hughmacdougall.com

One of the recent contaminated food scandals to appear in Chinese newspapers was the ‘cardboard baozi’ scandal. Baozi are steamed buns, usually with a savoury filling, but sometimes sweet. It was discovered that in one Chinese city a very popular vendor had been using cardboard in its baozi for six years. They bought used cardboard boxes, soaked them until soft, ground them to small pieces, boiled them and added flavouring, then used the pulp as filling for their steamed buns.

Now a food scandal has emerged in Wuhan. One of the favourite breakfast foods here is ‘hot dry noodles’. I’m relieved to say I don’t like them and never eat them but the locals love them. They are a variety of fried noodles with less water added than most noodle dishes. They get their flavour from sesame paste, or used to. The scandal is that it has now been discovered by police that many vendors are no longer using sesame paste. A while ago someone noticed that pig food was very similar in colour to ground sesame, so he added a little oil and water and scattered a few sesame seeds around it, and cooked his noodles in it. It was close enough in taste that the busy customers didn’t notice the difference. The trick caught on and became widespread throughout the city. Pig food is cheaper. It also contains nice hormones to fatten you up. Perhaps hot dry noodles will be taken off the list of ‘famous’ foods of Wuhan.

Beijing is not likely to shock you, disgust you or irritate you in the way other Chinese cities may. As the centre of government and of anything progressive in China, and now as the host city of next year’s Olympics, Beijing has educated its population in manners. It is not worthwhile to spit in the street in Beijing as it could earn a heavy fine. Littering is the same and the traffic is more inclined to follow the road rules too. A strong campaign is urging residents not to try to cheat foreign visitors but prices have risen sharply already, with twelve months to go. There is no doubt Beijing is the most expensive city in China and the bargains of its famous markets are now bargains in name only. If you plan to shop during a visit to the international sports meet it would be best to plan to travel elsewhere to do that. One of the reasons for the rise in price is that the Chinese government is trying to show multi-national companies that it can control illegal copying and pirating of goods and brand names. The Silk Market and other places will no longer be a place to find good copies of Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Calvin Klein. You’ll just have to hope you find them in the other towns you travel to. There will be no policing the cheating of the taxi drivers who will just take you round the long way with the meter on. That said, if you are from a country with a strong currency and have a reasonable job it won’t bother you much. The Chinese currency is still worth a lot less than yours and your trip will likely seem very cheap to you. Coffee is expensive here, relative to cost of living, so expect to pay about the same as you do at home, but almost everything else is cheaper. Women with a slim to thin build might think they are in paradise if they are the shopping for clothes kind of woman, but if they are well rounded or a little overweight they might end up hating China as the shops cater for the average Chinese female who is a lot smaller and thinner than the average affluent Western female and has a smaller bosom and sit-upon.

There is a man in our building who is a really good neighbour. He was the first to greet us with a friendly smile and offers of help if we had any problems. In China it is not polite to ask too much about a person’s life so I don’t know a lot about him. I do know now that before he retired he worked in several different cities in China and has a daughter who teaches in a university. More importantly I know he has a cheery smile for everyone and every time he sees me he grins broadly and says ‘Ni hao, ni chi le ma?’ Hello (are you well?), have you eaten? People like that add brightness to the routine of daily living. He is the only neighbour who has been in our home and he was very welcome. He caught me cooling off from the summer heat in my undies and we laughed about it together. He said ‘ We all do that in our homes.’ I hope you have neighbours like that. He is a good man.

Sunday was Chinese Lovers’ Day. There is a beautiful legend attached to it, of a plowboy and a heavenly princess. I have written a version of it here. A very poor plowboy had an old ox who faithfully worked for him every day. One variant of the legend tells that the old ox was bequeathed to the plowboy as his only inheritance. The young man lived with his elder brother who made him work very hard. The old ox was sympathetic to his master’s plight and knew he deserved more. A day came when the ox was able to do something to help his master. The ox said to him, ‘If you go to the lake early tomorrow morning you will see seven beauties bathing. Approach quietly and steal the clothes of one of them and she will marry you.’ Next morning, the plowboy did as his ox advised him. He went to the lake and saw seven beautiful women bathing there and he crept down to where they had left their clothes and stole the ones he thought were most beautiful. He climbed onto a big rock and shouted to the ladies, ‘I have some clothes here. The one who owns them must marry me. Who is it to be?’

The young women were first frightened, then shy, then a little intrigued and they began to giggle. Hiding themselves as well as they could with their long hair they ran to the bushes where their clothes had been left. Whose clothes were missing? All were there except for the lovely garments of the youngest one. They were the nieces of the High God and when they put their clothes on they were able to fly away to the heavens from whence they came. Their sister hid in the bushes and the plowboy called to her, promising to love her and be faithful always. She liked his words and judged him a good man. Having no choice she accepted her situation and agreed to become his bride. When he came down from his vantage point with her clothes she revealed her beauty to him and he was instantly in such love that he could never love another.

They went back to the shed where the young man lived, and married without ceremony. The young man’s brother and his wife could never mistreat a woman who was so obviously a heavenly being so they made the couple comfortable and raised them to the place of honour in the household. The princess’s skill with a needle soon made them all prosperous and they lived happily, for a time, and after a few years the young family had two children.

Meanwhile, in heaven, the High God was concerned. The sky seemed less beautiful and no rainbow had appeared for over two years. He summoned his niece, whose job it was to sew colour into the sunrise and embroider rainbows into the sky. Then he and his wife learned that she had fallen in love with a mortal and was living a humble existence on earth. The were angry and they sent heavenly guardians to capture her and bring her back.

Now the only sadness in the young couple’s life had been the passing away of the old ox. The ox’s last request was that his skin be preserved complete, to be used as a covering if any serious trouble arrived in their lives.

When the guards appeared no one could resist them and they took the princess by her arms and legs and they flew heavenward with her struggling between them. The plowboy remembered the ox’s legacy and slipped into the skin, hoping it would know what to do. Immediately, the skin stood up and began galloping into the sky. The pursuit was long because the sky is bigger than it looks but that just gave the plowboy time to close the gap between him and his true love’s abductors. He was almost in arms’ length of his darling when the Queen of Heaven reached down and scratched the sky with her needle, creating an impassible river that even the ox could not swim across. The guardians let go of the Princess and the two lovers stood facing each other, longing, on either side of the Milky Way.

It seemed that the lovers would be separated forever but the High God loved his niece and felt a little sorrowful at what had been done to separate her from her lover. He couldn’t go against the action of his wife, of course, so he merely issued a decree that on the seventh day of the seventh month of each lunar year, if the lovers found a way, they would be allowed to meet. A magpie was flying by at the time and it chanced that it was a friend of the plowboy, having often followed his plow and feasted on the small creatures turned up by its blade. The magpie flew back to earth and called a conference. When the other magpies heard the story many of them wept and a unanimous decision was made that each year every magpie would fly to the river in the sky and group together to make a bridge that the plowboy could walk across and into the arms of his bride.

That is why no magpies are seen on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month and why Chinese lovers choose that day to remember how wonderful love can be and show special appreciation to their lover.