One of the things that really annoyed me about China in those days was how extremely rude everyone I met was about ‘Western food’. There was I, unfailingly polite and diplomatic, trying to look on the bright side of their grisly slaughter practices, accommodating their penchant for gristly innards, forcing myself to eat pig’s brains — and no one, absolutely no one, was prepared to treat me with equal good manners.
那些日子，我在中国也有烦恼，其中一件就是我见到的每个人说起“西餐”时态度都相当粗暴无礼。这边厢，我温良恭俭让，拿出外交礼仪的架势，尽量去看他们残忍屠杀生灵的光明面，迎合他们对软骨内脏的喜好，强迫自己吃下猪脑花；结果呢，没有人，真的是没有一个人，用同样的礼貌来对待我。
Whenever the subject of ‘Western food’ came up in conversation, people would dismiss it out of hand with a few barbed stereotypes: ‘Xi can hen dan diao!’ (Western food is very monotonous) or ‘Xi can hen jian dan!’ (Western food is very simple). My own compatriots had a habit of talking about ‘Chinese food’ as if it were a single tradition, collapsing the diverse regional cuisines of this vast country into a dull set menu of spring rolls, sweet-and-sour pork and egg-fried rice, or writing it off as ‘junky’ and ‘gloopy’. Similarly, Chinese people all viewed ‘Western food’ as a single, rather boring, school of cookery. It didn’t occur to them that you might eat differently in, say, Naples or Helsinki, Alabama or Paris. Often, I found myself having to remind people that France alone was the size of Sichuan Province, and that some people thought its cuisine was as distinctive and complex as the Sichuanese.
摆龙门阵的时候，只要一提到“西餐”，大家就一发不可收拾地开始表达成见：“西餐很单调！”或者“西餐很简单！”我自己的同胞们对“中餐”的理解也很有限，在他们眼里，这个幅员辽阔、有着多种地方菜系的国家，只有一份无聊的套餐：春卷、咕咾肉和蛋炒饭；要么就觉得都是些“垃圾食品”或者“黏糊糊的一团”。同样地，中国人眼中的“西餐”也是非常无聊的单一菜系。他们根本没意识到，可能你在意大利那不勒斯、芬兰赫尔辛基、美国亚拉巴马和法国巴黎吃到的都会是完全不同的菜。有时候，我情不自禁地要去提醒在座的朋友，光是法国就和四川一样大了，很多人也觉得法国菜和川菜一样，特别又庞杂。
This might have been hilarious, but it didn’t seem so on the many occasions when I went to great trouble and expense to cook Western food for my Chinese friends. My delightful Chinese teacher, Yu Weiqin, for instance, persuaded me once to make a traditional English dinner for a party she was arranging. Even deciding what to cook was a challenge, because it was impossible to obtain ingredients for most of the dishes I might have chosen. There were no fresh herbs or non-Chinese spices in the markets; and no supermarkets stocking tinned ingredients from abroad (in fact, there were no supermarkets at all). The only ‘chocolate’ one could buy was some revolting Chinese brand that consisted mainly of vegetable fat; cream was unheard of; and olive oil was sold in tiny bottles as a beauty product, as expensive by local standards as Chanel No 5 was in London. To add to my problems, Teacher Yu’s kitchen, like every other domestic kitchen in China, lacked an oven. In the end, I clubbed together with some other foreign students to buy a small portable oven, and decided to make roast beef with potatoes and an apple crumble.
听起来可能很好笑，但很多时候，我会花很多钱、费很多精力为中国朋友烹制西餐，这可就不好笑了。比如说，我很喜欢的中文老师余老师有一次要办聚会，就叫我给她准备传统的英国晚餐。光是决定做什么我就很费了些功夫，因为很多菜的食材都不可能凑齐。市场上买不到新鲜的香草或者外国的调料，超市也没有进口的食材（其实当时连超市都还没有）。能买到的唯一的“巧克力”是当地的牌子，主要成分是代可可脂；奶油更是闻所未闻；橄榄油呢，都装在特别小的瓶子里，像美容护肤用品，价格以当地的标准来算，简直跟“香奈儿五号”香水在伦敦一个样儿了。最头痛的是，余老师的厨房和中国所有普通住家的厨房一样：没有烤箱。最后，我和几个外国学生凑份子，买了个搬得动的小烤箱，决定做牛肉烤土豆和烤苹果奶酥。
Afterwards, I wondered why I had bothered. Teacher Yu’s friends found what I had cooked so outlandish that they saw no need to be polite in their comments. They roared with laughter at the menu, barely able to comprehend that I would offer my guests a meal consisting of only three or four dishes. ‘Xi can hen dan diao!’ (How bland Western food tastes!) they crowed, demanding chilli sauce to liven up the roast beef. ‘Where’s the rice?’ they asked after the meal, filled with disbelief at the idea that we would make do with potatoes instead (in China, only starving peasants eat potatoes as a staple food). One middle-aged lady toyed with a piece of beef and then ate no more. Her husband curled his tongue at the revolting flavours of my apple crumble. And because Chinese people lacked the concept of dessert as a separate course, they all piled up their bowls with roast beef, buttered carrots, potatoes and apple crumble, all at the same time.
之后，我深切地怀疑自己为啥要费这一大番工夫。余老师的朋友们觉得我做的东西太古怪了，嘴上根本毫不留情。他们看着菜单大笑，很难理解我为什么要为客人做一顿只有三四个菜的晚餐。“西餐味道好淡！”他们一致要求往烤牛肉里加点辣椒酱提味。“有没得米饭？”吃完以后他们问我，简直完全无法相信这顿的主食用土豆就凑合了（在中国，只有穷苦的农民才用土豆当主食）。一位中年女士夹着一块牛肉翻来覆去地看，然后一口也没吃。她老公觉得苹果奶酥很难吃，嫌弃得舌头都卷起来了。中国人吃饭不像西方，没有单独的一道餐后甜品，所以他们的碗里同时堆满了烤牛肉、黄油胡萝卜、土豆和苹果奶酥。
‘Western food’ was at that time a distant and exotic concept for most Chinese. In 1994, in the whole of Chengdu, a cultural centre and provincial capital of some eight million people, there was a single restaurant specialising in foreign food, the Yaohua Canting. It called itself a ‘Western food restaurant’, and had been established in 1943, when it served chic foreign dishes like curry chicken, ice cream, salad, fried jam sandwiches and the acclaimed lao mian, a concoction of pasta covered in a thick eggy sauce and baked in an oven. In the forties, it was the trendiest place in town, frequented by well-heeled and well-educated youths, and it had somehow survived nationalisation in the fifties and the Cultural Revolution in the sixties to limp into the nineties in a new location on Dong Da Street. I visited it once, although I never ate there because the menu and atmosphere were so weird and alien. The place was decorated in what the managers clearly believed was cutting-edge Western style, with framed images of cigars and cocktail glasses in heightened graphics, and lurid photographs of scantily clad Western women, pouting provocatively. The tables were laid ostentatiously with knives, forks and spoons. The menu, as I remember, featured old-fashioned European-style dishes: heavy soups, steaks and cutlets drowned in murky sauces.
当时，对大多数中国人来说，“西餐”还是非常遥远和陌生的概念。一九九四年，作为文化中心和八百万人口大省的省会，成都全市只有一家专门做外国菜的餐厅：耀华餐厅。这家餐厅自称是“西餐厅”，开办于一九四三年，那时候做的是很时髦别致的外国菜，什么咖喱鸡、冰淇淋、沙拉、果酱三明治和很受欢迎的明星菜“烙面”：大张的意面涂上厚厚的蛋液再放到烤箱里烤。四十年代的时候，这里是全城最时髦的去处，穿着考究、受过良好教育的年轻人是这里的常客。在五十年代的国有化大潮和六十年代的“文化大革命”中，这家餐厅都奇迹般地生存下来；九十年代换了新店址，搬到东大街上。我去过一次，不过从来没在那里吃过，因为从菜单到气氛都很奇怪又诡异。我一个英国人在这里吃饭，就好像成都人点我们在国外那种外卖中餐一样。这家店的装修风格很显然是领导们心中的前卫西式风，挂着镶框的香烟与鸡尾酒杯图片，还有西方女人姿态挑逗的照片。餐桌上摆着餐刀、餐叉和餐勺。印象中，菜单上好像都是很老派的欧洲菜式：浓汤、牛排和浇满酱汁的肉饼。
Outside the rarefied atmosphere of these hang-outs for foreign businessmen and students, such delicacies were hard to find. The most dedicated foreign students at the university cycled for miles across town to buy a spongey version of French bread and margarine, just so they could avoid the local breakfast of watery rice porridge, fried peanuts and spicy pickled vegetables. Other than that, we had little alternative but to eat Sichuanese food all the time. This wasn’t exactly a hardship, as you’ve probably gathered, but we did miss some things, like decent chocolate. Most of all, though, we longed for cheese. We fantasised about it, discussed it, and begged anyone coming to see us from Europe to bring some. My own father has always loathed cheese. He refuses to eat it, and flinches if you wave some under his nose. But in an act of stupendous generosity, he carried a boxful of slowly maturing and increasingly smelly cheeses (including Roquefort, Cheddar, and Camembert) around China for a week, before he finally arrived in Chengdu for a visit. I was almost as pleased to see the cheeses as I was to see him.
外国生意人和留学生们除了这些稀有的去处，也就很难找到好吃的“家乡菜”了。川大最执着的几个留学生骑着单车穿城，勉强买到了还算正宗的法棍和植物黄油，只是为了早饭不用再吃稀饭、油酥花生和辣泡菜。除此之外，我们没多少选择，只能一直吃川菜。你也看得出来，这不是遭罪而是享受，但有些东西还是令我们甚为想念，比如正宗的巧克力。不过，我们最渴望的还是奶酪。我们经常痴迷地幻想、热烈地讨论，要是有谁从欧洲来看我们，就千请万求地麻烦那人带点儿来。我爸爸一直讨厌奶酪，非但不吃，就算你只在他鼻子前面拿点奶酪晃晃，都会搞得他往后一退。然而，父爱如山，他慷慨地带了一箱慢慢成熟且味道越来越大的奶酪（有洛克福羊乳干酪、车达奶酪和卡芒贝尔奶酪），在中国转了一个星期之后，带到成都来见了我。见到这一箱奶酪，我几乎和见到父亲一样高兴。
Apart from the Yaohua, there were two smart, five-star hotels in Chengdu that catered for visiting Westerners. The Minshan hotel offered a regular evening buffet that included extraordinary exotica like sliced cheese and salad, and on one occasion I ate a mushroom vol-au-vent and a steak in the swanky dining room at the top of the Jinjiang Hotel. Mostly, though, homesick foreign students and backpackers had to content themselves with occasional breakfasts at the city’s only travellers’ café, the Flower Garden, which served muesli with yoghurt and banana pancakes, and kept plastic packages of sliced processed cheese locked up in a glass cabinet like caviar or truffles (twelve rubbery and tasteless slices cost the equivalent of about ten bowls of noodles).
除了耀华，成都还有两座条件不错的五星级酒店，接待来自西方的访客。岷山饭店晚上有自助餐，有当时在成都还很稀奇的奶酪片和沙拉。有一次，我还在锦江宾馆顶楼富丽堂皇的餐厅吃了蘑菇肉馅饼和一块牛排。不过呢，很多时候，思乡的留学生和背包客们只能偶尔在成都唯一的花园咖啡厅聊慰乡愁。那里有酸奶麦片和香蕉松饼；塑料封装的加工奶酪片被锁在柜子里，像鱼子酱或者松露一样珍贵（买十二片难嚼又无味的奶酪片，花的钱够吃十碗面）。
If it was difficult for us to eat ‘Western food’, it was almost impossible for the average Chengdu resident. The prices in the hotel restaurants were astronomical; no one on a local wage could afford them. And the whole eating environment was unfamiliar and intimidating, as I discovered when I invited a Sichuanese friend for a buffet supper in one of the hotels: she had never before used a knife and fork and had no idea how to hold them.
如果说我们都很难吃到“西餐”，那普通的成都人就更不可能了。酒店餐厅的价格是天文数字，当地的工薪阶层很少吃得起。整体的就餐环境也很陌生，让人手足无措。我请一个四川朋友去其中一家酒店吃自助晚餐的时候发现，她以前从来没用过刀叉，根本不知道怎么拿。
Some Chinese hotels I visited tried to please their few foreign tourists by serving ‘Western breakfasts’. I remember the odd looks on waitresses’ faces as they gave us little plates with eggs on them, fried on both sides, a few deep-fried potato chips on a saucer, some plain steamed buns, and glasses of milk. They offered these things to us as they might have fed live mice to a snake — placing the strange, disturbing, and inedible victuals in front of a possibly dangerous creature, just to see what it did. Would we hiss as we licked them, or just swallow them whole, like a boa constrictor? One elderly Chinese man I met recalled his horror at having been served with a soft-boiled egg for breakfast during a visit to Hong Kong: ‘It was still raw inside!’ he said, still incredulous after about fifteen years. ‘I hardly dared touch it!’
我去过的一些中国酒店，为了想要让少数的外国游客高兴，于是推出了“西式早餐”。我还记得女服务员给我们拿来一小碟一小碟的双面煎蛋、配了酱料的炸薯条、几个馒头和一杯杯牛奶。她们脸上的表情很奇怪，好像是要喂蛇吃老鼠似的，把这些奇怪的、惹人烦、完全不能吃的怪东西放在可能有危险的生物面前，看看会有什么反应。我们会发出“嘶嘶”声舔舔这些东西，还是像大蟒蛇一样一口吞下去？我遇到一个上了年纪的中国男人，跟我说起他去香港遇到的“恐怖事件”：早餐的时候有人给他上了一个溏心水煮蛋。“里面还是生的！”他说。时隔十五年，说起来还是这么难以置信，“我碰都不敢碰！”
It always seemed to me comically ironic that while most of my compatriots saw the Chinese as barely civilised and promiscuous eaters of snakes, dogs and penises, the Chinese repaid the insult in spades. They saw what we ate as crudely simple, uncivilised in its rawness, and barely edible.
说起来真是又好笑又讽刺。我的同胞们觉得中国人几乎还未文明开化，吃得很杂，什么蛇肉啊、狗肉啊、鞭菜啊，而中国人也用同样的态度回应这种羞辱。他们觉得我们的食物太粗犷、太简单、半生不熟的，不也是不文明、不开化的表现吗？简直吃不得。
‘I had Kentucky Fried Chicken once and it was disgusting,’ he replied. This one experience, shocking, unhappy and vividly remembered, had soured his view of the culinary achievements of the entire Western world. I wanted to regale him with mouth-watering tales of sautéed foie gras, shepherd’s pie, crême brulée, roasted lamb with garlic and anchovies, Neapolitan pizza, baked oysters with beurre blanc, and everything else I had tasted and adored in the West, but I didn’t know how to begin. So I said nothing, but merely gazed at him in stupefaction.
“我吃过一次肯德基，简直太难吃了。”他回答。就这么一次令人震惊、不愉快却鲜明的经历，让他对整个西方世界的烹饪水平都产生了不好的看法。我想给他讲讲那些听起来就让人口舌生津的美食故事，比如油煎鹅肝酱、牧羊人派、焦糖布丁、大蒜凤尾鱼烤羊肉、那不勒斯披萨、牛油烤生蚝和所有我在西方吃过并喜欢的佳肴。但我不知道该从何说起，所以我什么也没说，只是麻木地盯着他。
At the tail-end of my time in Chengdu, American fast-food companies began to open their first outlets there, but they didn’t do much to rehabilitate local opinions about the cuisines of the West. One young chef I met remarked casually that he ‘didn’t like Western food’. ‘Oh really?’ I asked, surprised that he’d even tasted any. ‘What have you tried?’
我长居成都的时光接近尾声时，美国的快餐公司在这座城市开了分店。但他们也没能在当地人心中为西餐正名。我遇到的一个年轻的厨师，用随意的语气说他“不喜欢西餐”。“是吗？”我问，有点惊讶他竟然吃过西餐，“你吃的什么呀？”
The cooked barbarians were the kind of aliens with whom you could, at a pinch, do business. The raw barbarians (uncooked, un-Chinese, uncivilised), were beyond the pale. Even in modern China, strangers are known sometimes as sheng ren (‘raw people’), while people you know are ‘cooked’ (shu ren). Such disdain reflects the fact that Chinese people traditionally avoid raw food. There are exceptions, like the marinated shellfish and crustaceans eaten in Chaozhou and the east. Long ago, too, the elite of China’s most cosmopolitan dynasty, the Tang, who hobnobbed with bearded foreigners riding in by camel from the western deserts, dined sometimes on raw fish slices, perhaps the ancestor of modern Japanese sashimi. Broadly speaking, however, the Chinese have always liked their food to be not only cut into pieces, but also cooked. Cooking is seen as the root of civilisation: only barbarians remain at the evolutionary stage of ‘eating fur, feathers and drinking blood’.
吃熟的外国蛮夷，在必要的时候，还是可以打打交道的。而吃生的蛮夷（未开化的非中原人）就是“君子远之”了。就连在当代中国，有时候都把不认识的人称为“生人”，认识的人称为“熟人”。这样的态度反映了一个事实：中国人传统上就是不爱生食的。当然也有例外，比如说潮州和东部一些地区直接放在卤汁里面生吃的贝类。很久以前，在中国最强盛包容的唐朝，精英阶层会和骑着骆驼从西部沙漠来的大胡子外国人谈笑风生，有时候也会吃生鱼片，这可能是现代日本刺身的祖宗呢。不过，宽泛地说，中国人一直偏向于不仅要把吃的切成片，还要煮熟。烹煮被看作文明的根基：只有野人才停留在“茹毛饮血”的进化阶段。
There was nothing new about this attitude to foreign food. In Chinese antiquity, barbarians were grouped into the ‘raw’ (sheng) and the ‘cooked’ (shu).
这种对外国食物的态度由来已久。中国古代时，野人也称作“蛮夷”，被归类为“吃生”和“吃熟”两种。
Cheese, of course, was almost inconceivable. Dairy products have been largely absent from the Chinese diet. Perhaps in the past they were too strongly associated with the rough dining habits of the northern and western barbarians, cheese- and yoghurt-eating nomads who periodically invaded China. And the Chinese, too, lacked pastureland amid their tight patchworks of rice fields. Although in the late twentieth century Chinese parents started feeding milk to their children, cheese is still widely regarded as disgusting: it was memorably described by one informant of the American anthropologist E. N. Anderson as ‘the mucous discharge of some old cow’s guts, allowed to putrefy’. Some Chinese friends of mine claim, with a grimace, to be able to smell milk in the sweat of Westerners.
当然了，奶酪这种东西，就更超越想象了。中国食品中基本上很少看到奶制品。也许在历史上奶制品与北边、西边蛮夷们粗俗的吃食习惯联系太紧密，这些时不时侵犯中原的游牧民族，很爱吃奶酪和酸奶。而过去的中国版图上，遍布的是稻田，牧场则很少见。虽然二十世纪后期，中国的父母也开始给孩子喝牛奶，但奶酪在大多数人看来依然是很恶心的。美国人类学家E。 N。安德森有位调查助手曾经有过令人记忆犹新的描述，他说，奶酪就是“奶牛肚子里排泄出来的黏液，慢慢地腐烂发酵”。我的一些中国朋友皱着眉头说，西方人流的汗里都飘着奶味儿。
Ancient prejudices about foreign food are encapsulated in the language of modern cookery. Ingredients that were brought in from the West along the desert routes of the old Silk Road still bear a linguistic stigma. Regular pepper is known as ‘barbarian pepper’ (hu jiao); the carrot is a ‘barbarian radish’ (hu luo bu). The character hu refers to the old Mongol, Tartar and Turkic tribes of the northwest, but it also means ‘recklessly, foolishly, blindly or outrageously’. ‘Hu hua’ (hu talk) describes the ravings of a madman; hu gao means to mess things up; and other hu compounds refer to all kinds of mischievous, fraudulent, wild, careless, irritating and deranged behaviours. In the distant past, people who ate things like salad were clearly insane.
古时候对外国食物的偏见也融入了当代烹饪的语境中。从西部途经古代丝绸之路的漫天黄沙传进来的食材和调料在名称上依然有着被蔑视的意味，比如“胡椒”，就是“蛮夷之椒”的意思；还有“胡萝卜”。“胡”这个字是对古代西北部蒙古、鞑靼和突厥部落的统称，但也可以代表“鲁莽、愚蠢、盲目和凶残”。疯子乱说话叫做“胡话”；捣乱叫做“胡搞”；还有别的带有“胡”字的词汇，都和恶作剧、欺骗、野蛮、不小心、烦人和错乱的行为有关。在遥远的过去，吃沙拉这种东西的人，显然是精神出了问题。
In the glory days of Chinese empire, the Chinese disdain for foreigners and the food they ate must have appeared to have had a certain legitimacy. Chinese cities, with their fine restaurants, bustling markets and glittering aura of civilisation, were the envy of the world. The hairy, round-eyed barbarians who wandered in occasionally from the desert were overawed: they had little to compare with this in their own, distant lands. But by the nineteenth century, the solid Chinese sense of cultural superiority was being eroded by the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ of the Western powers. The Chinese had been the inventors of gunpowder, paper, printing and the magnetic compass, but they hadn’t used them to conquer the world. And the barbarians, with their red hair, staring eyes, filthy beards and uncivilised ways, turned out to be rather smart after all.
在中国灿烂辉煌的帝国岁月，他们对外国人及其食物的蔑视似乎看起来还挺合理的。那时候的中国城市有美味的餐馆、喧嚷的街市，中华文明名扬海外、熠熠生辉，让整个世界为之瞩目。那些偶尔从沙漠中游荡而来、浑身汗臭多毛的圆眼睛蛮夷被深深地震慑：在他们自己偏远荒凉的土地上，什么也无法与眼前的繁荣相比。但到了十九世纪，中国根深蒂固的文化优越感被西方国家的“炮舰外交”渐渐打得粉碎。火药、造纸术、印刷术和指南针都是中国人发明的，但他们却没用这些发明去征服世界。而红毛大眼脏胡子、行为举止粗鲁无礼的蛮夷们居然还挺聪明的。
Even in the 1990s, history often cast a shadow over the life of a foreigner in China. I found myself accused, often, over the opium wars, when the United Kingdom had bludgeoned China into accepting a deleterious trade of drugs for silver. Was I, personally, expected to apologise for these crimes of my ancestors, I wondered? I was certainly often treated as the personal representative of Her Majesty’s Government, and expected to mind that Britain had to give Hong Kong back to the Chinese in 1997.
就连到了九十年代，一个外国人在中国也经常感觉到历史的阴影。我经常被别人指责，说什么英国发动了鸦片战争，大不列颠打击了中国，用毒品换白银啊什么的。我就想，他们是不是想让我个人来为我祖先的罪过道歉啊？当然了，也常常有人把我当作女王政府的代表来谦恭尊敬地对待，而且认为我一定会介意一九九七年英国要将香港交还给中国的事。
But if the Chinese were confused and ambiguous in their attitudes towards us, one thing was certain, and that was that our food was unbearable. In the beginning, I had a sense of missionary zeal when it came to introducing my Chinese friends to Western delicacies. They were showing me the delights of Chinese food, and I wanted to return the favour, feeling that cultural exchange should not be a one-way traffic. So, undaunted by that catastrophic supper for Teacher Yu and her friends, I went on trying to persuade the people I knew that ‘Western food’ wasn’t as dreadful as they imagined. After all, if I could learn to love rabbit-heads, couldn’t they learn to love cheese?
不过，就算中国人对我们的态度很矛盾模糊，有一件事是肯定的：我们的食物令他们无法忍受。一开始，我还带着传教士般的热忱，要让我的中国朋友们了解西方的佳肴。毕竟他们让我领略到中国食品的美妙，我也想投桃报李，文化的交流不应该是单向的啊。所以，余老师和朋友们那顿灾难性的晚餐并没有打击我的热情，带着英勇无畏的精神，我继续努力说服人们，“西餐”没他们想象中那么可怕糟糕。毕竟，要是我能爱上兔头，他们怎么不可能爱上奶酪呢？
Many of the Chinese people I met viewed me and my foreign student friends through a bifocal lens of disdain and envy. On the one hand, weren’t we in some sense barbarians? We were large; plump and overfed. We were a little bit smelly (all that dairy food). We were loose-living, decadent and immoral: one Chinese student told me the ‘Panda Building’ was known as a hotbed of sexual promiscuity (it probably was, by the Chinese standards of 1994). On the other hand, we were rich, and we were free. The mere fact that we were able to lark around for a year in China, dining out in restaurants and backpacking all over the country, was a sign of wealth and liberty.
有时候我感觉很多中国人都把我和留学生朋友放在蔑视与嫉妒并存的“双焦镜”中来看。一方面，我们在某种程度上不也是蛮夷吗？身材高大肥胖、营养过剩；也许还有点体味（毕竟吃了那么多奶制品）。我们生活放纵、颓废懒散、不讲道德：有个中国学生告诉我，大家都说“熊猫楼”就是滥交的温床。另一方面，我们又很有钱，而且自由。你看，我们居然能在中国玩乐整整一年，天天出去吃馆子，背包漫游全国，这就是富有和自由的标志了。
Once, I made a beautiful Italian risotto, with arborio rice, dried porcini and parmesan. I was convinced that risotto would please my friends: after all, it was rice, with dried mushrooms not entirely unlike their own. I made my own rich stock, I added a dash of white wine, I spent forty minutes adding the liquid, spoonful by spoonful, until the rice was unctuous and creamy, fragrant with mushrooms. They all ate some, but they weren’t impressed: no one could fathom why I had spent so long making a simple tang fan (soupy rice).
有一次，我做了一道漂亮的意大利调味饭，用了意大利米、干牛肝菌和帕玛森干酪。我确信给朋友们吃调味饭总是没错的，反正就是饭啊，还有干蘑菇，和他们自己的也很像。高汤是我自己用老母鸡熬的，还加了点白葡萄酒增添风味。我花了四十分钟一勺一勺地往锅里加高汤，直到米饭吸饱了水分和油分，香浓爽滑，散发着蘑菇的香味。大家都吃了一些，但没觉得有多好：没人明白我为什么花了这么长时间，只煮了这么一道简单的汤饭。
Even on the rare occasions when my friends enjoyed what I made, they always managed to sabotage my plan to give them a real taste of the West. When I took a home-made apple tart to a dinner party at the home of my old friends Zhou Yu and Tao Ping, for example, they cut it up into chopstickable pieces and served it alongside stewed pig’s ear, tea-smoked duck and spicy seaweed salad. I reflected that, although I had certainly given them some ‘Western food’, in their manner of eating it they had turned it into something entirely Chinese.
就算少数时候朋友们喜欢我做的东西，我想要让他们尝到地道西餐的计划也总是遭到破坏。比如有一次，老朋友周钰和陶萍召集了一伙人到家里吃晚餐，我带了一个家常的苹果派去。他们把这个派切成筷子能夹起来的小块，跟凉拌猪耳朵、樟茶鸭和香辣凉拌海带一起上桌。回头想想，我虽然是给他们吃了一些“西餐”，但他们吃的方式完全是中式的。
Every time a foreign delicacy found its way into the Panda Building with the arrival of visitors from abroad, I would offer little titbits to my closest friends: Tuscan truffle pastes, fine olive oil, dark chocolate, parmesan cheese. From time to time, I cooked for them. But my efforts always backfired. I crashed into unexpected taboos, bored my dinner guests, revolted them or simply left them unsatisfied.
每次“熊猫楼”里来了外国的访客，带来外国的好食材，我都会和最亲密的朋友们分享：托斯卡纳的松露酱、上等的橄榄油、黑巧克力、帕玛森干酪。我不时做点东西给他们吃，但努力半天却总是事与愿违。我会犯一些意想不到的禁忌，或者让晚餐的客人觉得厌烦，要么让他们愤而反驳，反正就是很不满意。
Since I first lived in Chengdu, ‘Western food’ has made enormous inroads into China. Aside from the country’s colonisation by McDonalds and KFC, there are coffee bars and pizzerias, and the new supermarkets offer a range of imported products. But what Chinese people eat as ‘Western food’ is often far removed from what any European or American would consider normal. The UBC restaurant in Suzhou, for example, offers twenty-two kinds of coffee, but can’t make a decent espresso. Its menu includes such ‘Western’ delicacies as ‘boiled lemon cola with ginger’, waffles with meat floss, fruit pizza, and ‘duck chin with maggi sauce’ (whatever that is). And when my Chinese friends share a bottle of the newly fashionable dry red wine (gan hong) over dinner, they drink it in a wholly Chinese manner, toasting each other with a thimbleful of wine at a time. (Chinese leaders, invited to state banquets in the West, have been known to dilute fine vintage wines with fizzy lemonade.)
从我刚到成都至今，“西餐”以迅猛的势头入侵了中国。除了麦当劳和肯德基在全国范围内气势汹汹的“殖民”，咖啡厅和披萨店也层出不穷，新开的超市里也有了很多进口产品。但中国人吃的“西餐”，其实和欧美人心中正常的餐食还相去甚远。比如苏州的上岛咖啡店，有二十二种咖啡，却连一杯意式浓缩咖啡都做不好。菜单上还有些所谓的“西式”菜，什么“柠檬可乐熬姜”、肉丝华夫饼、水果披萨、“美极酱油鸭下巴”。我的中国朋友们很赶时髦地在晚餐桌上分享一瓶干红，喝的方式也完全中式，每次只倒一点，互相敬来敬去的。
In Shanghai in 2006 I bought a glossy cookery book entitled British Cuisine — or, in Chinese, ying shi xi can (English-style Western food). Reading it, I laughed till I cried. Highlights of the typically British recipes it offered included a salad of arctic clams covered in a latticework of squirted mayonnaise; macaroni with shrimps; stuffed squid in black pepper and minced apple sauce; and braised cauliflower with quail eggs. The presentation of the photographed dishes was like some nightmare out of the seventies.
几年前，我在上海买了本装帧精美的烹饪书，书名声称这是一本“英国菜谱”。我翻开来看了看，哈哈大笑，眼泪都出来了。书里重点讲的典型英国菜谱包括赤贝番茄沙拉，上面挤上格子状的蛋黄酱；虾仁意大利面；黑椒苹果鲜鱿鱼；菜花鹌鹑蛋。简而言之，英国本土人绝对不会把书里的任何一道菜看作英国菜。
Still, these days people try to show a little cross-cultural sophistication. On a visit to Chengdu in January 2007, I was invited by a hotel owner to be guest of honour at a Western-style dinner party. We sat around the only grand oblong dinner table I’ve ever seen in China. It was laid with brass candelabras, knives, forks and sideplates, with two wine glasses per person. The chefs in the hotel kitchen had been trained in ‘Western cuisine’, and they served up a menu of cold beef in mustard dressing, baked oysters in hollandaise sauce, cream of sweetcorn soup, deep-fried rabbit leg with french fries, beef steak with onion rings, and some kind of pudding. (There was no cheese course, obviously.) The other guests, chefs and food-writers mainly, ignored the chopsticks that were offered as a back-up, and tucked into this exotic feast, grappling nobly with the unfamiliar knives and forks. But I noticed people stealing glances at me to see what to do with their bread and their sideplates, and I didn’t have the impression that anyone particularly enjoyed the food. ‘Welcome Fuchsia!’ said my host, raising her glass to me with its thimbleful of red wine at the end of the meal, ‘We welcome you to Chengdu from the land of Shakespeare, David Copperfield and Anna Karenina!’
不过嘛，后来的人们也多了一些跨文化的经验。二零零七年我到中国来，一位酒店的老板邀请我去西式晚宴上做贵宾。我们围坐在椭圆的长桌上，这还是我第一次在中国见到这种椭圆大长桌。桌上摆着大烛台、餐刀、餐叉和边盘，每人两个酒杯。酒店的厨师们都是受过西餐烹饪训练的，呈现的菜单上有芥末凉拌牛肉、烤生蚝配荷兰酱、玉米奶油浓汤、炸兔腿配土豆条、牛排配洋葱圈，以及某种布丁（当然啦，不会有加了奶酪的菜）。别的客人主要都是厨师和美食作家，他们无视备用的筷子，投入到这场充满异域风情的宴会中，姿态高贵地拿好不怎么熟悉的餐刀和餐叉。但我注意到他们在偷偷地瞥我，看看该怎么吃面包、怎么使用边盘。我也没发现有谁特别爱吃那些菜。
If, in my first year in Chengdu, I failed miserably in my efforts to enhance the standing of ‘Western food’, I continued to throw myself into Sichuanese culinary culture. After that memorable cooking lesson with Feng Rui, my informal food studies gathered pace and my notebooks filled up with recipes. But I still wanted more. And so it was that my German friend Volker and I came up with a plan. Like me, Volker was a keen cook, and he was a veteran of Californian farmers’ markets. Inevitably, we fell into the habit of eating out together and comparing recipes. One afternoon, he suggested that we might try to take some formal cooking classes. So we asked around, found the address of the famous local cooking school, the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and set off on our bicycles to find it.
在成都的第一年，如果说我致力于加深大家对“西餐”理解的努力遭遇了痛苦的失败，那么在四川的饮食烹饪文化上，我可谓是全情投入。冯锐给我上了那难忘的一堂烹饪课之后，我非正式的饮食烹饪研究逐渐密集起来，笔记本上全是各种各样的菜谱。但我还想学更多的东西。于是德国朋友沃尔克和我制订了一个计划。沃尔克和我一样，也热爱烹饪，在加州的时候，他经常跑到农民集市采购食材。我们自然而然就成了一起下馆子的饭友，而且经常品评比较菜单。一天下午，他说我们应该去上点正式的烹饪课。于是我俩四处打听，得知了当地著名的四川烹饪高等专科学校的地址。我们骑上单车就去找。
It was a nondescript concrete building on a backstreet in the north-west of the city, but we heard the sound of chopping from an open window and knew we’d arrived. Upstairs, in a plain white room, dozens of apprentice cooks in white overalls were engrossed in learning the arts of sauces. They were pulverising chillies with pairs of cleavers on tree-trunk chopping boards, grinding Sichuan peppercorns to a fine brown powder, and scurrying around mixing oils and spices, fine-tuning the flavours of the rich dark liquids in their crucibles. The air hummed with a gentle, rhythmic pounding, and the sound of china spoons in china bowls. On long parallel tables sat bowls of ingredients; pools of soy sauce and chilli oil, piles of sugar and salt. Notebooks scribbled with Chinese characters lay around on the tables amid the blood-red chillies and scattered peppercorns. The light streamed in from open windows. Rushing into the room, eager and excited, we caused the usual commotion among the students by our alien presence alone.
学校在西北边一条偏僻的后街上，一栋毫无特色的水泥建筑，但我们在一扇敞开的窗户边听见切菜的声音，就晓得到地方了。上了楼，朴素的白色房间里，几十个身着白色厨衣的学徒厨师正全神贯注地学习调味的艺术。树干做成的大菜板上，他们用菜刀剁碎泡椒，把花椒研磨成细细的棕色粉末，来来回回地混合各种油和调料，细致地调整着面前碗里那醇厚的深色液体。轻柔而充满韵律的捶打声、瓷勺与瓷碗的碰撞声在空气中产生共鸣；长长的桌子两个两个拼在一起，一碗碗食材与调料相对而置；大盆的酱油与红油、一堆堆白糖和精盐；鲜红的辣椒与散落的花椒之中，放着一本本写满汉字的笔记本。敞开的窗户中透出明亮的灯光。我们满含着急切与兴奋地冲进房间里，光是这两副“洋鬼子”的面孔，就够学生们一阵骚乱的了。这也是常事。
In that strange, transitional period in Chinese history, there were no administrative procedures for dealing with our request. Was it even legal for foreigners to study, ad hoc, at a school that was part of the provincial bureaucracy? Probably not. But Sichuan is a place where the reins are a little loose, the lines a little blurred, and the people inclined to bend and yield. We settled down to a long afternoon of discussions and good-natured haggling. Cigarette packets were emptied, ashtrays filled. Tea mugs were replenished with hot water and drained countless times. Passing teachers and students dropped in to stare at us, and soon the large office was crowded. As dusk fell we came to a deal. We would take twice-weekly private classes at the cooking school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They would provide a cooking teacher and an interpreter as well as all the raw ingredients, and we would pay them a reasonable but hard-bargained fee in renminbi.
那是中国历史上比较尴尬的过渡转型时期，行政条例上没有任何能处理我们要求的流程。这学校是省级部门直属的，外国人在这里进行特殊学习合法吗？也许答案是否定的。但四川在这些方面一向都比较松，界限比较模糊，人心比较善良，倾向于满足别人的要求。我们经历了一个漫长的下午，进行各种讨论和善意的讨价还价。烟抽了一包又一包，烟灰缸都装满了；茶杯里一次又一次地续上热水，又不断地被喝光。经过办公室的老师和学生都要专门进来看我们一眼，很快大大的办公室就挤满了人。傍晚的时候我们终于定下来了：一周两次私教课，上课时间周二和周四。他们这边会提供厨师、翻译和各种原材料，我们用人民币付学费。学费很合理，但也是我们艰难地讲价谈下来的。
The principal of the school was a stout, jovial man with a crimson face, dressed in a Mao jacket in military khaki. We couldn’t really understand his broad Sichuan dialect, so he summoned the school’s English teacher, Professor Feng Quanxin, to interpret. A few other teachers gathered around. They all seemed amused, and perhaps flattered, by our unusual plea for tuition, coming out of the blue. The only foreign students the school had previously taught were an American couple who took private classes there in the late eighties. Such a request was not only odd because we were foreigners. The idea that university students like us would rather be in a kitchen than a library was extraordinary.
校长矮胖结实、活泼开朗、脸色绯红。他穿着一件卡其色的毛式中山装，说四川话，我们不太听得懂，于是他叫来学校里的英语老师冯全新教授做翻译。后来又围过来几个老师。我们突然这么出现说想来学艺，他们好像都觉得挺好笑的，可能还有点受宠若惊。之前学校里只有过两个外国学生，还是在八十年代末，那是一对美国的夫妻，上的是私教课。这要求显得这么奇怪，不止因为我们是外国人：我们可是大学生呢，怎么会不爱图书馆却偏爱厨房呢？
Volker and I cycled home, elated at our success. Our route took us across the span of the city, from the cooking school in the north-west to the south-eastern university campus. We passed through the old Manchu quarter, with its rows of higgledy-piggledy cottages, black and white with their dark timber frames and whitewashed walls. There were no street lights in the old lanes anyway, and that night there was a power cut, so candles lit the shops, houses and little restaurants that we passed. An old couple sat at a table outside their cottage on bamboo chairs, sharing a few simple dishes with rice. Shopkeepers stood over their packets of cigarettes and tealeaves, their faces illuminated by the glow of candles stuck in puddles of wax on glass-topped counters. Tempting aromas emanated from open-fronted restaurants. The deep, savoury smells of stews simmering away in tall clay pots on a row of gas burners; the whiff of beef in rice meal, small portions steaming away in a tower of little bamboo baskets; potato slivers sizzling in a wok with chilli and Sichuan pepper.
沃尔克和我骑着单车回家，洋洋得意于计划的成功。我们这一趟算是穿城了，从西北边儿的烹饪学校到东南边儿的川大校园。我们经过了明清时期的古街区宽窄巷子，那里有一排排杂乱的房子，深色原木结构的建筑，深浅斑驳的痕迹，粉白的墙壁。这些老街老巷里本来就没有街灯，那天晚上还停电了。我们经过的店铺、人家和小餐馆都点起了蜡烛。一对老夫妇坐在房子门口桌边的竹椅子上，捧着饭碗，一起吃着几道简单的家常菜。商贩站在满柜子的烟和茶叶背后，玻璃柜台上的蜡烛用几滴蜡油固定好，跳跃的烛光照亮了他们的脸。前门敞开的餐馆里飘散出诱人的香味。一排煤气炉子上放着高高的砂锅，炖菜那醇香的味道光是闻一闻就让人胃口大开；小小的竹编蒸笼堆得高高的，小份的粉蒸牛肉正在等待安抚大家的肠胃；“嘶嘶”作响的炒锅里，切成细丝的土豆正和辣椒、花椒发生着奇妙的反应。
Over the following month, Volker and I learnt how to make sixteen classic Sichuanese dishes. Our teacher, Gan Guojian, was a moody, sardonic man of around forty, with a James Dean look about him and a cigarette permanently hanging out of his mouth. In each lesson, we would first watch Teacher Gan as he prepared the dishes of the day, and then we’d try to re-create them ourselves. We learnt how to hold our cleavers and cut our raw ingredients, how to mix seasonings and how to control the heat of the wok.
接下来的一个月，沃尔克和我学习了十六道经典川菜的做法。我们的老师叫甘国建，三十多岁，有些喜怒无常，偏爱讽刺挖苦，和詹姆斯·迪恩（1）有那么点儿神似，嘴上永远叼着一根烟。每次上课，我们先要看甘老师为那天的课备菜，然后试着模仿和重现整个过程。我们学了怎么拿菜刀、怎么切菜、怎么调味、怎么控制火候。【注：（1）James Dean，美国男演员，二十世纪四十年代美国影坛的青春偶像】
Learning another cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or dishes, without system or structure. When I first went to China, I was already fluent in the language of basic French cookery. I could make a roux, mayonnaise, hollandaise, vinaigrette, pâtes sucrée or choux. I knew how to sauté ingredients at the start of a stew to make them more delicious, and I could often identify the seasonings and techniques that had been used in a finished dish. And so, in a sense, following a new French recipe was easy, it was just a matter of assembling it from the basic building blocks, the rudimentary culinary processes. The elements themselves were rarely new, however unfamiliar their combination. Even without a recipe, I could look at an ingredient and think of several ways of cooking it. But with Chinese cookery I hadn’t a clue.
学习新的菜系，就像学习新的语言。一开始，你对最最基础的语法规则都一无所知。各种各样的词汇一股脑儿向你涌来，不成体系，没有结构章法，正如这些五花八门的菜。我刚到中国的时候，对基础法国菜这门“语言”挺“流利”的了。我会做奶油炒面糊、蛋黄酱、荷兰酱、油醋酱、甜酥挞和泡芙；我知道做杂烩之前先把食材略略煎一下会更好吃；我也总能吃一道做好的菜，分析出其中的调味和使用的烹饪手法。所以从某种程度上说，即使是没做过的法国菜，也不算什么难事，只不过是对基本的手法和烹饪流程进行新的排列组合。不管这排列组合有多么陌生，各种因素本身却少有新花样。就算没有菜谱，我手里拿着某种食材，也能想出好几种烹饪方法。但是中国菜呢，我可是一点头绪都没有了。
In those private classes with Teacher Gan, I began to learn the basic grammar not only of Sichuanese, but also of Chinese cuisine. An understanding of its structures and processes started to coalesce through the repetition of steps that at first seemed random. As the weeks passed, I found I could watch Chinese friends cooking at home and understand some of what was going on in the wok. And it was thrilling to be able to reproduce a few of the sumptuous dishes I was guzzling every night in the Bamboo Bar and the ‘Italian’ restaurant. Very quickly, I was hooked.
在甘老师的私教课上，我开始学习这些“基础语法”，不仅是川菜的，还有整个中国烹饪。各种步骤一开始看似随意杂乱，不断重复之后，就可以将其联系起来，进而理解结构和流程。几个星期过去了，我发现在中国朋友们家里旁观做菜也能对那锅里春秋略知一二。而且，能复制出我每天在“竹园”以及“意大利餐厅”大快朵颐的那些“大菜”，真是太激动人心了。很快我就沉迷其中无法自拔。
After each class Volker and I cycled back to the university with tin lunchboxes filled with the fruits of our culinary endeavours, which we submitted to a devouring crowd of fellow foreign students for tasting and assessment. The classes became the highlight of my week. I was in my element.
每次上完课后，沃尔克和我都骑车回到川大，顺便带着个铁饭盒，里面装满烹饪课上努力挥勺颠锅得来的果实，拿回去给垂涎三尺的留学生朋友们品评鉴赏。每周两节课成为我生活中的亮点，我真是如鱼得水、游刃有余。
But time was running out. The cookery classes came to an end, and so did my scholarship. I decided to delay going home, and spent a long summer travelling around Tibet and Gansu Province with my Italian friends Francesca, Davide and Graci. We headed north from Chengdu into the forbidden areas of eastern Tibet, where we were arrested in every county town and had to sweet-talk our way out of fines in countless police stations. We hitchhiked on the back of rattling timber trucks, clinging to piles of unsteady tree trunks with a motley assortment of Tibetan monks and Chinese peasants. (After one particularly perilous ride, along the edge of a crumbling precipice, we discovered that our driver had only one eye.)
但是余下的时间不多了。烹饪课上完了，我的奖学金也到期了。我决定晚一点回家，过个长长的暑假，和三个意大利朋友去西藏和甘肃走一圈。我们从成都出发，北上进入西藏东部的非开放藏族地区，还有川西、青海和甘肃。几乎在每一个小镇我们都会被警察盘问，好说歹说才能免于罚款。我们一路搭便车，坐过运原木的卡车，在后车厢里靠着一堆结构很不稳定的木头，同行的乘客还有藏族喇嘛和汉族农民。（有一次我们搭车走了一段非常危险的路，车就从万丈悬崖边开过去，之后我们发现，司机居然是个“独眼龙”。）
It was a magical, unforgettable trip. We crossed wild open countryside to visit remote monasteries, meeting farmers, smugglers, nuns and secret policemen. And every so often, out of the brilliant blue emptiness of the sky around us would echo the sound of horse hooves, and a few Tibetans, dressed like medieval princes in red woollen cloaks edged in gilding and fur, tied around their waists and slung roguishly off one shoulder, would gallop past, their horses’ hooves kicking up a cloud of yellow dust. We travelled in a state of awe and wonder.
那真是难忘的魔幻之旅。我们穿越开阔的郊野乡村，探访最偏远静谧的喇嘛寺，一路遇见了农民、走私犯、尼姑和便衣警察。而且，湛蓝高远的天空下，经常会突然传来骏马的嘶鸣：几个西藏人出现，穿着镶金边与皮毛装饰的红色藏服，腰间系着腰带，一边的袖子不羁地放下来。他们策马而过，马蹄扬起一阵黄沙。我们一路都满含敬畏与惊奇。
But if our senses were overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Tibet, we nearly went crazy with boredom at the food. Sometimes we ate the Tibetan staple, tsampa, with monks in their hilltop monasteries, rolling the ground barley flour and yak butter tea with our fingers into balls which we popped into our mouths. Otherwise, day after day, meal after meal, we ate in Hui Muslim restaurants that served almost nothing but pasta in different shapes, flavoured with gristly goat or mutton, green onions and chilli. Most ubiquitous were square sheets of pasta called ‘pasta slices’ (mian pian), which were delicious the first fifteen or twenty times, but which we eventually hated so much we called them ‘business cards’ (ming pian).
然而，感官与心灵被西藏的景色和声音震撼的同时，味觉却因为此地食物的无趣而疯狂。有时候我们在山顶的寺庙和喇嘛们一起吃藏族的主食糌粑：将大麦粉和酥油和在一起，用手指团成球，扔进嘴里。别的时候呢，我们几乎每天每顿都在回族清真饭店度过。菜单上几乎没有别的菜，只有各种各样的面，加点羊肉、葱花和辣椒。最常见的就是方形的面片，吃个十五次二十次的，还觉得味道不错，但最后实在吃得太多，我们一想到就觉得烦，于是给面片取了个绰号叫“名片”。
• MENU •
菜单
One day, after a couple of weeks on the road, we fetched up in a one-horse village on the grasslands, where the usual Hui-run restaurant catered to passing pilgrims, nomads and traders. Tired, hungry and emotionally drained after another terrifying truck ride, we entered the shabby dining room, and were amazed to see an elaborate French menu chalked up on a blackboard near the kitchen. It read:
在路上的日子过了两个星期。一天，我们来到草原上一个简陋的村庄，那里也照样只有一个回族餐厅，主要接待途经的朝圣者、游牧人和商人。我们又累又饿，而且刚刚又坐卡车经过一场惊心动魄的旅程，心理上也是筋疲力尽，于是走进破破烂烂的餐馆，结果被厨房旁边黑板上写的好些法国菜给震惊了。
Foie gras
鹅肝
L’homard grillé
烤大龙虾
Sorbet
雪芭
Consommé celestin
清炖肉汤
(The rest had been rubbed off.)
（剩下的被擦掉了）
After two months of being richly fed with the beauty and spirituality of eastern Tibet, but starved in a more literal sense, I made my way back towards Chengdu alone, on the slow road that winds south over the grasslands from Lanzhou (the Italians had gone back to Venice to resume their university studies). Sometime in early September I fetched up in Zoigê, which had the wild feel of a frontier town. Tibetans in flamboyant cloaks and hats, edged in rare furs, daggers at their waists, hung around one-storey wooden shops. Horses were tethered along the street. And as I left the long-distance bus station and hauled my backpack towards the only guesthouse at which foreigners were admitted, my nostrils were assailed by the umistakeable scents of sizzling Sichuanese chilli bean paste and Sichuan pepper. My heart leapt: I knew I was on my way home. I ate that night in a small Sichuanese restaurant, which didn’t serve business cards with mutton and onion, but fish-fragrant aubergines and twice-cooked pork.
在西藏东部充分感受了两个月的美与灵性之后，我的眼睛和心灵很满足，但肚子却真的好饿。然后我独自乘着从兰州草原往南的慢车回成都（意大利朋友们回到威尼斯继续大学学业）。九月初，我到了若尔盖。这个边疆小镇充满了野性的风情。镇上的西藏人穿戴着有珍稀毛皮装饰的鲜艳服饰和帽子，腰上别着匕首，在木质平房的铺子外面闲逛。街上处处都拴着马。我离开长途汽车站，扛着重重的背包往唯一接待外国人的客栈走去，结果鼻腔内猛地钻进烧热的四川豆瓣酱与花椒的味道：绝对没错。一颗心顿时雀跃起来：我知道我在回家的路上了。那天的晚餐我在一家川菜小馆度过，那里没有加羊肉和葱花的“名片”，却有鱼香茄子和回锅肉。
It was like an hallucination, a shimmering mirage in the dusty eyes of desert wanderers. It was also one of the most exquisitely painful jokes I have ever encountered, and I have often wondered what genius of dry wit was its author (if you are reading this book, please get in touch!). We read, we yearned, we moaned, and then we sat down to our bowlfuls of business cards with gristly mutton, green onion and chilli.
一切就像是幻觉；仿佛沙漠中的流浪者，眼睛被黄沙蒙蔽，出现了海市蜃楼。这也是我遇到过的最令人哭笑不得的玩笑，一直想知道写下这些的到底是个怎样的冷幽默天才。我们看了看菜单，满怀渴望，接着又悲叹呜咽，然后坐下来，吃着一碗碗加了羊肉、葱花和辣椒的“名片”。
And so my real apprenticeship began.
我的学徒生涯就此开始了。
Arriving back in Chengdu, I didn’t really have a plan. I had agreed to take over a flat in a workers’ district from a British friend, for the princely sum of about £40 a month, with a vague notion of learning more about Sichuanese cookery. Through devious means I had managed to extend my green residence card for six months, although I was no longer at the university. It was unusual, then, for foreigners to live independently in China, and, strictly speaking, illegal. A few years before, it would not have been possible. But now the local police simply registered me and didn’t seem to want to know the details.
回到成都，我还没什么明确的打算。有个英国朋友要转租工人聚居区的公寓，我答应续租，隐隐觉得应该再多学学川菜烹饪。居留证也成功续了六个月，只是不再在川大上学了。那时候，一个外国人，没什么组织关系地独居在中国，还真不太寻常，而且严格来说是非法的，再早几年根本不可能。但当时，当地的公安只是给我做了登记，一副并不关心细节的样子。
Soon after my return, I cycled over to the cooking school to say hello to my teachers. I wanted to ask them if I might drop in from time to time to watch a few cooking demonstrations. But the principal welcomed me as an old friend, and told me that a three-month professional chef’s training course had just begun. ‘Why don’t you join?’ he asked me. It was a remarkable invitation. No foreigner had ever been accepted as a regular student before, and I suspect this, too, was technically illegal. But China was changing, the borders of possibility were expanding fast, and I had the impression that my teachers had been rather touched by this foreigner’s inexplicable passion for their local cuisine. I agreed on the spot. Out of sheer kindness, the school allowed me to pay the same modest fees as my Chinese classmates, which amounted to around £100, all inclusive, for a three-month, full-time course. I enrolled and was promptly issued with a cleaver, a set of chef’s whites printed with the name of the school, and two textbooks in Chinese, one on culinary theory, and one a collection of Sichuanese recipes.
回成都不久，我就骑着自行车去烹饪学校跟老师们打招呼，还想问问我能不能时不时地来观摩一下烹饪示范。校长对我的态度就像个老朋友，还告诉我刚刚开办了一个为期三个月的厨师培训班。“你来参加嘛。”他对我说。这是意义重大的邀请。以前还没有任何一个外国人成为他们的常规学员，而且我也不确定技术上来说这是不是合法。但中国正在发生巨大变化，充满了各种各样的可能性，而且我觉得老师们都被这个老外对当地菜品莫名其妙的热情给感动了。我当场就答应了。学校真是太好了，允许我和中国同学们一样交很低的学费。我入了学以后，马上就得到一把菜刀、一套印有学校名字的白色厨师行头和两本中文教材：一本讲烹饪理论，一本是川菜菜谱汇总。
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