Trolleys of rice, vegetables and meat rolled through the carriage all day. I let ten of them pass. At the eleventh, for five yuan, my stomach rumbled its thanks. I ate with chopsticks, watching rice fields to Chinese music, while most of the Chinese around me slurped instant noodles with plastic forks and never looked out of the window.
Food is one of the main reasons to come to China. I ate things that would have turned me inside out at home, out of curiosity and on the principle that nobody serves bad food on purpose. Not once did my stomach complain.
On a cliff, in bright characters: “Comrade! Do your part to prevent an explosion of the birth rate!” I remembered the Beijing pharmacies full of dried lizards, roots and snakes for potency. It seems the Chinese are, after all, trying to counter this Party narrative.
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