Chengdu Pt 2
I will never understand China. It’s too big, it’s too old, it’s too diverse. The vastness of China (and Chengdu for that matter) is ineffable, and despite any prior hubris I may have been holding onto, a few days on the ground level reassured me that my knowledge of the place is sweet fuck all. Chengdu is big, I thought — very big. But here’s the game plan: try and familiarise oneself with the neighbourhood. Get your bearings, try a few suburban eateries, find your hotel without any maps, maybe even wave at someone you saw yesterday.I was staying in a low-ish rise inner-city suburb a half-hour stroll from the People’s Park, a place I ended up walking to every morning. I’d wake around eight, get a rabbit and cabbage dumpling with warm, sweet soy milk from a stall fronted by a bashful middle-aged lady in a flowery apron, conveniently stationed beneath my hotel. Then I’d stroll the half hour or so along the Nanhe River to the tea house.The issue I soon found with landmarking street vendors, like the one beneath my hotel, is they would never be where I left them. By the time I finished my morning excursion, I’d confuse buildings and stalls with yesterday’s familiar scene. Nothing had stayed put. It was like the whole city rotated a few degrees every time I tried to find my way home, alive with movement and shapeshifting street carts. Stalls swapped places, appeared, disappeared, sold out, or melted back into the crowd.Because of this, I found navigating difficult. My eyes were always drawn to the food — shallot pancakes, fresh plums, skewered meats — lining every street like one big smorgasbord, never to the buildings or landmarks one usually commits to memory. I sympathised with my dog back home who, at the mercy of her powerful nose, has no logical sense of direction. It didn’t help that the mornings smelt like ginger and sesame and wrapped you up like the steamed buns stacked ten high on a cart. I ate what I could — which was a lot. The stalls taunted me no matter the time of day, no matter how lost I was or how recently I’d eaten lunch. The concrete shopfronts were no better. Depending on the hour, restaurants spilled over the streets with people hunched over bowls on plastic stools. Energy radiated from the heat of the woks in the kitchen recesses and from the constant churn of patrons. Things happened quickly. Food hit the table within minutes despite the crowd. Waiters ran plates to tables, yelling numbers to delivery drivers. Shirtless men slurped noodles, their foreheads irrigating their hairlines with sweat, only to vanish moments later, leaving behind nothing but a chicken bone or a bead of rice. A popular eatery was a sight to behold — yet like a cuttlefish that’s been prodded, the long tentacles of the shop retracted swiftly back into the safety of its camouflaged shell, roller door up, unrecognisable to the untrained eye.
Like the masks of the dancers in Sichuan opera, the city changed its colours frequently, tricking me with its beguiling nature. This being said, whilst I personally struggled to put the pieces together, I want to say that these shops did have signs. The streets did have names. Blue, large, clearly posted. The thing is — it was all in Mandarin, and I cannot speak or read a word of it. Apart from the bleedingly obvious greetings, I was essentially mute. Ordering food or a taxi meant relying on childish gestures. I had a translator app, but it was slow and cumbersome; it couldn’t keep up with the pace of things. Before I could type what I wanted to say, there’d be a line of people behind me. Once, a lady selling fried dumplings yelled at me as I fumbled with my phone. “OK,” she insisted, signalling for me to move on. I hadn’t even paid. I slunk away with my little plastic bag of pork and chive, the queue burning a hole in the back of my skull. I returned the next day with cash, but the stall was nowhere to be found.
While exploring the tangle of food stalls, wet markets, and daily neighbourhood rhythms, I began to notice a simmering juxtaposition forming in me. My short time in Chengdu ticked all boxes on the Eastern “explorer” checklist — mysterious food, open-air markets, unidentifiable flesh hanging in the hot sun, and the entropic rush of scooters, buses, and pedestrians suffocating every street. It smelt as delicious as it did fetid, as organised as it did chaotic, and as impenetrable as it was friendly. These things thrill the naïve traveller. I was wowed at every corner, charmed by every stallholder, slowly acclimatising to a wildness both around me and within me. It is the greatest reintroduction to humanity to see a society revolving around a central market, and it reaffirmed my theory that the supermarket is the harbinger of community collapse. I stopped in front of two older women sitting cross-legged on the concrete, their cotton blankets laden with plums the colour of rare earth gemstones — shiny obsidian and mottled emerald. Before I could take the photo, a man in a business suit with shoes as glossy as the plums knelt, bought a handful with a genteel smile, thanked them, and vanished. I never took the photo, but the image burned itself into me.
On paper, China is a communist country somehow unashamedly proud of its capitalist growth. But wherever I went in Chengdu, the affluent commingled with the common. I was on a musician’s budget of hostels and street food, yet everywhere I looked, people of all classes shared the same spaces. My opinions became duplicitous. On one hand the city had almost no combustion-engine vehicles — scooters to garbage trucks, all electric. Buildings towered above the morning fog. Robotic pandas ten feet tall twisted in their artificial gait. Neon nightlife pulsed until dawn. On the other hand, Chengdu felt as old as time.
Over the last few days, I began to crave company. I was surprised at the loneliness brought on by the language barrier. Here I was in a city of millions with nothing to say to anyone. I couldn’t read the museum descriptions, couldn’t chat in taxis, couldn’t ask a simple question. My luck turned one afternoon as a lady waved me inside a cramped dumpling shop. Her family — three generations — were eating at the next table. Her son, about thirty, tossed his child to the grandparents and rushed over offering a cigarette. He wanted to practise his English over my lunch. He was a graphic designer for a major sporting company, travelling often, but happened to be home helping his parents stretch noodles and roll wontons for the day’s service. His English was broken, but the conversation refreshed me. Family units anywhere are a reassuring comfort, and I caught a glimpse into the normality of China — mum, dad, kids, the family restaurant — an unmasked insight into the faces behind the curtain. The beef noodle soup was the best dish of the trip. After my last sip of broth, I was invited to hotpot that evening with Stephen, the son.
I hesitated. The invitation to a meal like this was something I deeply sought in travel, but the generosity overwhelmed me. Still, at the restaurant the nerves evaporated. I was greeted with more cigarettes, smiles, and handshakes from a group of friends who’d known each other since childhood. “He has been an arsehole since we were five,” Stephen said proudly of one of them. The spicy tallow melted slowly in the big cast-iron pot and began to bubble. We drank warm beer from plastic cups while mysterious entrails, sausage, lotus root, and mushrooms were lowered into the hellbroth of beef tallow and chilli oil. I stopped asking Stephen what things were. It didn’t matter. Whether pig’s lung or oyster mushroom, everything was mouth-numbingly, spine-tinglingly delicious. They were immensely proud of this dish — in fact China as a whole is. Born from farmers using every odd bit of the animal, paired with ingredients from each region, every variant is equally revered by the working man and the elite alike. It felt like the perfect metaphor for the China I experienced. The night burned away along with the ever-reducing broth, which thickened into a crimson syrup only to be touched by the bravest of eaters. I picked up one of the last of the mystery bits from the broth and it scorched me like a branding iron to the tongue. Warm beer — I’ll tell you now — does not soothe you like it should.
The next morning I sat in People’s Park sipping jasmine tea and writing in my journal. Next to me were older men playing mahjong; in the distance, a woman practised tai chi, lithe and poised in the cool morning air. I was catching a train south in a few hours, and my throat stung from the smoke and chilli burns of the night before. Had I unearthed some of these mysteries? Could I say that I caught the vibe or understood this place better? On reflection, no. What I do understand about Chengdu, however, is that in a city I’ll never fully comprehend, its food and its people gave me something better than understanding: a way to belong, even briefly.
