little trouble in big china

I discovered something today that I had not previously come across in years' worth of news articles about the war in Iraq: I am almost the same age as Muqtada al-Sadr. All this time I had pictured him as a 50-something cleric, but it turns out that, if Time magazine is to be trusted, fewer than two years separate us. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, I have never been so much as even a petty office-supplies despot. I suppose I can cross 'maniacally fervid leadership' off my list of potential career moves.

(There's no good way to segue from the tragedy of yesterday's earthquake, but I don't have anything useful or profound to add, nor do I feel comfortable exploiting it here. You are all welcome to comment if and as you see fit, but in the meantime, I'm going to go back to some general lighthearted musing.)

I try to carry my point and shoot camera with me whenever I go out here, because you just never know what you're going to see. Part of this has to do with the fact that among a lot of locals, public and private life blend together -- they have small houses or rooms in which to sleep, but conduct their business (selling vegetables, for example), hang their laundry, eat lunch, play cards or Chinese chess, or generally sit around and gab on the adjacent sidewalk (more on that some other time, because it's a topic I find very interesting).

So it was that I was strolling along the other day and happened to pass a woman sitting on the sidewalk in a folding chair, soaping up her cat. I was a little amazed that the cat was taking this so placidly, as I have vivid memories of a moment in the late '80s when my cousin declared that my family's cat was dirty and needed cleaning. He and my father foolishly began to draw a bath, took the cat to the upstairs bathroom, and proceeded to try to sit it in the tub. My mother and I maintained our distance from this entire scenario, so I can't provide eyewitness details, but suffice it to say that therein followed a very loud yowl (cat), some equally loud yelps and yells (humans), a black-and-white blur streaking down the stairs and into the basement, and several severe forearm scratches.

In any case, the woman on the street clearly had a better approach, because her cat was for the most part sitting quietly while she gave it a moderately vigorous rubdown (honestly, it was even better behaved before I snapped this; she had just repositioned it when I clicked).

Until, that is, the tub of water made an appearance (note the spillage in the street). 

Yeah, that's more like it.

In case you're somehow checking this blog from under a rock, there was a big earthquake in central China today. Apparently despite being about 1000 miles away, some people in Shanghai felt it (I think particularly those working in skyscrapers downtown/near the river), but I was blissfully ignorant. In fact, as it took place (about 2:30pm local time), my language teacher and I were commenting on the fact that the window-washer on the ledge outside our window wasn't wearing any kind of harness (or safety equipment of any kind, actually). My classroom is on the 7th floor, so for the window-washer's sake, I'm glad the building didn't shake.

I've heard that a couple of buildings in Shanghai did shake enough to be briefly evacuated, and the obnoxiously ugly Pearl Tower is or was being checked for damage. The big suspense now is whether they will be able to rescue some 900 schoolkids who have been trapped in Chengdu (nearest large city to the epicenter), but I'm sure the stories will get worse -- the Chengdu airport closed down for a few hours after the quake, so news has been spotty thus far. When I got a phone call around 7 to turn on the television, one of the main Chinese stations was phone-interviewing a reporter who was still at the airport waiting for her flight into the area. In fact, one of my primary news sources appears to be getting half of its updates from CNN, so I can't add anything you can't find elsewhere.

I lied. Some more short Singapore posts (sushi & stingray) added to the food page. If you're reading this in the US and haven't already done so... call your mother. (Incidentally, Mother's Day is not a traditional celebration here, but it's starting to catch on. I don't know whether people take their mothers out to lunch, give them flowers, or what, but I did see a sale ad the other day. As far as infiltration of American holidays goes, though, Valentine's Day is way ahead so far. I think chocolate may have something to do with it.)

One last Singapore food post! If you've been reading recent comments, you've probably gathered that my foodie friend and loyal blog reader David once came to Singapore for a visit. It was my distinct pleasure to introduce to him the wonders of the Singaporean hawker centre.

Singapore is dotted with hawker centres, which are basically giant covered, open-air food courts where local vendors have individual stands, usually specializing in a handful of dishes. I would guess the average hawker centre has around 30-40 vendors, usually covering popular Singaporean foods and drinks from Chinese, Malay, Indian and Indonesian cuisines. The diversity of cuisines reflects the country's ethnic makeup, but by now they're all considered Singaporean dishes.

You can get five kinds of fish ball soup at one vendor, handmade noodles at three others, chicken rice in the other corner, 18 kinds of juice squeezed in front of you, etc. I love it. The only place I've ever come across in the US that gave me remotely the same feeling was the second floor of this building in Boston's Chinatown. It only had about 6 vendors, but the dumplings were delicious, one of the vendors made bubble tea, and the atmosphere was fantastic. I still miss that place.

Anyway, the (first) hawker centre I took David to was on the ground floor of an old public housing apartment block, and I suspect that as we approached he was a little wary of what kind of cheap food I was touting that would be found in such a place. Then we stepped into the first aisle, and David stopped in his tracks, jaw open with what I can only describe as a sense of awe. I left him looking around and wandered off to get a plate of dumplings; when I returned with my goodies, I was met by a look of confusion mixed with disappointment. "You got dumplings? But you could get dumplings in the US!"  "Umm...nope. Not like these."  David dutifully tried one of my dumplings (I'd gotten well over a dozen for less than US$2) and was made a believer. "Ohmygod... these are really good! They're crispy but soft at the same time... and they're just... really good. Wait, how much did you pay for these? Oh my god." He then went off to do some more surveying and sample some more adventurous dishes, but I was pleased to have had my dumpling choice validated.  :)

I told you there would be a part two.

So while I have much love for the poh piah, there are two Singapore dishes that I generally rank above it for their combination of tastiness and comfort-food qualities. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the roti prata that I always have to have when I'm back, but here's one for you. Derived from an Indian form, Singapore has developed its own variations. It's a kind of griddle-cooked wheat bread that gets dipped in curry, and it's more special than it sounds. I will admit that it's possibly the curry that gives it that extra boost, but the bread itself is somewhat of a marvel of textures. It's a not-quite flat pancake, crispy on the surface, but which pulls apart to reveal soft, warm, slightly chewy innards. Which you then dip in the luscious curry and savor. It's really more of a snack food than a full meal, but when you can only get the real thing every so often, what's the point of rationing?

My other must-have food when I'm in town is chicken rice. One of my cousins once described this as Singapore's equivalent of mac-n-cheese. It's ridiculously simple, but impossible not to love. It's also an excellent comfort food.

Basically, you boil a chicken. Then you dunk it in ice water. While it cools, you cook the rice in the chicken broth/stock you've just created. Serve rice hot, chicken cold. Too easy, right? Sure, there's some seasoning involved (usually garlic, ginger, scallions), but it really is pretty basic. And surprisingly addictive.

Minced ginger, chili sauce, and soy sauce make up the standard dipping combination for this dish. Most people like to mix theirs together, but I kind of like keeping some boundaries -- I find soy sauce by nature to be just insidious and a little bit domineering, so I make it stand in the corner.

May always makes me think of moving, even though it's been a long time since I had to move every school year. Maybe it comes from living in Boston, where there are so many students that sidestreet traffic comes to a standstill on May 1 and 31 because of all of the moving vans hogging space.  Anyway, I don't know if any of you are moving anytime soon, but the next time you do, take a moment to be thankful that you're not using this method.

Yep, it's time for a little more time travel (aka catching up on old news) as I go back to talking about Singapore for a while. I've been back in Shanghai for a couple weeks, but I promised a post on food heaven... I just didn't say when!

Singapore tends to be known for a handful of things -- to people who don't travel much, laws about chewing gum and caning come to mind. Otherwise, the two words most frequently mentioned are "food" and "shopping."

I don't care that much about the shopping (suffice it to say there's plenty), so let's talk a little about the food. There's another post about food variety and quality in the works, but right now I'm going to focus on a couple local favorites. They're two of the dishes most closely identified with Singapore, and they're mmm, mmm, good.

First up is poh piah. It resembles a fresh spring roll, but the ingredients are usually somewhat different than what you'd find in the Vietnamese version. My aunt decided to do a poh piah night for the family, which was very self-sacrificing of her, as it basically meant that she spent an entire day preparing the ingredients.

Pretty much everything has to be sliced or shredded, and the main filling has to be cooked. Everyone can choose the ingredients they prefer, but these were the (pretty standard) ones on offer at our dinner: from bottom right, cooked shrimp, cooked fish meat, bean sprouts, egg, a kind of dried sliced sausage, spring onions, and shredded lettuce. If you look closely on the left side, you can see a jar of chili paste (red), minced garlic (yellow), and a dark sweet sauce, similar to plum sauce, though I don't know what it's actually made of. The big white bowl behind the lettuce contains the main poh piah filling, made primarily of shredded cooked white radish/turnip and carrots.

The rest is pretty simple: you take a wrapper -- kind of like a tortilla, but about as thin as a crepe, and it's not heated -- and arrange the ingredients of your choosing as you please. This particular assembly (not mine) was derided somewhat by other family members for being ridiculously skimpy. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one of my uncles likes to pile his filling so high that he actually needs two wrappers to contain it; it comes out about the diameter of a Chipotle burrito (but shorter). To each his or her own. Roll it up like a burrito, and voila, fresh crunchy cool sweet goodness. You can slice them if you like, for sharing (or as in the top photo, how it would be served in a restaurant), but since we were all having them, we chowed down two-handed. I don't mind saying that I had three (think of all the vegetable servings!). In fact, I could kinda go for one right now...

Part two coming some other day, since this post is ridiculously long already.

You might have heard that certain things get copied here in China.  Like, say, CDs and DVDs.  Those are certainly popular, and not just with the tourists.  By way of example, you can get a pirated DVD on the street for 5RMB, or less than one US dollar.  The same movie in the theater (where it'll probably still be playing when you buy the DVD) might cost 50RMB (~US$7).  When you figure that an entry-level salary for a college graduate might be 3000-5000RMB a month (~US$5000-8500/yr)  before taxes... well, you can see why the Chinese prefer their DVDs. 

But it's not all about the DVD. Some goods are obviously knockoffs, like the pair of "Dr. Markens" shoes I tried on the other day.  Others might actually have been made at the factory and just have "fallen" off the back of a truck. Some are actually legit and just tweaked for local audiences. Herewith, a few things you've probably seen before... sort of.

And my personal favorite...

I have a little trouble keeping up with the holidays here. You see, China has been fussing with their federal-holiday calendar over the last few years, so sometimes it's hard to know what's new, what's old, and what's going on. (If anyone can understand what this article is saying about weekends and consecutive days off, let me know.)

What I do know is that I just had a four-day weekend in celebration of International Labour Day (communism, w00t!). Of course, in at least the recent past, this used to warrant a full seven days off, so some people may view a mere two extra days as a disappointment. And as is usual here during holidays, people who have the day off either go shopping or travel, so for everyone who was still laboring (i.e., transport workers and store clerks), I'm sure Labour Day was fantastic.

I also know that these banners appeared everywhere on May 1st. (What do they do, put them up overnight? That's a lot of streets to cover.) Now I'm curious to see when they come down.