Regionalism

Lakeside walkway at Yi He Yuan.

On the bus to Yi He Yuan (the Summer Palace) my students grinned, chatted, laughed. They’d invited me along for some weekend sightseeing. I supposed playing tourguide for the teacher was fun, but it didn’t explain why they bristled with such excitement.

Then we entered the park grounds and their enthusiasm became clear: Yi He Yuan was as new for them as it was for me. Most had never been to Beijing before; in fact I’d been in the city longer than they (by a week). I was enjoying a neat specimen of foreign architecture, but they were touching their own cultural history.

My students came from a variety of cities, some a good stretch of continent away. The few Beijing natives among them were both ribbed and envied for their standard accent, with its words ending in extra r’s (similar to the British idear instead of idea). Occasionally they laughed at a classmate’s different pronunciation of a Mandarin word. Since the only Mandarin I learned was there in Beijing, my students were delighted by my own “proper” speech, marveling, “You speak better Chinese than me!”

The Northerners teased the Southerners about their exotic cuisine. Up north the food was mainly noodles, cubed meats and veggies; down south, a wider variety of animal types and parts were dished.

Over dinner at a restaurant one evening, a group of students gave me an impromptu lesson in anatomical dissection. It was the same dilemma as before: fish was served whole, and we had only chopsticks. I still had no clue how to proceed.

“Look, pick it up like this,” they said, wrapping the chopsticks around the fish’s middle. “Then bite here and remove this bone” (into the back, pulling out the spine), “and now you can eat the meat. Then turn it over” (laying it down on the plate, then lifting from the opposite angle) “and bite out this bone” (something from the belly), “then eat here.”

I’m a squeamish eater; I don’t like meat looking as if it were ever part of an animal, not even fried chicken. But this process was so biologically precise, so ingeniously self-reliant, that I couldn’t help replicating it step by step. By meal’s end each of us had a fish head and tail on our plates.

“You don’t eat the head?” I joked.

“No, no,” they protesetd – all except Mike, from the south province of Guangdong, who smiled and said, “Sure!”

“Oh yes!” they laughed, “he will eat it! In the south they eat things like this.”

“Eat it, Mike!”

Happy to oblige, Mike lifted his fishhead in his chopsticks, spine and tail dangling, and brought it close to his mouth. Eyeing us mischeviously, he drew the fish in close, kissed it on the lips – then popped the whole head inside , eyeballs and all, chomping it off at the spine with his teeth.

“Eww!” we all yelped in unison, Chinese and American alike.

Ordinarily they spat out the bones. Mike, too much the showman for that, ground them up and swallowed the entire head in one gulp, opening his empty mouth and waggling his tongue as proof.

Walking from the bus stop to Yi He Yuan.

Yi He Yuan entrance with students. (Fellow American teacher James is in front; I’m the Lao Wai in the back row, left.)

Yi He Yuan.

Posing with students on the “stone boat” at Yi He Yuan. (I took this shot; the waiguoren is James.)

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