A RAT IN MY SOUP
Looking for the best-tasting rodent
in town.
Peter Hessler
The New Yorker
July 24, 2000
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"Do you want a big rat or a small rat?" the waitress asked. |
"If you have white hair and eat rat regularly, it will turn black," the owner said.
|
The waitress at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, who was also named
Zhong (in Chinese, it means "bell"), asked again, "Do you want a big rat or a
small rat?"
"What's the difference?" I said.
"The big rats eat grass stems, and the small ones eat fruit."
I tried a more direct tack. "Which tastes better?"
"Both of them taste good."
"Which do you recommend?"
"Either one."
I glanced at the table next to mine. Two parents, a grandmother, and a little
boy were having lunch.The boy was gnawing on a rat drumstick. I couldn't tell
if the drumstick had belonged to a big rat or a small rat. The boy ate
quickly. It was a warm afternoon. The sun was shining. I made my decision.
"Small rat," I said.
The Chinese say that people in Guangdong will eat anything. Besides rat, a
customer at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant can order turtledove,
fox, cat, python, and an assortment of strange-looking local animals whose
names do not translate into English. All of them are kept live in pens at the
back of the restaurant and are killed only when a customer orders one of them.
Choosing among them involves considerations beyond flavor or texture. You
order cat not just because you enjoy the taste of cat but because cats are
said to impart a lively jingshen (spirit). You eat deer penis to improve
virility. Snakes make you stronger. And rat? "It keeps you from going bald,"
Zhong Shaocong, the daughter of the owner of the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor
Restaurant, told me. Zhong Qingjiang, the owner of the New Eight Sceneries
Wild Flavor Food City, went further. "If you have white hair and eat rat
regularly, it will turn black," she said. "And if you're going bald and you
eat rat every day your hair will stop falling out. A lot of the parents around
here feed rat to a small child who doesn't have much hair, and the hair grows
better."
Earlier this year, Luogang opened a "restaurant street" in the newly developed
Luogang Economic Open Zone, a parkland and restaurant district designed to
draw visitors from nearby Guangzhou City. The government invested a million
two hundred thousand dollars in the project, which enabled the two rat
restaurants to move from their old, cramped quarters in a local park into new,
greatly expanded spaces-about eighteen hundred square feet for each
establishment. The Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, which cost
forty-two thousand dollars to build, opened in early March. Six days later,
the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City opened, on an investment of
fifty-four thousand dollars. A third restaurant-a massive, air-conditioned
facility, which is expected to cost seventy-two thousand dollars-will open
soon. A fourth is in the planning stages.
On the morning of my initiation into rat cuisine, I visited the construction
site of the third facility, whose owner, Deng Ximing, was the only local
restaurateur not named Zhong. He was married to a Zhong, however, and he had
the fast-talking confidence of a successful entrepreneur. I also noticed that
he had a good head of hair. He spoke of the village's culinary tradition with
pride. "It's more than a thousand years old," he said. "And it's always been
rats from the mountains-we're not eating city rats. The mountain rats are
clean, because up there they aren't eating anything dirty. Mostly, they eat
fruit-oranges, plums, jackfruit. People from the government hygiene department
have been here to examine the rats. They took them to the laboratory and
checked them out thoroughly to see if they had any diseases, and they found
nothing. Not even the slightest problem."
Luogang's restaurant street has been a resounding success. Newspapers and
television stations have reported extensively on the benefits of the local
specialty, and an increasing number of customers are making the half-hour trip
from Guangzhou City. Both the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant and the
New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City serve, on average, three thousand
rats every Saturday and Sunday, which are the peak dining days. "Many people
come from faraway places," Zhong Qingjiang told me. "They come from Guangzhou,
Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macao. One customer came all the way from America with
her son. They were visiting relatives in Luogang, and the family brought them
here to eat. She said you couldn't find this kind of food in America."
In America, needless to say, you would be hard-pressed to find twelve thousand
fruit-fed rats anywhere on any weekend, but this isn't a problem in Luogang.
On my first morning in the village, I watched dozens of peasants come down
from the hills, looking to get a piece of the rat business. They came on
mopeds, on bicycles, and on foot. All of them carried burlap sacks of
squirming rats that had been trapped on their farms.
"Last year, I sold my oranges for fifteen cents a pound," a farmer named Zhong
Senji told me. "But this year the price has dropped to less than ten cents."
Like many other peasants, Zhong decided that he could do a lot better with
rats. Today, he had nine rats in his sack. When the sack was put on a scale in
the rear of the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, it shook and squeaked.
It weighed in at just under three pounds, and Zhong received the equivalent in
yuan of a dollar forty-five per pound, for a total of three dollars and
eighty-seven cents. In Luogang, rats are more expensive than pork or chicken.
A pound of rat costs nearly twice as much as a pound of beef.
At the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, I began with a dish called
Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans. There were plenty of other options on
the menu-among them, Mountain Rat Soup, Steamed Mountain Rat, Simmered
Mountain Rat, Roasted Mountain Rat, Mountain Rat Curry, and Spicy and Salty
Mountain Rat-but the waitress had enthusiastically recommended the Simmered
Mountain Rat with Black Beans, which arrived in a clay pot.
I ate the beans first. They tasted fine. I poked at the rat meat. It was
clearly well done, and it was attractively garnished with onions, leeks, and
ginger. Nestled in a light sauce were skinny rat thighs, short strips of rat
flank, and delicate, toylike rat ribs. I started with a thigh, put a chunk of
it into my mouth, and reached for a glass of beer. The beer helped.
The restaurant's owner, Zhong Dieqin, came over and sat down. "What do you
think?" she asked.
"I think it tastes good."
"You know it's good for your health."
"I've heard that."
"It's good for your hair and skin," she said. "It's also good for your
kidneys."
Earlier that morning, I'd met a peasant who told me that my brown hair might
turn black if I ate enough rat. Then he thought for a moment and said that he
wasn't certain if eating rat had the same effect on foreigners that it did on
the Chinese-it might do something entirely different to me. The possibility
seemed to interest him a great deal.
Zhong Dieqin watched me intently. "Are you sure you like it?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, tentatively. In fact, it wasn't bad. The meat was lean and
white, without a hint of gaminess. Gradually, my squeamishness faded, and I
tried to decide what, exactly, the flavor of rat reminded me of. But nothing
came to mind. It simply tasted like rat.
After a while, Zhong Dieqin excused herself, and the waitress drifted away. A
young man came over and identified himself as the restaurant's assistant
manager. He wanted to know whether I had come to Luogang specifically to
report on the restaurants. I said that I had. "Did you register with the
government before you came here?" he asked.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because it's too much trouble."
"You should have done that-those are the rules," he said. There was a wariness
in his voice, which I recognized as part of a syndrome that is pervasive
throughout China: Fear of a Foreign Writer.
"I don't think the government cares very much if I write about restaurants," I
said.
"They could help you," he said. "They would give you statistics and arrange
interviews."
"I can find my own interviews. And if I registered with the government I would
have to take all of the government officials out to lunch." A scene appeared
in my mind: a gaggle of Communist cadres, middle-aged men in cheap suits, all
of them eating rat. I put my chopsticks down.
The assistant manager kept talking. "A lot of foreigners come to our China to
write about human rights," he said.
"That's true."
He looked at me hard. "Have you come here to write about human rights?"
"Have I asked you any questions about human rights?"
"No."
"Well, then, it would be hard for me to write a story about human rights. I'm
writing a story about Luogang's rat restaurants. It's nothing sensitive."
"You should have registered with the government," he said stubbornly.
Next door, at the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City, the Zhongs were
more media-savvy. They asked if I had brought along a television crew. They
looked disappointed when I said that I hadn't. Then the floor manager
brightened and asked me how I'd liked their competition.
"It was fine," I said.
"What did you eat?"
"Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans."
"You'll like ours better," she said. "Our cook is better, the service is
quicker, and the waitresses are more polite."
I decided to order the Spicy and Salty Mountain Rat. This time, when the
waitress asked about my preference in sizes, I said, pleased with my boldness,
"Big rat."
"Come and choose it."
"What?"
"Pick out the rat you want."
I followed one of the kitchen workers to a shed behind the restaurant, where
cages were stacked atop one another. Each cage contained more than thirty
rats. The shed did not smell good. The worker pointed at a rat.
"How about this one?" he said.
"Um, sure."
He put on a glove, opened the cage, and picked up the chosen rat. It was about
the size of a softball. "Is it O.K.?" he said.
"Yes."
"Are you certain?"
The rat gazed at me with beady eyes.
I nodded.
Suddenly, the worker flipped his wrist, swung the rat into the air by the
tail, and let go. The rat made a neat arc. There was a soft thud when its head
struck the cement floor. There wasn't much blood. The worker grinned. "You can
go back to the dining room now," he said. "We'll bring it out to you soon."
"O.K.," I said.
Less than fifteen minutes later, the dish was at my table, garnished with
carrots and leeks. The chef came out of the kitchen to join the owner, Zhong
Qingjiang, the floor manager, and a cousin of the owner to watch me eat. "How
is it?" the chef asked.
"Good."
"Is it too tough?"
"No," I said. "It's fine."
In truth, I was trying hard not to taste anything. I had lost my appetite in
the shed, and now I ate quickly, washing every bit down with beer. I did my
best to put on a good show, gnawing on the bones as enthusiastically as
possible. When I finished, I sat back and managed a smile. The chef and the
others nodded with approval.
The owner's cousin said, "Next time you should try the Longfu Soup, because it
contains tiger, dragon, and phoenix."
"What do you mean by 'tiger, dragon, and phoenix'?" I asked warily. I didn't
want to make another trip to the shed.
"It's not real tigers, dragons, and phoenixes," he assured me. "They're
represented by other animals-cat for the tiger, snake for the dragon, and
chicken for the phoenix. When you mix them together, there are all kinds of
health benefits. And they taste good, too."
