Free What the Chinese Don't Eat by Xinran Page B

a
HongDu-Dou
. I was told it had disappeared a long time ago, in the Cultural Revolution.
    Two weeks ago, I went back to Xi’an with my western friends on a publishing trip. It has improved so much that I couldn’t be sure I had been there before. We were told that new empty highways have been built and thousands of trees planted, ready for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.
    When I went back to the Terracotta Warriors, I couldn’t find the woman with her wild flowers. There were hundreds of people selling man-made stuff for tourists, but nothing from nature.
    I told my husband I wanted to find this
HongDu-Dou
, and he came with me, along the narrow, twisting street that runs beneath the old city walls. There was traditional local food, and children’s clothes – tiger shoes, lion hats and cat-baby coats – but no
HongDu-Dou
. No one even knows what it is.
    On my last day in Xi’an, we went back to that street and, finally, I found it on a tiny stall. The seller was a young girl; she was so happy and surprised when I bought all 30 of the
HongDu-Dou
s she had. ‘What do you want them for?’ she asked.
    ‘For your happiness,’ I said, ‘and my 14 western friends, who will have them as traditional Chinese gifts from my Chinese heart.’

25th June 2004
    The ghosts of Qing-Zang: When Xinran met a woman who had spent 30 years searching for her lost husband in Tibet, she was inspired to write her extraordinary story. But then her subject went missing, too …
    In 1994, an old woman dressed in Tibetan clothes smelling strongly of animal skins, rancid milk and dung sat down opposite me in the town of Suzhou in China, and began to describe the 30 years she had spent searching for her husband on the Tibetan plateau. I was working as a journalist at the time and had made the four-hour journey by bus from Nanjing to interview her. Her name was Shu Wen. A listener to my radio programme had called me after meeting her by chance at a street stall: he had never heard me speak about women’s lives in Tibet, and thought I would like to meet her. He was right: I found myself so caught up in her story that I forgot to ask her all the important questions. I was so absorbed by her descriptions of Tibet that I noticed only the rough skin on her trembling hands and the deep emptiness in her eyes. I failed to realise then how little I really understood about the Tibetan way of life; I wasn’t to know that this was a story I could never walk away from.
    ‘Why did you go there?’ was one question I did manage to ask.
    ‘For love,’ she said. ‘My husband was a doctor in the People’s Liberation Army. His unit was sent to Tibet. Two months later, I was told he had been lost in action. We had been married for fewer than a hundred days. I refused to accept he was dead. The only thing I could think of was to go to Tibet myself and find him.’
    I stared at her in disbelief. I could not imagine how a young woman at that time – 1958 – could have dreamed of going to a place as distant and terrifying as Tibet. She, too, was a doctor, and after he went missing she decided to join the army to go in search of him: it was her only way of travelling to Tibet.
    When evening came, Shu Wen was only part of the way through her story. I suggested we share a hotel room for the night and continue our conversation the next day. She agreed in the same brief manner that she answered all my questions. When she wasn’t caught up in telling me about her experiences, her voice was flat and curt; she spoke Chinese with a strong Tibetan accent. I longed to draw her out more, so that I could ask her all the questions I had been storing up during the day – but it was clear that she considered all talk for the day to be over.
    I was worried that her large body might not fit into the narrow single bed in the hotel room. But before she took off her Tibetan robe, Shu Wen removed her possessions from it like a magician producing birds from a hat. From two inside