Kung Pao Chicken

On my walk to work this morning I passed a man, cigarette butt in mouth, with a pole over his shoulders and about five roosters hanging from wires tied to their feet on each side. Closer examination revealed, as it usually does in China, that the animals were still alive—just tactically paralyzed in a way that made transportation easier. These roosters along with the big silver fish I see in an inch of water gasping for air bubbles as I make my way down xiangyang lu always make me look away, make feel incredibly guilty for enjoying gongbaojding. It’s almost as if I forget that meat comes from animals. Afraid of becoming the American tourist that spends a month in China and quickly draws conclusions about Chinese culture, I can’t help but think that the Chinese are much more open about a lot of things. I appreciate and admire the straightforward, frank attitude I’ve encountered.

This past week, I attended author Mina Choi’s book talk at Garden Books in Shanghai. Her presentation of Shanghai Girls: Uncensored & Unsentimental roused an audience of Shanghai girls, English ladies and gentlemen, American men and women, Chinese men, German businessmen and many more who observed without comment. Choi’s Shanghai girlfriend under the pseudonym Lanlan shared stories about all the Shanghai girls she knew for the author to present to a Western audience. Shanghai girls, she says, wouldn’t be interested in the book. These aren’t new ideas to them. Lanlan told Choi and Choi told us stories upon stories of Shanghai girls marrying foreign men thirty years their senior and the quick transformation observed by their friends from an 800RMB/month lifestyle to perfect spoke English, perfect hair and makeup, and a foreign passport. Most often, these girls would use their newfound money and connections to improve both themselves and the situation of their families. The Western men in the audience were the most outraged by the book, citing true love and ethics. They were married to Shanghai girls.

The "marriage market" in People’s Square provides another prime example of frankness about relationships that many Westerners find crude. Grandparents and parents of busy career men and women gather at the park on weekend days and post papers with their progeny’s height, weight, education level, monthly salary, and dating history for females and the same minus weight and plus the ownership of a car and house for males. I hear girls on the street answering these kinds of questions from their moms all the time. In fact, I get these kinds of questions from my mom back in Nebraska. Let’s be real, we all talk about all the same things, we still eat meat: we just whisper when we do it. We feel bad about it, as if practicality means whoring out our western ideals.

The practical girl in me feels like we Westerners with all of out touted idealism could get a lot more down with a lot less pain if we were more honest about what we wanted. Remember there’s chicken in gaobaojiding (affectionately known as Kung Pao Chicken in the West).