issue 6: John Meyer
[John:] After six months in Japan I ended up getting a job in China, and that started off with a four week quarantine. You were only supposed to do it for two weeks, then a week at home, but I flew into one province and my job was in another zone that was enforcing a secondary quarantine, so I had four weeks in isolation.
Three times a day you get a knock on the door. When you open it there’s a barstool with a bag of food on it. This [second] photograph is from my first meal, which was: two really big chicken feet, a side of a small, roasted pigeon, and one other dish. I thought the third dish was sweet potatoes, but when I looked closer I realized it was three duck heads. That was the entire meal. It was heads, feet, and an entire body, which also had the head and feet, served in these Tupperware containers.
And it’s that or don’t eat, pretty much?
Exactly. I was starving, so I was sucking all the meat off the heads of these ducks, which I guess you’re supposed to do. After spending half a year there I went back to that area and tried [that dish] for real, and it was actually pretty good. The hotel version was definitely the hotel version.
Did you get used to the food?
I did call the company I work for and mentioned what the first meal was. They said something like, “I told them not to do that for foreigners.” But I was actually kind of OK with it. The Chinese really like to eat meat that has bone right by it. I guess if you’d never had ribs before and someone said, “Here, eat this,” you might think it was super weird that people were gnawing on bone. And that’s kind of the vibe with a lot of Chinese food. Chicken feet is kind of garbage to us, but there it’s like the bone is what gives it the flavor, and there’s truth to that. You’ve just gotta get past whatever your cultural norm is and push through it. Especially if you’re in a quarantine prison kind of environment.
[Above] This is my birthday party. We went and talked to the owner of this BBQ place we’d go to fairly often. We were like, “Hey, instead of you barbequing what you usually do, could we use your grill and everyone will bring stuff?” I bought a swimming pool off TaoBao, which is like the Chinese Amazon, and they let us bring a hose from the factory and run it across the street to fill it up in that park.
China felt like this totally different thing than I’d initially perceived. Where I was living and who I was hanging out with, the vibe was do whatever you want, whenever you want. Throw a big party on the sidewalk, don’t ask the city, it doesn’t matter. These police officer guys came by, and they just smiled. They don’t care.
The western perception of China is pretty politicized. You only hear about the surveillance aspect and the economic threat.
I can’t say I’m the expert, and I lived in a really specific region. But if I were to boil down the main differences between the US and China, I’d say: In the US there are a lot of things we cannot do, but we’re allowed to go out and complain about it as much as we want. In China it’s kind of, do whatever you want, but don’t complain.