In the most recent version of my second novel, The Swing of Beijing, Pip Alonzo begins writing a book called Eating Penis in Beijing, which is her exploration of the unique way that China is modernizing. The title, of course, is also a joke, as well as an allusion to the many ways in which Beijing's expatriate residents are brought to their knees by the formidable city.
Reader response to Eating Penis in Beijing, and to the scene in penis restaurant that inspires that title (in The Swing of Beijing, as well as in real life), has been such that when I was brainstorming locations for a short promo for The Swing of Beijing, Beijing's actual penis restaurant, Guoli Zhuang, was the obvious choice. We -- that is to say, me, Matt Forney, and Josh Chin -- filmed the promo yesterday. (I'll post the link here once the promo is finished and up on the web.)
The conversation that Matt and I had about The Swing of Beijing on camera, as well as our lunch of horse, donkey, dog and ox cock (horse was the best, in case you're wondering), made me think back to the many iterations of Eating Penis in Beijing that have appeared in The Swing of Beijing over the many drafts. Below, I reprint the penis restaurant's earliest appearance in The Swing of Beijing, in an article that Pip writes in defiance of her editor, who wants her to cover the penis restaurant with a non-analytical, "isn't this gross?" agenda.
In this early version, Pip gets to use her full name, "Lapis Patricia Alonzo," for which "Pip" is a nickname (a detail that's been axed in later versions), and her explanation includes a detailed analysis of the social meaning of status foods. As in later drafts, however, Pip's analytic focus remains the same: why penis? Why now?
Sure, The City's Called "BJ," but Eating Cock in Beijing Isn't Just About Sex
By Lapis Patricia Alonzo
Guolibian, Beijing's first penis-in-every-dish restaurant, is a development of note. Though penis is not an ingredient foreign to Chinese cuisine, and consuming it is reputed to have health benefits ranging from virility to improved skin tone, Guolibian's singularity and lack of competitors raise the questions: Why penis? Why now?
Pointing to the omniverousness of "the Chinese" doesn't explain Guolibian. Vague stereotypes about all the world's animals (and their many parts) ending their lives in a Chinese wok is a racist canard, albeit one embraced by the Chinese themselves: Northern Chinese complain that Southern Chinese will eat anything. "Three squeaks," a dish of live newborn rats - so named because the ratlings squeak once when they're grabbed by chopsticks, a second time when they're dipped in sauce, and a third and final time when popped in the mouth - is a common example offered by Northern Chinese to prove the uncivilized natures of their Southern countrymen.
In fact, the food consumed by most Chinese is pretty pedantic. Putting aside the approximately 700 million Chinese peasants who subsist on staple foods, like rice and fried bread, somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 million Chinese qualify as "middle class." And, at least in Beijing, they eat jiachangcai: literally "food often eaten in the home" (although increasingly Beijing's middle class eat jiachangcai in restaurants). Typical of this cuisine is stir-fried tomatoes or cucumbers with eggs, braised eggplants or tofu in brown sauce, and boiled dumplings stuffed with pork and cilantro.
That said, Chinese banquet cuisine, reserved historically for imperial personages (or, in more recent times, for Communist cadres and their relatives and business partners), has always encompassed the extremes of culinary experience: bird spit, camel humps, frog ovaries, hairy crab roe, jelly fish, rabbit ears, scorpions, shark's fins, snakes and - yes - penises. These ingredients became delicacies for the same reasons that transform any odd food - caviar and uni; Vieux Boulogne; haggis; sweetbreads - into a treasure in need of an acquired taste: they're rare or expensive, require special expertise to prepare, taste good and/or impart coveted health benefits.
Why penis? It's a benchmark delicacy food. It's rare - there's only one on every male, and whether because of anthropomorphism or scarcity, everyone acknowledges that it's valuable. It requires special skills to prepare because, as the female readership already knows, every penis is different. And, not to belabor the knowledge of our female readership, it tastes fine - particularly when doused in chili or sesame sauces. Perhaps most endearingly, Chinese men really believe that it enhances sexual performance. Across the world, Viagra has found grateful customers for a $9 pill that can cause debilitating headaches, priapism or - even worse - nothing at all. Eating penis is (depending on the species) cheaper, tastier and risks fewer side effects - and if it has a placebo effect, even better.
Simply put, penis is a status food in China. And this is the answer to the second question: Why now? Perhaps nothing is so important in China as face, but face is precisely what the Chinese, as both individuals and as a nation, feel they've been deprived of for the past century. Pre-Communism, rampant wars and invasions, opium, political vacuums and natural disasters left the Chinese impoverished and their country an international whipping boy. Post-Communism, ideology, bad policies, corruption and environmental degradation have left the Chinese impoverished and their country an international pariah.
For the first time in more than a century, the Chinese are on the brink of enjoying genuine status. Quality of life is improving in a stable political context, and the nation is enjoying unprecedented attention on the world stage. Hosting the 2008 Olympics is the capstone of national status, the proof positive of the nation's emergence as a power that commands face; eating penis is the personal equivalent. Eating penis shows that you're rich, virile, and feasting on the food of kings.
But status and the Chinese quest for it doesn't entirely explain an all-penis restaurant like Guolibian. Acknowledging that eating penis shows wealth and virility and commands face still begs the question: Commands face from whom? Plainly, not from the West, where eating penis is viewed as abhorrent and uncivilized. So why, just when China is about to win international acceptance, and the Chinese people to enjoy heretofore-unknown personal prosperity - benefits attributable to China's adoption of Western economic methods - would the Chinese embrace penis cuisine?
This restating of the questions doesn't merely reflect Western incomprehension of a desire for difference. The Western revulsion of penis consumption is grounded in more than narrow-mindedness. Western respect for the individual has historically correlated to a practice of ascribing sacred or symbolic meaning to certain body parts: Oedipus gauged out his eyes; Achilles' downfall was his tendon; and Jesus gave his blood to save humanity. Consumption of eyes, tendons, blood, and other parts emblematic of the person, like hearts, brains and genitalia, has - precisely because of that part's close association with an individual's identity - long been linked in the West with barbarism.
And while it's easy to critique Western sensibilities as those developed in conditions of prosperity - bones, organs, and sinew that constitute trash in the West are, elsewhere in the world, whole meals - the truth is that conservative consumption practices are safer. Human cases of bird flu in Viet Nam have been traced to the practice of using raw poultry blood as a condiment in porridge. SARS was unleashed when the Chinese mania for eating wild animals to demonstrate status led to increased consumption of civet cats, whose bodies harbored the virus. HIV, originally a disease in monkeys, may have leapt the species barrier when humans hunted, prepared or ate bush-meat, while the degenerative neurological disease, kuru, afflicted New Guineans who ate brain.
For these reasons, the Chinese enthusiasm for eating penis at this historical moment is significant. What explains a penis emporium, like Guolibian, is the Chinese rejection of Western values in favor of establishing continuity with more traditional Chinese mores and practices. The Chinese have little use for the Western investment in the sanctity of the individual or the West's fanatical attention to safety, and the Chinese now have the confidence and security to dismiss these Western obsessions. When the Chinese tuck into a penis, they're not trying to keep up with the alienated, urban Joneses in New York or London. Rather, they're aligning themselves with their ancestors, reintegrating themselves into the context of their clans, and establishing a communion with an ancient belief system that posits that eating the penis of a yak imbues a man with the animal's prowess.
The Chinese are unfazed by the contradiction inherent in having achieved the prosperity necessary to enjoy penis-eating as a status ritual only by embracing Western economic reforms. What the Chinese want, and think they can have, is the benefits of modernity - wealth and conveniences, stability and respect - while maintaining the feudal, famial- and communal-orientation that sustained them through their two thousand year history as a nation under imperial rule.
Eating penis in Beijing, then, represents "modernization with Chinese characteristics." As with most slogans - "democracy with Chinese characteristics," "transparency with Chinese characteristics," "Internet with Chinese characteristics" - the last three words tend to obliterate the first one. Recognizing that incompatibility, however, isn't within the scope of "self-awareness with Chinese characteristics." And for the time being, at least, China's massive labor resources, steaming economy, and manipulative bravado allow China to get away with telling its naysayers: "Eat me."
Reader response to Eating Penis in Beijing, and to the scene in penis restaurant that inspires that title (in The Swing of Beijing, as well as in real life), has been such that when I was brainstorming locations for a short promo for The Swing of Beijing, Beijing's actual penis restaurant, Guoli Zhuang, was the obvious choice. We -- that is to say, me, Matt Forney, and Josh Chin -- filmed the promo yesterday. (I'll post the link here once the promo is finished and up on the web.)
The conversation that Matt and I had about The Swing of Beijing on camera, as well as our lunch of horse, donkey, dog and ox cock (horse was the best, in case you're wondering), made me think back to the many iterations of Eating Penis in Beijing that have appeared in The Swing of Beijing over the many drafts. Below, I reprint the penis restaurant's earliest appearance in The Swing of Beijing, in an article that Pip writes in defiance of her editor, who wants her to cover the penis restaurant with a non-analytical, "isn't this gross?" agenda.
In this early version, Pip gets to use her full name, "Lapis Patricia Alonzo," for which "Pip" is a nickname (a detail that's been axed in later versions), and her explanation includes a detailed analysis of the social meaning of status foods. As in later drafts, however, Pip's analytic focus remains the same: why penis? Why now?
Sure, The City's Called "BJ," but Eating Cock in Beijing Isn't Just About Sex
By Lapis Patricia Alonzo
Guolibian, Beijing's first penis-in-every-dish restaurant, is a development of note. Though penis is not an ingredient foreign to Chinese cuisine, and consuming it is reputed to have health benefits ranging from virility to improved skin tone, Guolibian's singularity and lack of competitors raise the questions: Why penis? Why now?
Pointing to the omniverousness of "the Chinese" doesn't explain Guolibian. Vague stereotypes about all the world's animals (and their many parts) ending their lives in a Chinese wok is a racist canard, albeit one embraced by the Chinese themselves: Northern Chinese complain that Southern Chinese will eat anything. "Three squeaks," a dish of live newborn rats - so named because the ratlings squeak once when they're grabbed by chopsticks, a second time when they're dipped in sauce, and a third and final time when popped in the mouth - is a common example offered by Northern Chinese to prove the uncivilized natures of their Southern countrymen.
In fact, the food consumed by most Chinese is pretty pedantic. Putting aside the approximately 700 million Chinese peasants who subsist on staple foods, like rice and fried bread, somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 million Chinese qualify as "middle class." And, at least in Beijing, they eat jiachangcai: literally "food often eaten in the home" (although increasingly Beijing's middle class eat jiachangcai in restaurants). Typical of this cuisine is stir-fried tomatoes or cucumbers with eggs, braised eggplants or tofu in brown sauce, and boiled dumplings stuffed with pork and cilantro.
That said, Chinese banquet cuisine, reserved historically for imperial personages (or, in more recent times, for Communist cadres and their relatives and business partners), has always encompassed the extremes of culinary experience: bird spit, camel humps, frog ovaries, hairy crab roe, jelly fish, rabbit ears, scorpions, shark's fins, snakes and - yes - penises. These ingredients became delicacies for the same reasons that transform any odd food - caviar and uni; Vieux Boulogne; haggis; sweetbreads - into a treasure in need of an acquired taste: they're rare or expensive, require special expertise to prepare, taste good and/or impart coveted health benefits.
Why penis? It's a benchmark delicacy food. It's rare - there's only one on every male, and whether because of anthropomorphism or scarcity, everyone acknowledges that it's valuable. It requires special skills to prepare because, as the female readership already knows, every penis is different. And, not to belabor the knowledge of our female readership, it tastes fine - particularly when doused in chili or sesame sauces. Perhaps most endearingly, Chinese men really believe that it enhances sexual performance. Across the world, Viagra has found grateful customers for a $9 pill that can cause debilitating headaches, priapism or - even worse - nothing at all. Eating penis is (depending on the species) cheaper, tastier and risks fewer side effects - and if it has a placebo effect, even better.
Simply put, penis is a status food in China. And this is the answer to the second question: Why now? Perhaps nothing is so important in China as face, but face is precisely what the Chinese, as both individuals and as a nation, feel they've been deprived of for the past century. Pre-Communism, rampant wars and invasions, opium, political vacuums and natural disasters left the Chinese impoverished and their country an international whipping boy. Post-Communism, ideology, bad policies, corruption and environmental degradation have left the Chinese impoverished and their country an international pariah.
For the first time in more than a century, the Chinese are on the brink of enjoying genuine status. Quality of life is improving in a stable political context, and the nation is enjoying unprecedented attention on the world stage. Hosting the 2008 Olympics is the capstone of national status, the proof positive of the nation's emergence as a power that commands face; eating penis is the personal equivalent. Eating penis shows that you're rich, virile, and feasting on the food of kings.
But status and the Chinese quest for it doesn't entirely explain an all-penis restaurant like Guolibian. Acknowledging that eating penis shows wealth and virility and commands face still begs the question: Commands face from whom? Plainly, not from the West, where eating penis is viewed as abhorrent and uncivilized. So why, just when China is about to win international acceptance, and the Chinese people to enjoy heretofore-unknown personal prosperity - benefits attributable to China's adoption of Western economic methods - would the Chinese embrace penis cuisine?
This restating of the questions doesn't merely reflect Western incomprehension of a desire for difference. The Western revulsion of penis consumption is grounded in more than narrow-mindedness. Western respect for the individual has historically correlated to a practice of ascribing sacred or symbolic meaning to certain body parts: Oedipus gauged out his eyes; Achilles' downfall was his tendon; and Jesus gave his blood to save humanity. Consumption of eyes, tendons, blood, and other parts emblematic of the person, like hearts, brains and genitalia, has - precisely because of that part's close association with an individual's identity - long been linked in the West with barbarism.
And while it's easy to critique Western sensibilities as those developed in conditions of prosperity - bones, organs, and sinew that constitute trash in the West are, elsewhere in the world, whole meals - the truth is that conservative consumption practices are safer. Human cases of bird flu in Viet Nam have been traced to the practice of using raw poultry blood as a condiment in porridge. SARS was unleashed when the Chinese mania for eating wild animals to demonstrate status led to increased consumption of civet cats, whose bodies harbored the virus. HIV, originally a disease in monkeys, may have leapt the species barrier when humans hunted, prepared or ate bush-meat, while the degenerative neurological disease, kuru, afflicted New Guineans who ate brain.
For these reasons, the Chinese enthusiasm for eating penis at this historical moment is significant. What explains a penis emporium, like Guolibian, is the Chinese rejection of Western values in favor of establishing continuity with more traditional Chinese mores and practices. The Chinese have little use for the Western investment in the sanctity of the individual or the West's fanatical attention to safety, and the Chinese now have the confidence and security to dismiss these Western obsessions. When the Chinese tuck into a penis, they're not trying to keep up with the alienated, urban Joneses in New York or London. Rather, they're aligning themselves with their ancestors, reintegrating themselves into the context of their clans, and establishing a communion with an ancient belief system that posits that eating the penis of a yak imbues a man with the animal's prowess.
The Chinese are unfazed by the contradiction inherent in having achieved the prosperity necessary to enjoy penis-eating as a status ritual only by embracing Western economic reforms. What the Chinese want, and think they can have, is the benefits of modernity - wealth and conveniences, stability and respect - while maintaining the feudal, famial- and communal-orientation that sustained them through their two thousand year history as a nation under imperial rule.
Eating penis in Beijing, then, represents "modernization with Chinese characteristics." As with most slogans - "democracy with Chinese characteristics," "transparency with Chinese characteristics," "Internet with Chinese characteristics" - the last three words tend to obliterate the first one. Recognizing that incompatibility, however, isn't within the scope of "self-awareness with Chinese characteristics." And for the time being, at least, China's massive labor resources, steaming economy, and manipulative bravado allow China to get away with telling its naysayers: "Eat me."
Leave a comment