22.10.2006

Jane Goodall In Beijing

Last Monday I went to see Jane Goodall give an evening talk, part of her brief tour through China promoting Roots and Shoots, an organization she founded several years ago in the hopes of enlisting young people across the world to do ecological work.

It takes stubbornness and an almost pathological optimism to stand in a Beijing auditorium and talk about saving the environment. Fortunately Goodall has abundant reserves of both, and there is something cheering about seeing her on stage, with her stuffed banana-eating chimpanzee, encouraging young Chinese people that it is not too late to turn things around. Goodall is quiet, kindly and warm, like a beloved favorite aunt, and it is impressive to remember that this soft-spoken woman once spent many years doing pioneering fieldwork in the harshest conditions.

The talk attracted a mixture of expats and Chinese students, as well as a fair number of older people of uncertain provenance and a small swarm of photographers. Poster exhibits had been set up in the auditorium lobby, most of them by the Roots and Shoots groups and their offshoots, but these were in Chinese only and so inaccessible to me.

The moment Goodall came out on the stage the photographers popped up to take her picture, hiding her from view. One very serious cameraman stood with his back to her and filmed the audience. Goodall was genial, smiling through the cameras, placing her stuffed chimp gingerly on the lectern in front of her. She was dressed in something fuzzy and black and had a long flowy scarf around her shoulders; all that was missing was a mug of chamomile tea. Her translator was a serious, compact guy in a suit, with a copy of her talk in his hand. They were a team act; Goodall would speak three or four sentences at a time, then the translator would deliver them to the audience in Chinese while the woman behind me repeated them loudly in English for her hard-of-hearing companion.

Goodall started her talk by telling everyone that while she could not greet them in Chinese, she would greet them in chimpanzee, and she then gave a long, crescendoing chimp cry that sounded amazingly like the famous diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. This completely silenced the audience and made the photographers sit down. But the translator, a little bit of a spoilsport, did not give a chimp cry himself.

The first part of Goodall's talk was a recital of her own story - her early dreams of working with animals when she was growing up in England, the near-universal discouragement she received from everyone except her mother, her first meeting with Leakey in Kenya, her faithful mother coming down to live with her in the forest when it was decided she must have a chaperone, and the long frustrations that preceded her first breakthrough observation: seeing a chimpanzee prepare a termite meal by first peeling and shaping a poking stick. This famous event was the first time anyone had seen tool use by an animal, at a time when toolmaking was considered the distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens. It got Goodall the funding needed to continue her work.

Goodall talked a little bit about the many things she had learned about the social habits of chimpanzees, demonstrating the various behaviors on the translator as she described them. She began with a discussion of head-patting, tapping him softly on the head as she spoke, to the complete bafflement of everyone in the room who did not speak English. The mortified man frowned deeper into his glasses and stared at the paper in his hand, which was now bunching up a little bit. When she finished talking, still patting his head, he dutifully translated her explanation, to mounting laughter. Goodall let him finish and then carried on:

"Now, let's say I'm a female chimpanzee..."

The translator's grip seemed to tighten, though I had thought he could not grip the paper any harder.

"Then I may just go up and..." And here she turned to the translator and planted a big wet kiss on his cheek, amplified by the microphone he was holding up defensively to his lip.

"Sweet monkey Jesus!" I thought to myself. "You're on stage making out with Jane Goodall! Roll with it!" But the translator failed to roll with it at all. He stared down at his sheaf of papers as if he were trying to ignite them with his mind. The audience, of course, was going nuts.

Spurned by this man of ice, Goodall moved to the second part her talk, a litany of the many environmental problems facing the world and especially her beloved African forests. The dynamic there is sad. Demand for wood (driven in large part by China) has led to logging that not only destroys chimpanzee habitat directly, but also creates roads that open previously inaccessible parts of the jungle to poachers. The poachers hitch rides in on logging trucks, set up camp, and then kill every large animal they can find over the course of two or three days. These animals are sold for 'bush meat' back in the rapidly growing African cities; any young collected in the hunt are sold as pets. In essence, the African forests are being mined both for their wood and their wildlife, in a way that guarantees their eventual exhaustion. We're partly to blame for it, since we drive the demand. But, Goodall argues, this also means we exert some power over the situation.

The final part of her talk was devoted to developing this argument, laying out her reasons for not losing hope. She cited two examples of animals in China being saved from the brink of extinction: the Milu deer, which is about to be reintroduced into captivity after a rather extraordinary history where repeated attempts to breed up populations of the animal were thwarted by its being so very very tasty, and the crested ibis, a beautiful bird whose numbers had declined to seven birds in Shaanxi province by 1981, but which has now recovered to the point where about a thousand birds are alive. She also referred to successful desert reclamation in the Loess plateau, which I had not heard about before. Most of my experience with the Loess plateau has involved inhaling it as it floats in giant yellow clouds past Beijing, but Goodall calls it the largest recuperation of a destroyed ecosystem in history.

Environmental organizations pose a dilemma for the Chinese government. On the one hand, pollution in China affects everyone on a day-to-day level, and in some places (like the coal region of Shaanxi) it makes life almost intolerable. Pollution also takes a huge chunk out of Chinese GDP, deters foreign tourism, and annoys the neighbors. Narrowly focused environmental activism (like the national panda fetish) has been good public relations for China, making the country look like it's making serious reforms after a regrettable interval when economic development trumped every other concern.

But there is always a risk that any kind of organized grass-roots activity may cross political redlines, especially since many of the worst environmental problems are a direct result of corruption and misgovernment. Having someone as charismatic and famous as Goodall offers a bit of protection to both sides in the game. Her prestige protects her organization from arbitrary hassles, while her track record of focusing on ecological problems and trying to work within sometimes difficult political constraints reassures the government that the group won't go all Falun Gong on them.

Goodall is used to dealing with a variety of devils - her whole career studying chimpanzees required working with African governments of varying degrees of unsavoriness, and since becoming an environmental crusader she has allowed her image be used in connection with commercial products in ways that purists might find problematic. You get the impression that her tolerance for human imperfection comes from having seen some very dark things, and not just from our own species. After studying chimpanzees for over ten years and coming to see them as peaceful and benevolent animals with a bit of a temper, Goodall witnessed a four-year chimpanzee war of extermination, and discovered a mother-daughter pair who liked to kill and eat babies. To someone who always had higher expectations of chimpanzees than people, the petty hypocrisies of Western consumerism or even Chinese repression must seem like small potatoes in comparison. Her resilience and optimism are remarkable; they reminded me of how many times I have been content to adopt a convenient pessimism in the face of the terrible environmental damage taking place, and made me ashamed of it.

19.10.2006

The Sweet Yoke Of Fame

I've put up Chapter 7 of the Golden Calf translation, "The Sweet Yoke Of Fame", in which the protagonists buy some sharp new clothes, meet a pair of Chicago gangsters, and enjoy the best night of their lives while plundering their way south through the Soviet countryside.

16.10.2006

The Gnu-Antelope

Regular readers will remember that I've been chipping away with a friend at a translation of The Golden Calf, the beloved Stalin-era Soviet comic novel. Today I posted a rough draft of Chapter 6, in which our criminal protagonists pile into a car and begin embezzling their way south to Chernomorsk.

As ever, you can follow the analysis and evisceration in the translation LiveJournal comment thread. I'm not a big believer in stretching the open source metaphor, but the collective discussion on that site has been amazing. Most of it is in English and may be fun to follow if you have any interest in problems of translation. permalink

16.10.2006

National Day

How sad to be a crab in China! A turtle or catfish can at least swim free in its murky tank, waiting for the Inevitable to come sashaying through the restaurant door, but a crab must spend the long period between being plucked from his pelagic home and being served in a beautiful but impossible-to-eat-with-chopsticks dish all bondaged up in a fancy twine knot. You can often see these live crabs artfully stacked in baskets or tubs at the local seafood market, angry and immobile.

So I was happy to share a train car with an unusual, free-range crab on National Day. It was the first day of the misnamed week-long national vacation and both of us were going to Tianjin, a city not far from Beijing. I was just barely seated on a steep little staircase leading down into the car; he was resting comfortably in his metal tray. Every ten minutes or so one of his traveling companions would lift him out of the tray and make him menace another passenger with his pinchers, to general laughter. Then he would go back in the pan. He looked tired and dry; I couldn't imagine he was in for a good night in Tianjin.

My own prospects were much rosier. I was on my way to the airport to fly to the southeast coast of China, where I had booked a short holiday in Xiamen. Leaving from Tianjin let me save money over a Beijing departure while also giving me the chance to rub elbows (and every other part of my body) with the massive crowds of people who would be traveling on National Day. This was the morning when everyone in China would live up to stereotype by simultaneously trying to switch places. At some point, drunk, booking my ticket for this date had seemed like a fun way to “learn more about China”, a catchall phrase that seems to correlate suspiciously well with some really bad travel decisions.

"How bad could it get?" I thought.

The first ominous chords sounded during the subway ride into town. It was shortly before eight in the morning and already the cars at my outlying station were packed dense with people and their backpacks, all of us converging on the city center. At the big transfer stop at Xizhimen, barricades had been set up to channel the river of humanity safely into the station. The lab-coated ticket ladies had even taken the extraordinary step of emerging into the light to collect tickets outside, blinking under an unfamiliar sun.

It took me a while to get used to Chinese crowd dynamics, where the imperative is to squeeze through without regard for personal space. I suffered through a lot of uncomfortable subway rides this summer before it occurred to me to apply a strategy I learned my cat - first push the nose through, then one paw, then the other paw, applying steady pressure until you get where you need to be (on the lap, in the suitcase, under the fitted sheet, into the subway car). The thought had never occurred to me during frantic rush hours at Penn Station, but no matter how dense crowds get in New York City, there was still an aversion to actual physical contact with strangers. People tried to tuck themselves in and act invisible. This was not the case at all in Beijing, where you are expected to contribute bodily effort to help move the crowd along. If you get angry when strangers press up against you, then here you will find yourself angry a great deal of the time. Learning to ignore it is as difficult as it is liberating.

Local masters have developed strategies for navigating these crowds, such as holding out toddler grandchildren before them like Moses holding out his staff, or else clutching a heavy suitcase at chest height to increase their inertia and penetrating power. Older people from the provinces, who are very short even by Chinese standards (a silent but uncensorable history lesson) are especially ruthless at exploiting gaps in the understory. Lift your hand to scratch your nose and you may find a sudden trickle of grandmothers, holding hands, squeezing through the small space you left vacant. No one gets knocked down and the trains still somehow run on time, but it is certainly a breathtaking experience.

It took me four months to learn to stop constantly apologizing and plow on through. For all the mayhem, people play it clean (no elbowing or stepping on feet), and the game is remarkably impersonal. Even such rage-inducing phenomena as a dozen construction workers carrying a dozen enormous bales of rags into the subway, taking up all available space, seem to be accepted as accidents of a capricious Fate rather than as anything someone could influence or change (by yelling, for example).

The crowd waiting for the Tianjin train at the Beijing station was the densest I had ever seen. As I skirted its edge I was actually injected into it by the pressure of the people walking behind me. We formed a dense, semi-regular lattice extending some twenty meters out from the platform doors. Once in a while you could feel things moving at knee level, as suitcases and small children bounced around in between the immobilized adults.

When the doors opened it was literally impossible to move, and yet I found myself propelled along down the stairway, miraculously obeying the Navier-Stokes equations even though I am in fact quite bad at math. Somewhere on the platform a small eddy of us detached far enough for people to begin to move freely, and I pushed my way into the nearest train car, finding a stairstep to sit on right across from that lonesome crab.

People whose tickets actually matched the train's correct time and destination moved through the cars like happy lottery winners, claiming their seats and chasing off the squatters who had settled on every available surface. As we rolled out of the station, the situation stabilized, with everybody either in a seat or wedged in somewhere where they could stand or lean for ninety minutes without being knocked over. There seemed to be no spot where one could actually place a foot, yet by the routine miracle I've come to expect in Chinese crowds all kinds of business went on, ticket-takers coming and going, people floating to and from the bathrooms, even snack vendors who nonchalantly steered enormous baskets of food through the cars, taking orders and bringing back hot and cold dishes from God only knows what kind of a kitchen.

There was an equally impressive crowd waiting for the train at Tianjin, where strict crowd control measures (consisting of a hastily-rigged clothesline and a teenager with epaulets and a megaphone) had been put into place. The atmosphere was festive and hundreds of enormous mooncake boxes, miraculously uncrushed, punctuated the crowd with their bright red color. I found a Muslim street meat roaster and stood for a while eating dubious kebabs, wondering what would become of my friend the crab. But I couldn't think of good outcome, and I had to put it out of my mind.

10.10.2006

Hong Kong

When it comes to the future, we were robbed. Raised in anticipation of the new millennium, we let the grown-ups fill our ears with sweet promises even as they failed to do any of the basic or applied science needed to make them a reality. The year 2000 was supposed to bring us flying cars, flying robots, moon cities, undersea bases, bionic medicine, artificial brains, orbiting lasers, monoliths, domes, hypersonic airliners, cyborg bodies and giant space stations. Instead, when the big odometer finally rolled over, we were told to accept as the acme of Western technological achievement the autonomous vacuum cleaner and animated smiley. The crushing sense of disappointment found its purest expression in the Millennium Dome, a combination of insane cost, masterful engineering and total pointlessness of the kind one usually associates with things in low earth orbit. But its lesser expressions were everywhere.

In some areas, our civilization had even regressed. In the 1980's, the bad guys were a globe-spanning empire with a thermonuclear arsenal, undisputed chess superiority, great graphic design and a rather catchy worldview. Twenty years on, the global enemy had become a loose coalition of fundamentalist beardos whose most potent secret weapon was the airborne beverage. Cobra at its least competent was a better global adversary than al-Qaeda. In the meantime, the Concorde had been grounded, the nuclear icebreaker Lenin was sitting in dry dock, and even the retro Space Shuttle was about to be replaced with a scaled-up version of its predecessor. The future was here, and it kind of sucked.

Hong Kong was the first place where ever felt like I was in the 21st century. Free internet terminals in the subway, Jetsons architecture, a giant Central Escalator, chirping traffic lights, storefronts filled with tiny robotic gadgets - this was the new millenium I'd been waiting for. From the moment my plane docked at the world's most advanced airport and the cute policewoman scanned my eager retinas with her retina-scanning gun I felt like the future wasn't just a cynically oversold ripoff, but a place I might actually want to spend some time.

Like ancient Gaul, Hong Kong is divided into three parts. Taking the zippy and futuristic train from the airport at the western periphery of the colony past the new Disneyland takes you first into the New Territories (the mainland part of the colony) down into Kowloon and finally under Victoria harbor to the island of Hong Kong proper, the oldest part of the territory and the place where all the iconic buildings stand in a neat row, Hong Kong's equivalent of Manhattan.

The city center looks like it was designed on a "Free Cocaine Friday" at the Grand Theft Auto studios. Hong Kong island rises quickly from sea level to steep hills in the south, and property values are so high that every scrap of land that isn't on an eighty-degree slope has buildings on it. A system of concrete spaghetti roads and walkways connects the various levels of the city in a giant knot of unspeakably expensive infrastructure. Sidewalks somehow manage to weave under and over the main roads in a series of awkward underpasses, bridges and spiral staircases, but going long distances as a pedestrian is challenging. Attempts at cycling are rewarded with instant death. The climb from the old port district is so abrupt that there is even that Central Escalator, a strange bit of the indoors stuck in the outdoors, which looks like it escaped from one of the downtown malls and is trying to zigzag its way uphill to freedom. Commuters slide placidly up and down on its chain of moving staircases, looking into upper-story windows as they pass from the financial district up through the restaurant neighborhoods and finally into the posh apartments of the Mid-Levels.

It's hard to imagine how the economy here functioned when people and goods had to move around on foot, and there was no refrigeration or air conditioning. Even just moving along the city's contour lines in late August feels like taking a sauna bath (in the traditional, rather than ubiquitous Hong Kong girl-on-billboard sense of the term). If you turn and try to walk uphill, you can actually hear the faint hiss as all the moisture leaves your body and settles into your clothes. Here and there you may see a delivery person pushing a wheelbarrow up a vertical slope of concrete, two steps and rest, two steps and rest. The miserable people who actually have to work outdoors wear long coveralls and elaborate sunshades, covering up like Gulf Arabs.

My own hotel was in Kowloon, across the water from this alpine craziness, near the busy shops of Tsim Tsha Tsui. This neighborhood is an excellent place for those looking to buy a 100% genuine cheap rolex watch, a pallet of perfume and a digital camera while waiting for the nice Indian tailor to finish that bespoke three-piece suit in under two hours. My own reasons for coming were a bit more modest: I had made the trip down in late August in order to eat myself insensate and to get a new Chinese visa. The 'one country, two systems' agreement governing Hong Kong for the next forty years means that the colony is considered external to China for visa purposes, attracting expats like me who shuttle down as the most convenient way of cobbling together a long-term stay on the mainland.

The city's political status is complicated, but something about it struck me as strangely familiar. Here I was in a province autonomous in everything but defense and foreign policy, with its own beautifully colored play dollars, its own strange dialect of moon language, and a large population of people who secretly spoke English. Then it hit me - the place was a Chinese Québec, except with better food and dengue fever.

I was fully expecting to be amazed by the city, but to my surprise the first thing to jump out at me wasn't the crazy density or great wealth, but rather the fact that every street sign had come down with character cancer. Four months in Beijing had only given me the most rudimentary knowledge of Chinese, but there was still a bedrock class of characters ('street', 'hotel', 'restaurant', 'tobacco shop') that I had come to regard as old friends, and it was somewhat traumatic to see them gone, replaced by mysterious and intimidating usurpers bristling with ink. Like Taiwan, Hong Kong uses the traditional† Chinese writing system, which looks like it was designed by someone who got paid by the stroke:

I may be exaggerating a touch in the last example, but the others are real. And just to really mess with the heads of foreign learners, the change in orthography comes with a brand-new spoken language at no extra charge. Whatever foothold you may have scratched in the sheer rock wall of Mandarin becomes useless in Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, dropping you back into the abyss of complete illiteracy and incomprehension so familiar from your first weeks in China. Simple everyday situations you may have learned to cope with on the mainland ("how much?", "which way?", "dumplings?", "massage?") once again become an insurmountable linguistic Everest. Hence the immense feeling of relief when you discover that everyone here secretly speaks English.

There are few other outward signs of the long British dominion over Hong Kong, but its effects run deeper than just language. A century of proximity has taught Hong Kongers one of the West's best-kept secrets, which is that Westerners are not that interesting. For the first time since coming to China, I found it completely unexceptional to be a white guy. Beijing is not a bad city in this respect at all - people don't stare, and there are none of the cries of 'laowai' that you might hear in less visited parts of China - but neither do you ever feel like you are blending into the background. People treat you with the kind of courtesy and deep concern that we might reserve for a particularly mentally deficient visiting dignitary. The most mundane interaction with merchants, waiters, officials, or ordinary passers-by risks unleashing Level 9 Chinese hospitality, with much fussing and solicitousness and gathering of clouds of people to hover and giggle.

In Hong Kong you can be white, black, blue, green or striped and no one will take a second look. The city has been a cosmopolitan port for centuries, and of course all parties to the mix have brought with them not just their customs and moon languages but also their grandmothers and their recipes, making the city a culinary paradise. The grandmothers get put to work in the kitchens of ten thousand hole-in-the-wall restaurants, filling the streets with the most amazing assortment of cooking smells. Anything that swims, crawls, skitters or undulates its way through the sea is hauled out of the water and prepared in an infinity of different styles, to suit every palate and price level. Particularly impressive is the Indian food, unobtainable in Beijing and possibly the best I have ever eaten; lunch at the venerable Gaylord restaurant activated taste buds that hadn't fired in over a year. It occurred to me that Hong Kong was a kind of anti-Argentina, with steak one of the only foods that was not readily obtainable on every street corner.

As it's late August, heavy rains come in and drench the city with tropical abruptness. One minute some clouds are wafting around, the next minute a few fat drops have burst on the sidewalk, and then the air is opaque with rain, ridiculous quantities of water exploding against curbs and soaking the innocent. Moments later everything is back to normal, with a fresh rain smell and people emerging back out from the awnings where they have taken cover, until the whole process repeats again a few blocks later.

You can hide from the rain most effectively by descending into Hong Kong's immaculate subway, the kind of light rail system you would expect to find in Heaven. Four months of riding the subway across the immensity of Beijing - with its lab-coat-wearing ticket-shredding ladies, the kittens on sale in tiny cages, the refusal to let any passengers step off before mashing into the subway car, the crowds of expense account fraudsters with their morose sales cries of fapiao (receipt), the high-powered fans blowing ninety-degree air through your hair, the sour compressed smell of a million Asian sweat glands struggling to break free, the teenage uniformed guards barking through megaphones, the one-way pedestrian tunnels, the five-minute train delays at each station stop, the little advertisements in plexiglas holders above each strap - had brutalized me and crushed my subway expectations into a fine powder. So I was completely unprepared for the Hong Kong trains, with their spotless wide cars, beautiful maps, cool air and all that effortless gliding under the harbor.

Even more fun than the quick train journey to Central is taking the Kowloon ferry, particularly at night, where you can see all of Hong Kong's buildings lit up and standing in a neat row. The iconic building in the skyline is supposed to be I.M. Pei's boring Bank of China tower, but I much prefer the Lippo Center, which looks like a pack of giant glass turtles humping a chimney. Most of this part of town is an imposing arid stretch of steel box malls and financial centers, but just a little way up the hill lies a stretch of parkland, with calm gardens and a small pond where giant carp glide around under the water like nuclear missile submarines. There are tortoises as well, paddling around in the water, escapees from the ferocious southern Chinese appetite. These small oases are surprisingly numerous throughout the city, and in fact the built-up part of Hong Kong in surrounded by over a hundred kilometers of wonderful hiking trails out of all keeping with the territory's reputation as a crowded urban monstrosity. Wherever the ground gets so pointy that builders had to give up in exasperation you can find families and tourists puffing around in the bush.

Climbing uphill from the skyscrapers of Central leads into a little warren of restaurants, the beautiful small bar district of Lang Kwai Fong, and then up through a small zoo(!) to steeper and steeper roads until the buildings abruptly transition into thick foliage that yearns to come down from the peaks and cover the entire island. This greenery is another testament to the industrious Hong Kongers. Vegetation here is so aggressive that it can grow on vertical rock; you can imagine what it would do to the rest of the city if allowed to spread unchecked.

The city can seem hectic and rushed during business hours, but that is only until you see it on weekends, when Hong Kong's equivalent of the bridge and tunnel crowd converges on the city for an orgy of eating, cosmetics shopping and the quintessential Chinese hobby, crowd formation. Every bus, sidewalk and subway car is packed, and in the middle of town, people put out cardboard and tatami mats to make a long, improptu picnic along the eleveated walkways. Domestic workers on their lone day off sit and play cards or dominoes, laughing and enjoy the shade. The incongruous urban setting makes it looks like a festive train station or particularly good-natured refugee camp.

I was sad to leave Hong Kong. With my visa in hand there was no pretext to stay, but I could easily imagine myself living there for good, puffing my way up and down the hills, slowly turning into a sphere of radius R, uniformly filled with dim sum.

My flight to Beijing was delayed for a couple of hours, so that it landed close to two o'clock in the morning. Nevertheless, I found myself stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from just past the fifth ring road, the taxi driver helplessly pacing in and out of the cab in frustration. Without thinking, I had scheduled my return for a Sunday night, when every car-owning family that has fled in the outbound Friday night traffic jam tries to return to the city, clogging the roads again in the other direction until dawn. Hong Kong is an enchanting vision of one future China, but this surreal 3 AM gridlock amidst dirt and concrete served as a useful corrective. How do you bring seven hundred million subsistence farmers up to a First World standard of living? And how are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Hong Kong?

08.10.2006

Nobody Likes Moon Cakes

Yesterday (October 6) was the mid-Autumn festival, a main event in the lunar calendar that was doubly significant this year, since it fell in the middle of the week-long National Day celebration, when all of China is on vacation and most of China is on the road. Considering that the festival also fell on a Friday, it was nearly the ultimate party weekend, spoiled only by a bit of rain.

WalMart is my reliable early-warning system for Chinese holidays. Three weeks or so before any main event various special exhibits start popping up, and more and more floor space of the store is devoted to lanterns or zongzi or whatever the item of interest might be, similar to the Halloween and Christmas infestations that hit American shopping malls. About a month ago, I noticed a profusion of gorgeous and expensive red boxes taking up more and more shelf space - the mooncakes had arrived - and I spent some time debriefing my Chinese friends.

"What are mooncakes for?"

"For the mid-autumn festival. They are very famous. Usually we exchange them with friends and eat them cut into small wedges, with tea"

"Do you like the taste?"

"Hmm, maybe not so much."

Which is the polite Chinese equivalent of putting your finger in your mouth and miming the gag reflex.

"Strange," I thought, "why make a holiday dessert no one wants to eat?"

Mooncakes, of course, are the exact cultural analogue of the American Christmas fruitcake, that venerable Christmas pastry of astonishing density that brings people together by uniting the giver and receiver in a shared reluctance to eat it. The Chinese have not yet advanced as far as those intrepid Americans who store a received fruitcake for a year before re-gifting it to another victim, but there are promising signs that the failure to let mooncakes overwinter may just be a function of limited apartment storage space, solvable by applying economies of scale:

"Earlier this month, a prominent mooncake factory in Nanjing was reported to have minced and frozen last year's leftover mooncake fillings and reused them in this year's product. "

At its simplest, a mooncake is a pastry crust wrapped around a disk of filling that in shape, flavor and density strongly resembles a hockey puck. Traditional fillings include lotus seed paste and the salted yolk from a duck's egg, but modern mooncakes can come filled with pretty much anything. A Chinese character baked into the top of the cake warns you what to expect inside.

In simpler times, mooncakes were something you bought cheap in a paper sack and ate in wedges with your friends, bonding in shared hardship. In recent years, however, the trend has been to offer mooncakes packaged up in more and more ornate gift boxes, complete with brass sculptures, fancy utensils, bottles of brandy, and (for the completely unsubtle) miniature bars of gold. These blinged-out mooncakes have proved a useful way to flaunt great wealth, or offer that important someone the equivalent of an envelope full of cash while preserving some semblance of deniability.

Mooncake scientists have been caught a little flat-footed by the rise of the luxury gift box, and are racing to come up with high-end fillings to do the hyperornate presentation justice. A popular 'lucky' price point for the finest boxes is 9999 yuan ($1200), at which point even the most perfectly round egg yolk is not going to be adequate. A Western chef in this impasse might reach straight for the Perigord truffles, but the Chinese prefer their hideously expensive ingredients to lack flavor. They've enlisted the old standbys: shark fin, swallow's nest, pearl dust and (for those who really want to sledgehammer the point home) flakes of metallic gold. The approach so far has been limited to "let's find something really expensive and grind it up and put it in there", but work on the five-star mooncake continues, with perhaps a hint of desperation:

"The shark's fin was first stewed for hours in sugar water. After it dried, chefs mixed in some ham slices, various nuts and preserved fruits. "

The luxury mooncake fad may be a symptom of a rapidly stratifying society, but another, more charitable way to read it is as an expression of the universal human yearning for the edible. Unlike a fruitcake, you cannot soak a mooncake in brandy - it has to go down on its own merits. I noticed that the most popular mooncakes this year were those that gave the traditional recipe the widest possible berth. Häägën Däzs, past masters at selling extremely overpriced ice cream on the Chinese market, deployed their perennial winner: chocolate-covered ice cream mooncakes. These suspiciously Klondikeian confections have been selling like... well, like hotcakes, to the point where anyone who doesn't pre-order them in the summer months is just out of luck.

Other multinationals haven't been as successful. Starbucks tried to crack the market with a chocolate-and-lavender offering that perfectly blended the rich taste of cocoa with the floral aroma of bath soap, but this proved too much even for the hardened mooncake eater. Meanwhile KFC, the other titan of the China market, chose to punt with a custard tart that it lamely emphasized as "moon-shaped".

I thought I would check in with that touchstone of all things cultural, my Chinese chat harem, to see if there was any love anywhere for the poor pastry:

<rc> when i was at university, there was a Dept called food and agriculture
<rc> one of the classes was about how to cook things
<rc> before the moon cake days, they taught how to make moon cakes
<rc> the mooncakes made by the students were hard like a rock, they even used it like a stone to fight for fun
<rc> when moon day came, the university sent all the students free mooncakes which were from that Dept
<rc> no one ate it, we did the same thing as the cooking students did, so there was a moon fight
<idle> ha, can I steal that story from you?
<rc> of course
<rc> dont forget the starbucks part
<rc> i will never forgive them for making a lavender moon cake

There is one other traditional food served on the mid-autumn holiday: the pomelo. This lovable fruit can be forgiven its harmless self-indulgence in the area of rind thickness; under all that skin it tastes like a simple, no-nonsense grapefruit.

Homely, fresh, tasty, and impossible to package, it makes the perfect foil for the mooncake. So long as no one develops a a shark fin pomelo (and I'm sure research is ongoing in some blood-spattered Guangdong basement) it will remain the great green hope against the gentrification of the mid-autumn festival.