URUMQI
Why is a Chicken Like a Chinese Train?
After a certain point it can start to feel like travel might just be about practicing your nod in different timezones.
It’s not quite lying but it’s on the same street. Too proud to admit shock and too well-raised to consort with moral judgment, we respond to disagreeable encounters by painting ourselves into a corner. After all, everyone knows that unqualified praise is fine, while condemning something foreign only exposes your stubborn provincialism.
So instead, in the best traditions of liberal tolerance—and because we know that walking towards potentially unenjoyable scenes is a large part of travel—we feign a wide-armed acceptance of everything as equally valid. Make a habit of it and it becomes easy to start convincing yourself that you really believe this.
There are cures though. I found one in a nightmarket for only 30 c.
We were in Urumqi, at a formica table under fairylights. I had a beer in one hand and a head brimming with doubt. Waiting in a plastic bag on the table was a barely warm boiled chicken foot. Four claws reached out of a skinny length of leg. Its cockroach-yellow skin glistened with the film of gloves left too long in turbid dishwater. It greased my fingers as I pulled it to my mouth.
I lowered a claw into my mouth and bit down.
Split room-temperature skin. A familiar oily flavour.
In 2009 I was offered tarantula in Cambodia. More than Aliens-inspired ‘paddy eels’ in China, more than Mongolia’s kilos of congealed fat, Hong Kong’s metres of entrails and India’s atom-splitting curries, I was bothered by its fried spindly legs and swollen abdomen. Not the taste—I’d passed it up, thinking I’d get another chance. I never did. Back in China, that lost chance was my motivation. Chicken juice was the taste of victory.
I settled into the skin.
Lukewarm and tough, it was like eating rubber soaked overnight in concentrated chicken fat. With no flesh to focus on I had plenty of time to think. I started to consider that, more than just skin-wrapped keratin, maybe this latenight snack a symbol of the wider travel imperatives.
The thought process:
One of the reasons we travel is because it’s often the shortest distance to new experiences. Naturally we gravitate towards what we think we’ll enjoy. The tasty dishes. China had no shortage of decent cheap meals, yet here I was, shucking cold skin from a claw because I told myself that—sometimes and within reason—you’ve got to succumb to the dire and the humdrum.
And not just with meals.
We had caught a train to Urumqi. It was one of those encounters that ‘broaden’ your mind only in the sense that it feels like someone is jumping on your head: a 36 hour hardseat ride spent flopped over a tiny table next to an aisle filled with crumpled farmers and spat-out sunflower husks, all to a blasted slapstick soundtrack of Chinese gameshows.
Still, when things aren’t pleasant they’re often instructive. I doubt—by which I mean I really, really hope—that if we’d flown we would have witnessed the surreal image of nobody else batting an eyelid as a father aimed his infant daughter down the aisle like a urine-loaded supersoaker.
Swallowing the last of the claw’s skin, quietly pleased with myself not baulking at the challenge, I decided this: at meals and between them, a limited selection curbs experience and sanitises understanding. It might keep your shoes a little cleaner, but at the expense of revealing little more than your separation from those you’re traveling past.
Then I hit bone.
Abstractions popped and fizzled. Nothing could distract me now. I was crunching into fibrous bone that felt and tasted like nothing so much as banded toenails.
It was then that I realized I’d found my gag-point. After the prime cuts of luxury and two months in China I had disrupted my nodding for only 30 c and a few well-selected mouthfuls. I could chew on a claw but I realized I couldn’t swallow the idea of it as food.
Long-set standards surfaced from a marrow-deep reservoir. They said: Foot is more than one letter from being food. I couldn’t argue. It’s the part that walks your food around until it’s big or tasty or useless enough to wind up on your plate. Sounds about right.
I finished one claw and put the rest down.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t glad for the opportunity to taste chicken foot, an offer I wouldn’t easily get back in Australia. But it did feel that trying to convince myself I could view foot as legitimate food in pursuit of some hazy idea of cultural relativism would only make me an idiot and veil the reflexes that—for better, worse or neither—mark our differences.
So I owned it: I’d accepted a culinary challenge and rejected it.
Likewise the train. I’ll concede a lot, but I’ve got to put my foot down at people whose plan for their child’s urine involves me. Or keep it up; whatever’s cleaner. And come to think of it, what’s with all the spitting?
Around me was the heavy chewing of locals. Many were working over a foot of their own, clearly considering it as self-evidentially food as I considered it something else. They could throw them back, I could throw them out. And that was okay.
Foot’s not good, but regret and self-deceit taste worse.
After a certain point it can start to feel like travel might just be about practicing your nod in different timezones.
It’s not quite lying but it’s on the same street. Too proud to admit shock and too well-raised to consort with moral judgment, we respond to disagreeable encounters by painting ourselves into a corner. After all, everyone knows that unqualified praise is fine, while condemning something foreign only exposes your stubborn provincialism.
So instead, in the best traditions of liberal tolerance—and because we know that walking towards potentially unenjoyable scenes is a large part of travel—we feign a wide-armed acceptance of everything as equally valid. Make a habit of it and it becomes easy to start convincing yourself that you really believe this.
There are cures though. I found one in a nightmarket for only 30 c.
We were in Urumqi, at a formica table under fairylights. I had a beer in one hand and a head brimming with doubt. Waiting in a plastic bag on the table was a barely warm boiled chicken foot. Four claws reached out of a skinny length of leg. Its cockroach-yellow skin glistened with the film of gloves left too long in turbid dishwater. It greased my fingers as I pulled it to my mouth.
I lowered a claw into my mouth and bit down.
Split room-temperature skin. A familiar oily flavour.
In 2009 I was offered tarantula in Cambodia. More than Aliens-inspired ‘paddy eels’ in China, more than Mongolia’s kilos of congealed fat, Hong Kong’s metres of entrails and India’s atom-splitting curries, I was bothered by its fried spindly legs and swollen abdomen. Not the taste—I’d passed it up, thinking I’d get another chance. I never did. Back in China, that lost chance was my motivation. Chicken juice was the taste of victory.
I settled into the skin.
Lukewarm and tough, it was like eating rubber soaked overnight in concentrated chicken fat. With no flesh to focus on I had plenty of time to think. I started to consider that, more than just skin-wrapped keratin, maybe this latenight snack a symbol of the wider travel imperatives.
The thought process:
One of the reasons we travel is because it’s often the shortest distance to new experiences. Naturally we gravitate towards what we think we’ll enjoy. The tasty dishes. China had no shortage of decent cheap meals, yet here I was, shucking cold skin from a claw because I told myself that—sometimes and within reason—you’ve got to succumb to the dire and the humdrum.
And not just with meals.
We had caught a train to Urumqi. It was one of those encounters that ‘broaden’ your mind only in the sense that it feels like someone is jumping on your head: a 36 hour hardseat ride spent flopped over a tiny table next to an aisle filled with crumpled farmers and spat-out sunflower husks, all to a blasted slapstick soundtrack of Chinese gameshows.
Still, when things aren’t pleasant they’re often instructive. I doubt—by which I mean I really, really hope—that if we’d flown we would have witnessed the surreal image of nobody else batting an eyelid as a father aimed his infant daughter down the aisle like a urine-loaded supersoaker.
Swallowing the last of the claw’s skin, quietly pleased with myself not baulking at the challenge, I decided this: at meals and between them, a limited selection curbs experience and sanitises understanding. It might keep your shoes a little cleaner, but at the expense of revealing little more than your separation from those you’re traveling past.
Then I hit bone.
Abstractions popped and fizzled. Nothing could distract me now. I was crunching into fibrous bone that felt and tasted like nothing so much as banded toenails.
It was then that I realized I’d found my gag-point. After the prime cuts of luxury and two months in China I had disrupted my nodding for only 30 c and a few well-selected mouthfuls. I could chew on a claw but I realized I couldn’t swallow the idea of it as food.
Long-set standards surfaced from a marrow-deep reservoir. They said: Foot is more than one letter from being food. I couldn’t argue. It’s the part that walks your food around until it’s big or tasty or useless enough to wind up on your plate. Sounds about right.
I finished one claw and put the rest down.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t glad for the opportunity to taste chicken foot, an offer I wouldn’t easily get back in Australia. But it did feel that trying to convince myself I could view foot as legitimate food in pursuit of some hazy idea of cultural relativism would only make me an idiot and veil the reflexes that—for better, worse or neither—mark our differences.
So I owned it: I’d accepted a culinary challenge and rejected it.
Likewise the train. I’ll concede a lot, but I’ve got to put my foot down at people whose plan for their child’s urine involves me. Or keep it up; whatever’s cleaner. And come to think of it, what’s with all the spitting?
Around me was the heavy chewing of locals. Many were working over a foot of their own, clearly considering it as self-evidentially food as I considered it something else. They could throw them back, I could throw them out. And that was okay.
Foot’s not good, but regret and self-deceit taste worse.
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