deals in Hong Kong — for just 6 HKD (75 American cents) you cross the Harbor while enjoying fantastic views of the city. Other great bargains for Hong Kong visitors include the bird and flower markets (free) and an evening tram tour of the city (2 HKD).

This is the latest in a series of Friday snapshots featuring photos from my travels in China and beyond.

Passport Photos: A Study in Cultural Difference

Jessica Marsden — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:32:27 +0000

In between visas, residence permits, and student IDs, I’ve gone through a lot of passport photos over the past few years. And since I never remember to order 20 prints at a time, I end up getting new pictures taken every few months. And yet, they are never quite alike.

L to R: Normal, Crazy-eyed, Trying-not-to-smile

In the United States, your passport photo is a record of what you looked like when it was taken — maybe your hair looks bad, maybe you look a little sleepy (as in photo #1), but that’s fine. It’s not meant to be flattering. But when I went to get passport photos taken on Monday in Beijing, my actual appearance was just the starting point. The technician pulled it up on her computer and proceeded to airbrush me, wildly. Most notably, my eyes were enlarged way beyond their normal size. In the charitable view, I look really, really awake. Or, you know, manic.

In Russia, on the other hand, the central rule is that you MUST NOT SMILE. Seriously — it’s part of the visa application instructions. So hours before Dan was supposed to leave to get our visas, we had to run to the nearest photo store for emergency, non-smiling photos. Have you ever had someone take a photo of you in which you are strictly enjoined from smiling? It turns out it’s basically impossible. Hence the look of repressed laughter/constipation in photo #3.

Can the difference in passport photo-regulations tell us anything about the cultures? Perhaps only a little. But on the streets of Russia, no one was smiling.

Snapshot: Chinatown Dragon Fighters

Jessica Marsden — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:07:19 +0000

On Canal Street in Chinatown, even the fire station is China-themed. The “Chinatown Dragon Fighters” are otherwise known as Engine Company 9, Ladder Company 6 of the New York City Fire Department, and they’ve painted their garage door to proclaim this to the passing crowds.

Excuse the brevity of this post — I’ve just gotten back to Beijing and am busy apartment-hunting. Check out previous snapshots of other stops on my travels in China and beyond.

Snapshots: Dancing Dragons

Jessica Marsden — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:01:35 +0000

This was meant to appear last week as the final post as my series on Guizhou, but then I went to Richmond and forgot the charger to my laptop. So without further ado, the dragons and dragon boats of Shibing, Guizhou:

Fighting dragons as part of the Dragon Boat Festival in Shibing, Guizhou.

Theundisputed highlight of our trip — a visit to the tiny town of Shibing for the Dragon Boat Festival — initially seemed like a horrible mistake. Bad advice brought us there a day early, so we spent a day wandering through the markets and drinking cheap bubble tea. But the next morning, our waiting paid off. The day started off with a complicated dance-and-fight between two long, colorful dragon puppets who twisted, coiled and twirled around the town square, much to the delight of the children and adults in attendance. After the dance ended, everyone headed for the river shore to watch the dragon boats race. I’ll be honest, this was a little anticlimactic after the excitement of the puppet performance. But it was fun to watch the crowds — and especially the children — cheer on the rowers.

A few shots from the day:

The puppeteers, encircled by dragon.

Local women wait with the crowds for the dragon boat races to start.

A racing dragon boat, complete with a drum to keep the rhythm.

Who loves dragon boats? This kid loves dragon boats! He was using a long balloon to pretend to row along with the racers.

Exploring Manhattan’s Chinatown

Jessica Marsden — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:37:08 +0000

When people hear that I’ve been living in China for two years and that I’m about to head back for a third, they inevitably ask how my parents feel about this. The assumption is that my parents must be begging me to come home, but that could not be farther from the truth. Although I’m sure they wish I could be home for Christmas (and I do, too), they are immensely supportive and, it must be said, a tad jealous.

So for Father’s Day this year, when I was still in China, I promised my dad that when I got home for the summer, we would spend a day exploring Chinatown. I had planned a whole itinerary of eating, shopping and museum-ing, and yesterday, we finally got to complete it. As the day began, I wondered: In the 21st century, does an authentic Chinatown still exist in Manhattan?

You know you're not in China when... everyone follows traffic signals!

We cheated a bit with our first stop, Xi’an Famous Foods. The restaurant has branches in Flushing, Queens (home to New York City’s largest Chinese community), as well as Manhattan’s Chinatown, but for the sake of air-conditioning, we went to their brand-new location in the non-ethnic neighborhood of the East Village. We stuck to the specialties that have earned them the praise of NYC foodies high and low: one spicy cumin lamb burger, “tiger vegetables,” and an order of cold 凉皮. The lamb sandwich — which isn’t really a burger since the meat isn’t formed into a patty — was a thing of dreams, as good as any roujiabing I’ve had in China, and the noodles and salad were also spicy and delicious.

Very happy to be reunited with the shaved-ice drink of my dreams.

Ever since it got hot, I’ve been jonesing for cendol, a Malaysian shaved ice drink made with coconut milk, palm sugar, pandan jellies and red bean. Internet queries for cendol in Manhattan didn’t turn up anything, but I was still hopeful. When we walked by the Singapore Cafe on Mott St., I stuck my head in, and lo and behold, they had it! Frosty drinks in hand, we walked down to Columbus Park, where we watched more than a little illegal gambling go on in games of Chinese poker.

Our only non-foodie activity was a visit to the newish Museum of the Chinese in America. It reminded me a bit of similar Chinese-diaspora museums I’ve visited in Malaysia and Singapore. The main exhibit still has some kinks — it has lots of cool artifacts and texts on display, but needs more overarching explanations — but it was a good reminder of the complex history of the Chinese in America, from their early exclusion to their later status as a “model minority.”

Even QQ candies have made it to America!

Our last stops of the day were the Hong Kong Supermarket and Deluxe Food Market on Elizabeth St. My dad is an aficionado of Chinese smoked ham — 腊肉 — and I’ve occasionally smuggled some back in my luggage. But we wanted to find a more legal supplier. We found it, and plenty more: custard-apple juice, Malaysian coffee powder, Chinese vegetables, and on and on.

All in all, it was a great chance to share my love of all things China with my dad, and to explore a slice of Chinese culture much closer to home. It’s made me way more excited for my imminent return to Beijing. Not just because of the delicious foods that await me, but also because I’ll once again be immersed in a culture that makes me more curious every day I’m there.

Snapshot: Chinatown Dragon Fighters

Expense Report: 6 Days in Guizhou

Jessica Marsden — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:02:00 +0000

This is the second in an occasional series of “Expense Reports” where I use my recent trips to examine the highly variable costs of travel in China. The first report covered the costs of Sichuan travel.

In a Nutshell

Trip Length: 6 days/7 nights

Total Cost: 679 RMB ($100)

Per Day: 113 RMB ($17)

Starting Point: Kaili

Ending Point: Kaili

Guizhou is the poorest province in China, so going into the trip, I expected it would be quite a bit cheaper than my average jaunt around China. And, in fact, it was. My daily expenses were just $17, despite the fact that our “hub-and-spoke” itinerary had us coming back to Kaili every day or so. Key areas of savings were sightseeing and accommodation. We spent the days visiting markets, wandering around villages and watching a public festival, so the only admission fee we paid was to the village of Xijiang (60 RMB/20 RMB students). We also CouchSurfed for 3 nights, thereby saving a chunk of change on hotels (since there are no hostels in Guizhou).

Guizhou Travel Expenses
Sightseeing	10 RMB/day
Food	471 RMB/day
Accommodation	28 RMB/night
Transportation	25 RMB/day
Other Expenses	3 RMB/day
Total	113 RMB/day ($17)

The cost of attending the Dragon Boat Festival in Shibing: Free!

But I’ll be honest — in Guizhou, we got what we paid for. Probably less than we paid for, in some cases. While we were staying in an 80 RMB ($12) per night room at Kaili’s Petroleum Hotel, I found a cockroach rooting around in my toiletries case. Compare that to Mix Hostel in Chengdu, where for the same price we got a spotless and newly renovated room, albeit with a shared bathroom. If you’re planning a trip to Guizhou, be prepared for a slightly more “rustic” experience than you’ll get in other places in China.

Notes on This Budget:

The full itinerary: Day trip to Shidong market (night in Kaili); 2 days in Shibing for Dragon Boat Festival; 1 day and night in Xijiang; Drive along the Leishan-Kaili road; Day trip to Paiyang
We CouchSurfed for three nights in Kaili and spent the remaining four nights in hotels for 80-100 RMB for a double room. These hotels were not the kind of place I would take my parents — if you want a guaranteed cockroach-free experience, you’ll have to pay more.
We got from place to place with a combination of local buses and trains.

Guizhou’s Spicy-Sour Specialties

Jessica Marsden — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:08:23 +0000

This week, I’m turning the spotlight on Guizhou, one of China’s least-famous provinces. Read my introduction to Guizhou and then subscribe to my RSS feed to automatically receive the rest of the posts in the series!

Guizhou has all the staples of Chinese cuisine — noodles, hotpot — but puts its own distinctive hot-and-sour spin on them. Like Hunan and Sichuan, the province is known for its fondness for spicy food — an old joke claims, “No degree of hotness will affright the people of Guizhou.” Generally speaking, we found the heat to be a little less intense than the other two provinces, but it was usually coupled with a bit of sourness from pickles or a lemongrass-like herb.

The source of spice: Dried chilies for sale at the Shidong market.

The staple of our Guizhou diet was the local varation on noodle soup, for which I don’t even have a name. The exact ingredients varied, but the method was always the same. Starting with an empty bowl, the noodle-maker would throw in pinches of salt, sugar, dried chilies, and I suspect, MSG. In would go a handful of fresh rice noodles and a ladleful of broth, and the mix would be topped with a spoonful each of cooked ground meat, vegetable pickles, scallions and a final dollop of hot sauce. Most days, this was breakfast:

We discovered our second Guizhou specialty courtesy of our Couchsurfing host, who took us to eat suantang on our first night in Kaili. Suantang is a variation on hotpot where the broth is a slightly spicy and tomato-based. We ate it at a casual courtyard restaurant, where we sat on low stools, hunched over our Sterno-fueled hot pot. Vvegetables and meat came on skewers for 7 cents each, allowing us to sample as many different foods as we wanted.

We cooked a few skewers at a time, unthreading them first to submerge the food fully in the broth. Lettuce, chives and eggplant cooked quickly, while slices of potato and lotus root required more time in the soup. Fresh out of the pot, they were only mildly spicy, but a quick dunk in hot sauce (a mix of dried peppers and herbs with a dash of suantang-broth to bring it all together) made them quite spicy indeed. At the end of the meal, we drank the spicy tomato-ey broth like a soup. It was a warming meal, perfect for a winter night but pleasant even in summer, with a cold beer or soda to wash it down.

This post is part of Wanderfood Wednesday over at the Wanderfood blog. Head over there to check out other great, mouthwatering posts.

Paiyang’s Propaganda

Jessica Marsden — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:34:54 +0000

In Guizhou’s villages, thick ribbons of writing adorn even the most ramshackle buildings. Sometimes they are painted onto the bricks, sometimes they are written on fabric signs and pinned across a wall. Ever-present dust and faded colors make them easy to ignore.

But they reward a moment’s scrutiny, for these inconspicuous strips of text are actually government propaganda. What does China want to tell the farmers of Paiyang, a tiny village in the mountains outside Kaili, in eastern Guizhou? Let’s take a look:

Strengthen literacy programs to help farmers throw off poverty, become wealthy and raise their quality of life.

Long-distance education is farmers’ golden bridge to wealth.

Is this long-distance education in the Western sense of distance-learning classes? I’m not sure, but I couldn’t find any other way to translate it.

Walk with the Party for happiness, family planning has incentives.

Not sure about the exact translation on this one, but you get the idea — family planning + Communist party = happiness.

More scientific planning and rational use of every inch of land.

As you can see, most of the messages — a random sampling taken from all over Paiyang — pertain to education. Only one mentions the Communist Party, and only one alludes to the one-child policy. As China continues to develop, one of its big challenges will be raising the standard of living in places like Paiyang. Today, its low cement buildings and dirt roads of Paiyang hardly seem to belong in the same country with the skyscrapers and multilane highways of Shanghai. Education will be key to closing the gap between these rural and urban populations, and the government knows it.

Introducing Guizhou Province

Jessica Marsden — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:01:33 +0000

Guizhou (贵州) is surely one of China’s least-famous provinces, at least among Western travelers. It lacks the famous karsts of Guangxi, the celebrated cuisine of Sichuan, or the political problems Xinjiang and Tibet. Once-obscure Qinghai leaped into prominence under tragic circumstances, when it was ravaged by an earthquake earlier this year. So far, no similar tragedy has brought Guizhou to the fore.

If anywhere in Guizhou is "on-the-beaten-path," it's the Miao village of Xijiang.

Even To China… and Beyond! has had little to say about Guizhou, despite the fact that I spent a week exploring the eastern part of the province way back in June. I’ve been saving up my posts on the subject to fuel the blog during my time in the States. But this week, I’ll be pulling back the curtain on Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces and the home to a large concentration of minority groups. There will be posts about the food (spicy and a little sour) and the festivals, the people and the places we encountered over the course of the week.

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