Don't Serve Weird Meat To Foreign Friends

Browsing through this week's Chinese news, I found a few articles about the new social education program the Shanghai government is starting up in preparation for the World Expo 2010. They're going to offer public lessons on manners and etiquette -- how not to hack spit all over the place, how not to smoke on public elevators (we hope!), how to yield for pedestrians (yeah right), and how to greet foreigners visiting Shanghai. The last one caught our attention. We're used to being called "lao wai" daily, as we walk down the street. "Hallo !! Lao wai !!" Lao wai means "old foreigner," and even though my friends here insist it's a term of endearment, hearing it 50 times a day "lao wai !! heheh .. Hallo !!" can become a bit nerve-racking. So the government is going to discourage this behavior, in hopes that Shanghai will appear to be a more mature, cultured, cosmopolitan city, as it prepares to host the World Expo. Yeah, I know, World Expo ... they still have those?



So how is this related to Weird Meat? Well, it seems that one of the items they're going to address is how Chinese hosts should not serve foreign guests "offal and fish with bones." [SH-8days magazine, March 2006] Now I'm all for encouraging the 20 million civilians here to wait in line at the subway ticket booth, but some things are sacred and shouldn't be changed. Public pajama wearing doesn't bother me, and should be left alone -- it's charming, and it's a person's own business what they want to wear. But messing with a culture's foodways like this is just wrong. If a foreigner doesn't like offal and fish on the bone, that's the foreigner's problem. I'm a foreigner, and I want to appreciate the culture's foodways as they are, not a dumbed-down tourist version.

A better effort could be to discourage consumption of shark's fin soup, or the poaching of endangered species. A far more important PR exercise! But I say, eat the offal. Don't waste this perfectly good meat. Stop the anti-weird propoganda!

If they'd only learn how to cook it...