Chinese Food

I'll start today's update with a no-brainer: China is fast-becoming a truly capitalist consumer society. I mean, when I go shopping at the grocery store, I don't do it with government-issued food stamps and I certainly don't do it for free. I pay with cash. Cold hard cash.

But don't get the wrong idea. This blog isn't about politics or government or any of that. It's about stuff, and more specifically the stuff you find in daily life living in a semi-rural post-industrial Beijing.

Stuff like this bag of Cheetos. You know, I always thought the idea of cheese flavoring was inextricably linked to the very heart of Cheetos. I guess that had something to do with the brand name sounding so much like "cheese." But when Cheetos came to China the brand had to undergo a little name change -- you know, they speak this whole other language here, called "Chinese" -- so now they call it 奇多, or "Qiduo."

Now, 奇多 can mean any number of different things. The "qi" part could be translated as surprise, wonder, queer, odd or strange, while "duo" can mean excessive, numerous, or (also) odd. Well as a matter of fact these Cheetos are strange. They've abandoned the classical cheese doodle shape for a neat little ravioli-like puff. And, oh, yeah, the cheese? It's gone too. The flavors available range from chicken to steak to veggie shish-kabob. But no cheese.

Actually, "no cheese" is a fairly prevalent phenomenon here in Beijing. It's hard to find. The Wal-mart has some, but they only have Land-o-lakes medium cheddar and Kraft singles slices. I've tried to share my love of cheese with some of my friends and students here, but I've made no headway.

Milk is another story. I'm going to guess that when you think of milk you think of cartons, jugs, or, for my Canadian friends, 1.33 litre transparent bags. Well here the more common form of milk is the long-lasting kind, the kind you can keep on a shelf for months on end because milk is frankly not very popular either. So milk comes in boxes of twenty or so heavy duty paper foil bags. The milk is sweeter than American milk, and, actually, it's really delicious once you get used to it. Each bag of 242 mL is just enough to fill a standard glass, or to pour over a bowl of cereal.

Ah, Cereal. That daily part of your complete breakfast. Well, cereal's a luxury item here, and so far it hasn't gained much traction. I discovered my first cereal in China three months after I got here. There was a girl modeling the cereal, you know, like those people who demonstrate juice makers or knife sets. Well she was standing there with a tray of paper cups, each with about ten pieces of this Nestle cereal called "Milk and Egg Stars" inside. I was so happy to find it, I bought six boxes of cereal right there. Probably as much as everyone else who bought cereal put together.

I should say a few words about overpackaging in all this. I mean, you might have thought about it momentarily when I described the milk packaging, but you know, there's another side to the consumer equation -- waste. So, every corrugated cardboard box of milk has twenty individual sachets of milk, and I should also add that every box of cereal usually comes with two sachets of cereal. Cookies generally come with a tray that divides the cookies into little pods, but so do the Lay's and Pringles potato chips, here. You can buy sleeves of Lay's potato chips neatly arrayed in a sturdy plastic security tray. All of this goes without mentioning the KFC/McDonald's/Starbucks explosion. So packaging is a passion here, but I'm afraid with a rapidly-growing supermarket economy, China will soon have to face the demon of overpackaging head on or find itself swimming in piles of garbage like New York's Staten Island.

But now for a lighter note. Remember MSG? That oft-demonized food flavor additive? Is it a carcinogen? An addictive drug? An allergen? A curse? Well at Wal-Mart in 昌平 (Changping), it's got its own section, easily ten times the size of the cheese section, by way of comparison. Doing just a little research on MSG, I think it's safe to say that most experts and professionals agree that its biggest problem is it's just too darn tasty. Yeah, it's a salt, technically, so when you ingest it it's not necessarily going to be the most nutritious part of the meal, but, yeah, after you eat it you're going to feel full. That "full feeling" known as "Chinese food syndrome" has an explanation. After you eat a lot of delicious food, you feel full. Anyway, now I know why the Chinese food in China tastes so much better than that lousy American stuff. Hooray! MSG!

Art Wars in Beijing

Beijing is the home to a massive sprawl of art and design known as the 798 district, a converted industrial sector that now makes a home for creative people of all kinds. But there are struggles going on here -- as in all burgeoning bohemian art communities -- struggles to define what art is, and struggles to establish its value to society.

In the looming shadow of the global financial crisis -- the topic that weighs heavily on every front page and at the top of every news broadcast -- property costs are rising in the 798, an area of old industrial Beijing that lies right in the corridor between the city's center and its ultra-modern international airport. As costs rise, tenants are worried about what will happen to their galleries.

There is art represented here from schools as diverse as conceptual to expressionist, from craft to surrealist. I've added some pictures to this post so you can see what's going with some of this art.

Surreal art by Xiao Se (萧瑟) at the Fifth Element Gallery.

To be honest, I was quite shocked at the candidness of some of this art. In a country where media is heavily controlled (even bloggers, right?) the 798 is a bastion of open expression, a home of sometimes sharp social criticism. On my visit, a one-day visit that only led me through less than half of the art sprawl, I was struck especially by the exhibition of the late Chen Yufei's work, that portrays an urban nightmare landscape riddled with commercialism, overpopulation, and dissonance.

In one piece we find a disturbing superposition of images: a man sitting on an english-language newspaper, the 21-st Century times, reporting on some financial crisis or another, holding a cell phone and in the sky, malevolent faces leer from the face of a 100 yuan note in the sky. Writing in the sky echoes the phrase on the face of every note of Chinese currency, "中国人民银行," or, "The People's Bank of China."

There's a gallery hosting art that plays with chinese writing itself, blending expressionism with Chinese writing. Another hosts craft art that truly brings a surreal feeling to the world around it, as though you've left the real world and entered a surreal painting. But what's inside the galleries is only half the story.

Outside the galleries, on streets regularly patrolled by squads of ten or so guards, grafitti artists are winning the rent war. From lowly tags to massive frescoes, the renegade urban artform has definitely made its colorful mark on the drab exterior of the 798.

Grafitti is not allowed here. Cameras are in place all over the complex, inside and out, to prevent it. All to no avail.

Sometimes it's striking to see the difference in skill represented between what's outside, and what's inside the gallery. One exhibit comes to mind...a room full of empty easels, all brightly painted a different colour, so tightly-packed it's hard to move, and all in a room so big it could house a small jet plane. The concept is interesting, but in execution the piece lacks the gusto and wow of the fresco found on a wall outside in the open air, a piece entitled, "say hello to big 爸爸" or, "daddy."

Whether the graffiti deserves the same praise as the work inside the galleries is still a point of heated debate, but one thing is clear: Art -- of all kinds -- is alive and well in Beijing's 798 district. 口

More photos from the 798 District below >