Food writer Fuchsia Dunlop’s journey to becoming an award-winning Chinese food writer and cookbook author is an interesting one in which she writes about in her memoir Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China.
Moving to Chengdu to learn Chinese on a British Council scholarship in 1994 was the start of her adventures with Sichuan cuisine in which she eventually wrote a cookbook about. Finding formal Chinese lessons in Sichuan University too boring and too full of propaganda, she skipped classes and spent most of her time wandering around the city and going to restaurants to indulge in her love of eating. She also gives delightful descriptions of street life in Chengdu:
“In the alleys there were wine shops, with strong grain spirits sold from enormous clay vats. Some of the wine was steeped with medicinal wolfberries, some – for the gentlemen, of course, – with assorted animal penises. Flute-sellers wandered among the crowds with bamboo pipes slung all over their bodies, playing a melody as they went. And it was hard to go more than a few yards without being tempted to eat. I might be waylaid by an old man selling sesame balls; distracted by someone selling glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in tangerine leaves from a steamer on the back of a bicycle; or arrested by the scent of eggy pancakes stuffed with jam, fresh from the girdle.”
It is not surprising that Dunlop befriended many locals through her love of food. Chinese people love to eat and there’s nothing like finding a kindred spirit through food. It also helps that Dunlop was an adventurous eater who had vowed to eat everything she was offered, no matter how bizarre. By her own admission – with an amount of shame thrown in – she has eaten endangered animals like muntjac (a type of deer) and perhaps unknowingly also a wild five-pace snake.
Dunlop took her love of Sichuan food even further when she enrolled to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Being the only foreigner and one of the three women in the class, she faced difficulty fitting in as most of her classmates, who were from working-class or peasant homes, had never interacted with a lao wai, a foreigner, before. Despite her difficulties with the Sichuan dialect, Dunlop does relatively well in class and gives us a little insight into the things she learnt:
“Professional Chinese cookery is serious, complex and sophisticated…the basic word chao, for example, means ‘stir-fry’, but if you want to be really precise, you should specify whether you mean hua chao (‘slippery stir-fry’), bao chao (‘explode stir-fry’), xiao chao (‘small, simple stir-fry’), sheng chao (‘raw stir-fry’), shu chao (‘cooked stir-fry), chao xiang (‘stir-fry until fragrant’), yan chao (‘salt stir-fry’), or sha chao (‘sand stir-fry’).”
The rest of the book chronicles Dunlop’s eating and travel adventures in Hunan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Fujian and Yangzhou. Dunlop’s love for China is evident, though she is also clearly aware of the rife corruption that takes place among government officials, the ethnic tensions in Xinjiang and the illogical Mao-worship that still exists in many parts of China, among many other contradictory issues that plague a communist country with a (somewhat) capitalist economy. Ultimately though, it’s the diversity of China’s people, food and cultures, that Dunlop has fallen in love with. With a mix of travel and food writing, this memoir was an enjoyable read and one I would recommend.
