Learn More About Chinese Food

When Deng Xiaoping decreed Shenzhen China's first Special Economic Zone, the farming hamlet sprouted into a city that now rivals Hong Kong in size, vertical ambition and enterprise. Just over the river from its glitzier rival, Shenzhen has absorbed all the manufacturing work Hong Kongers, and the rest of the world, can throw at it. The city is so filled with factories that the countryside outside the Zone has become dotted with little industrial areas that feel a bit like New England Mill towns must have felt 100 years ago. Young workers, most in their late teens and early twenties, pour in from all over China to make clothes and electronic goods in bare-boned factories with dormitories attached. Together with a Chinese friend, I visited a stitching factory in one such village in April. We arrived at lunch time and the place was deserted. Metal saucers filled with fish bones sat spent on wooden tables. Dogs wandered by sniffing for scraps. The workers were off in the dorm for a 45 minute siesta.

Upstairs in the office, the managers were waiting for us. Since we had missed lunch, they planned to take us out. We walked out of the factory, down roads crossed only by occasional traffic, mostly motorbikes, past dozens of small general stores and still more foraging dogs. We passed the "Diffany Restaurant," which boasted an English sign with a jewel on it meant to remind locals of the glamour of its near namesake. We headed instead into a place without a sign. By the door, one of the cooks had a net dipped into the aquarium where he tried to snare an eel fish, a serpent-like gray fish that refused to say put. It leaped out of the net and hit the floor several times before the cook could trap it in a steamer. The blackened kitchen, visible as the door swung, was unlit except for two foot high flames leaping from the burners.

Diners get seated upstairs in a broad room divided into two sections, one for Cantonese food and the other for what I was told was Western-style food (as far as I could tell, this was mainly beer). Six of us sat down, and after a quick discussion of the day's fare, the food came out rapidly. The first thing to hit the table was the eel fish, served coiled like a Slinky on a round dish and cut into small slices. The fish is surprisingly chewy, and the only way to pry meat off the bones is to suck like hell, which made our table sound something like a cobra's den.

Then came a surprisingly recognizable dish of chicken with cashews. It is common for smug expatriates to declaim that Chinese food in the States is nothing like that in China. Yet, just as soon as they convinced you, a dish arrives that is so familiar it could have come from the neighborhood chop-suey joint (okay -- a really good chop-suey joint). I probably ate this with a little too much gusto, since my hosts all smiled as I dug in. I was glad to have fortified myself since the last dish was far from filling: a whole plate of deep fried finches. They are served whole, heads, feet and all, and are eaten that way. They arrive with a dish of salt and pepper mixed together, and the proper technique is to grasp the bird's head between your thumb and forefinger, bite off the rest of the body and then chew. This is roughly the fowl equivalent of eating sardines, with the taste of soft flesh mixing with the slight crunch of the bones. I was told to deposit the head on my tea saucer. Or, if I wanted, I could, like one of the managers, a rail-thin elderly ex-academic purged in the Cultural Revolution, gobble the head too, then spit out little pieces of the beak. Other than its appearance, and the fact that I have a cage of beloved pet rice finches at home in Chicago, the preparation suited me fine. In addition, it offered one of those symbiotic relationships

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between the devourer and devoured that Americans don't experience often. The finches, I was told, are an abundant pest capable of wreaking havoc on a rice field, so they are caught and eaten.

Walking home, I remarked on all the dogs in town. The dogs of Shenzhen don't look like any I've seen at home; they are boxy and have a quizzical, friendly expression a bit like that the children in town had when they laid eyes of my fat pink face. I asked my hosts why I had never seen dogs like that at home. He smiled and then told me that they all get eaten every September. I can accept that the Chinese eat dog -- I had it once myself -- but I stopped myself from considering if they relished the heads.