Chengdu - Part. 1
The air is not gentle here. You can see it. I saw Chengdu from the aeroplane the way an octogenarian with cataracts sees Christmas lights: a blur, a thick haze, and for me, a nosebleed. I touched down at Tianfu Airport close to midnight, without my wits, but with a swollen backpack I had kindly let the authorities in Shanghai tear apart like labradors with a teddy bear. To my surprise, that would be the last in-person encounter with Chinese officials until I left the country eight days later.
That’s the impression we’re given of China: a big-brother state in the clutches of communist authority where your sphincters are turned inside out after the faintest dissent against the supreme leader. That’s the China I thought about on the taxi ride into town, where rows of snapping speed cameras caught drivers and passengers alike, collecting thousands of data points on you — expressions, even the smallest trace of unease — feeding the great database of the people, for the people. Despite this, my driver sped the whole way to my hotel.
Nothing makes you feel small like driving into a Chinese megacity. Many will say that sleeping under the stars or staring at the ocean renders the ego useless. Wait until you drive for hours through an ever-expanding sprawl of dystopian apartment blocks, each with the same taupe exterior and obsidian windows glistening in the glow of the city. No balconies. All identical. Mile after mile.
It was this theme of insignificance I felt on arrival — not the environmental wonder of a mountain or the ocean, but an urban claustrophobia. Is there room for the individual in a city with the population of Australia, or do you dissolve like a grain of sand on the beach? Coming from a country so sparsely populated distorts our perception — not only of the world, but of ourselves. It’s easy to look at Chengdu, Mumbai, Tokyo and imagine the population as a teeming shoal of fish in an endless ocean. But individuals are not lost; that’s our fabrication. It was staring at those thousands of apartment windows, imagining a family in each one, that the intensity of my insignificance hit. On that highway, a population bigger than I could comprehend stretched before me in the largest simulacrum I’d ever seen.
Things are never as they seem, especially in Chengdu. I found myself perched on a plastic stool in a fruit market, clutching a menu I couldn’t read — a favourite hobby of mine. I pointed to the table next to me: “I’ll have that.” Before long a tall beer and a plate of La Zi Ji — or, in English, find the chicken in the chilli — stared back at me with the eyes of a dragon.
The market circled me like a carousel while I tore into the mound of burning goodness. Mala is what I came here for: that mysterious, face-numbing flavour of Sichuan peppercorns. At first it was a tingle in the lips; then my face began to feel funny. My heart pounded with a drum in the distance. My tongue and lips melted into a puddle beneath me. Still I ate.
The carousel picked up speed. The market blurred. Hawkers in straw hats shifted with the beat of the drum — one moment men, the next dragons, warriors, farmers. They breathed fire into the street and I followed with a convulsive jerk of my stomach. The inferno that was my mouth exhaled with the ferocity of a dragon. My beer was empty. The plate cooling. Slowly, the drums of the Sichuan opera faded back into rattling carts and street noise.
I got a nod of approval from the man at the next table.
The food of Chengdu is ineffable. I don’t have the expertise or vocabulary for its layered complexity, but you know it in fragments: a Sichuan restaurant downtown, a dinner-party Mapo Tofu that made someone cough into a napkin. The essence is one of familiarity, but nothing prepares you for the violence and intensity of the cuisine here. Chengdu is an old, old city, and these people have been cooking a long time. Its food surpasses nourishment. It cracks open a portal into the city’s ancient beginnings, and you feel the deities and spirits catching the edge of your palate or in the corners of your periphery. I ate with a rabid hunger.
