The Turtle

Eating in China is an experience. It’s not how the food is cooked that takes getting use to, it is how it’s served and what part of the animal arrives on the table. If it is a small animal (typically bird or fish) it will be the whole thing: head, tail, legs, skin. This is to create trust between you and the restaurant or store. It proves to the customer that they are serving you what you ordered. In other cases it also allows you to identify the animal. For larger animals, the meat dishes are served with small pieces of meat with the bone still in it, sometimes the "cuts of meat" are just big chunks of fat, other times there is almost no meat and lots of bone. Fish have the skin, head and bones. If it is a fillet of fish, which is very rare, it will have bones in it. Shrimp comes with its head and feet.

Chinese are masterful eaters. They can take an entire shrimp, put it in their mouth, take the meat outside of the shell and then spit the shell back out, which gets spat onto the table. This is the equivalent to trying to tie a cherry stem with your tongue. They can also hold a piece of meat in their chopsticks and manage to clean the entire bone. I am rather savage-like and must hold mine in my fingers.



One of the things I like about the Chinese is that they do not waste any part of an animal. They like the brains, internal organs, skin, fat, feet, muscle and everything in-between. For me it makes the death of the animal more humane, because most of it is not being wasted. What I don’t like about China is that they eat the whole animal! While I know it’s all edible, I have grown up where you eat the meat of an animal and nothing else.

There are stories of people eating dogs and cats. We have not seen that. The “weird” things that we see are frogs, turtles, fish lips, eel, jellyfish, fungus, brains, pigs feet, chicken feet, intestines, heart and many others.

The worst experience we’ve had so far with food was the Friday during Chinese New year at San Mei’s house. If you remember from the last post San Mei is one of the cleaning ladies from the school (and her name means third sister.) San Mei invited the whole staff and those of us in town attended - along with her entire extended family. We were served so many different dishes, but the one that stands out the most was the poor soft-shell turtle. It arrived on the table and we all looked at it. Seated around the table were 2 Canadians, Kelly, Lulu, Vanessa (from Taiwan), her daughters and us. We all looked at this turtle and every single one of us thought “I don’t want to eat that!” Somehow we discovered that none of us wanted to eat it and Aaron and I were so grateful. When San Mei walked back into the room, Kelly said to her in Chinese, “take this back to your family we don’t want to eat it.” San Mei was clearly baffled and maybe offended. In rapid fire Chinese she started saying perhaps the following: “What do you mean you don’t want to eat the turtle? It’s very yummy! What’s wrong with you people? Here I’ll cut it for you with chopsticks and then each of you can have a bite and see how delicious it is. “



San Mei took two chopsticks picked up the turtle that’s probably 8 inches long and flipped it over onto its back. She then used the chopsticks to slice down the middle and cut it into pieces about three inches square. She picked up the first piece and tried to give it to Kelly, who squealed like a little girl and threw herself backwards as far as she could get from it. Vanessa, who has been brought up well, gracefully accepted her piece of turtle. Aaron, myself and one of the Canadians did the same. No one else had any. Aaron was amazing, he ate all of his. I ate the smallest bite possible and I all I can tell you is that turtle is slightly rubbery and I don't need to eat one again. As soon as San Mei left the room we all took our pieces of turtle and managed to disguise them among the other food scraps on the table.