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Thursday, September 22, 2005

Procuring peppers in Sichuan is a painful, pungent pursuit


TED ANTHONY of Associated Press in Chengdu



I summon the waiter with a wave and he rushes over, grinning, jabbering
in Mandarin about getting me whatever I need. It takes several seconds
before doubt begins to cross his face, and this is why: I am trying to
talk, but no words are coming out.

I am in a raucous room that opens onto a narrow, bustling alley. The
place is called Yulin Chuanchuan Xiang - "Jade Forest Fragrant
Skewers." Its speciality is "firepot" - a brand of hotpot bubbling like
the cauldron of one of Macbeth's witches, filled with some of the
hottest peppers in the world. They float in the metal bowl in front of
me, gastronomy's answer to open canker sores.

Jade Forest is in an old neighbourhood called Huaxing Jie, which in
turn is in a city called Chengdu, which in turn is the capital of a
western Chinese province that you may have heard of when you've ordered
your takeout from the corner Chinese place. The province is called
Sichuan, though you may know it as Szechuan.

This is the epicenter of spicy Chinese food, and home of the "flower
pepper," a dried berry that, combined with chili peppers, creates a
tingly-spicy flavouring found in no other cuisines. I have come here
looking for the hottest dish I can find.

I have been addicted to high levels of capsicum since I was a young boy
living in Singapore. I had an amah - a nanny - named Amiah who made me
Malay curry at age six. The peppers, she told me, came from a crop that
was also used to make muscle ointments like BenGay. When it comes to
spicy, I think I can take anything.

Which does not explain why, at this moment, I cannot speak.

Language isn't the problem; my Chinese is just fine, thank you. It's
just that my throat and my lungs and my vocal cords are not
cooperating. Beads of sweat are forming behind my eyebrows. I am the
only foreigner within view. Everywhere, people are looking at me,
pointing and shouting, "Laowai!" - "Foreigner!"

To my friends, the people I have told about this pepper-procuring
vacation, I have dubbed my trip "Chasing Pain."

It seems I have found it.

---

To Chinese, hot peppers are a defining topic. In all corners of the
land, they say to each other, "Ni chi la ma?" - "Do you eat spicy?"
There's no shame in saying you can't - the Cantonese are proud that
they don't "chi la" - but there's a certain hardy, roll-up-your-sleeves
manliness to answering the question in the affirmative.

That is not why I'm here. I have come to Chengdu on a personal mission.

I have craved spicy food for most of my life. I collect hot sauces from
all over. I have yet to meet a "Suicide Wing" that can scare me. In
college, my fraternity brothers paid me US$10 a head to do shots of
Tabasco. They thought I was a carnival attraction; I walked away with a
weekend's worth of beer money.

Because I add hot sauce to everything, I figure I should visit a place
where I don't have to.

Sichuan food is nothing like Szechuan food, its American counterpart.
Once I was in a Chinese restaurant in a large northeastern city when a
woman at the next table bleated to her companion, "Szechuan means SPICY
in Chinese." Well, no, actually Sichuan means four lakes. And anyway,
her food wasn't spicy; the manager of that particular American-Chinese
restaurant was Taiwanese, which is as if a North Carolina barbecue
master opened a New England clam shack in Minsk.

Even back in Beijing, where the greasy Sichuan eateries are plentiful,
I kept hearing whispers of a better place, where the tongue-tingling
peppercorns were even more plentiful and the red peppers were utterly
relentless. I realised that if I truly wanted to burn my face off, I
couldn't do it remotely. So I set out for Chengdu.

The city is famous for its "little eats" - more than snacks, less than
meals. As China undergoes a restaurant renaissance, the country is
dotted with "Chengdu Little Eats" - places where you can get a bowl of
spicy pork, tingly dandan noodles or the town speciality,
scarlet-sauced spicy "pockmarked" tofu with minced beef. Firepot, with
its endless skewers of sundry vegetables and meats, is part of this
category.

I spend my first few days making stomach sorties from my hotel, first
within a two-block radius, then 2 kilometres, before I cast a wider
net. Each place is more delicious than the last. At one ratty snack
place, the red-oil dumplings send me into fits of orgiastic moaning.
People stare, and, like many of the times when they see my white face
and hulking frame, there comes the inevitable shout: "Laowai!" At 10pm
each night, I waddle back to the hotel and sleep fitfully, dreaming of
my next meal.

It's an odd experience doing all of this solo, because eating is such a
communal event to the Chinese. Until fast food arrived, it was unusual
to have two-person tables in any restaurant. Perhaps the best-case
scenario would have been for me to bring my posse along (presuming that
I had a posse) so that many dishes could be sampled.

Yet this particular search seems better conducted by myself. It's a bit
obsessive, and obsession is better parsed in private. Plus, the
dramaturge in me enjoys the notion that This Is A Quest I Must Complete
Alone. And on a more practical level, between the peppercorns and
ginger and pore-infiltrating garlic, I'm not the most fragrant person
to be near.

One morning, I visit a wholesale market and buy a pound of flower
peppers to take back to Beijing. I ask at one of the stalls where I can
find the hottest hot sauce around. The woman points me upstairs; as I
walk away, I hear her laughing amiably with her stall mate.

"Laowai - always interesting," they say, giggling as I turn around to
give them a good-natured glare.

---

The waiter is still waiting for me to say something. But I can't.

I am huffing. I am Lou Costello desperately trying to tell Bud Abbott
that some rampaging creature who looks a great deal like Lon Chaney Jr
is approaching. I try again; nothing but air. He grins. He thinks I am
in pain when I have merely succumbed to pepper-induced laryngitis. I
look into the firepot, and peppers specially selected because of their
personal dislike for me glare back up.

Around me, in every direction, Chinese are dipping pieces of
vegetables, meat and things I don't begin to recognise into bubbling
cauldrons. Gomez Addams would have enjoyed pouring this concoction from
his roof onto Christmas carolers.

Imagine the possibilities for medieval castle defence: A moat filled
with boiling, blinding Sichuan red oil would have made the ideal
holiday accessory for that hard-to-please viscount. And what about
Sichuan Pepper Spray for warding off assailants? Its time hasn't yet
come, but you can bet Williams-Sonoma or The Sharper Image is keen to
get it into R&D.

I gulp and remind myself that Deng Xiaoping, the leader who started
China's economic reform, was Sichuanese. He was a tiny man - sometimes
called "little bottle" - and if he can take it, I can.

Finally, after about 30 seconds, speech returns.

"Bottle of beer," I wheeze in Chinese. The waiter runs and returns with
the first of two malt-liquor-sized bottles of Golden Blue Sword, a
thin, tepid brew that quickly becomes the most refreshing thing I have
ever sampled.

Half an hour and 30 skewers later, the phlegm in my respiratory tract
is looser than Paris Hilton's reputation. I ask for the cheque, and the
busboy stares at the empty plates. "Most foreigners who come here, they
can't take this or don't like it," he says. Not a compliment, but I
think he vaguely approves.

My oesophagus aches. I wander out into the narrow street and inhale
deeply, hungry for non-peppery air. From behind me, I hear someone
shout. "Laowai zoule!"

The foreigner has left the building.

---

If You Go...

GETTING THE Flights from Beijing to Chengdu take about three hours
and cost about 1,200 yuan each way. Clean hotels range from 600 yuan to
1,600 yuan for the top-end choices. Taxis in the city are extremely
inexpensive, though most cabbies will not know English.

TRAVEL CHINA GUIDE: www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/sichuan/.



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