In the Danger Zone (36 page)

I ask Hwong what we're doing here, irritated that we've used up most of a day from our tight schedule, but he assures me we're going to meet a farmer and we're dragged around the ridiculous village, despite my protests. It's a lavish, brutally symmetrical estate of marble-lined houses, and we are led into one particularly smart number where I'm finally introduced to a sweet, smiling lady. I tell her how nice her house is, and how unusual it is for a farmer to live on a smart estate but she looks confused. I ask her what sort of farming she does and she tells me that she works in the office of a state-owned oil company. Aaaargh!

My head minder doesn't bat an eyelid when I tell him that in Britain, farmers don't usually work in oil companies. Again, I ask Hwong why on earth we are here – we'd asked to meet a farmer. And he mumbles that he thought maybe she used to be a farmer. Then his friend says that people who live outside the cities are all farmers in a funny sort of way. Aaaargh and more aaaargh!

I am furious. I tell Hwong that he's wasting my time and money and lying to me. He knows damn well that this woman isn't a farmer. He looks at me haughtily, knowing that he is in complete control of the situation and that he can do whatever he likes – can't we see that it's his job to hinder us? My impotent rage isn't helping so I take a breath and try another tack. I'm going to report you to your superiors. He smiles – they will clearly be very pleased at his hampering of our plans. Then I hit on the one thing that makes him quake in his boots: 'You're making yourself look ridiculous – can't you see that we're filming this charade, and we'll go home and make a film about how silly and deceiving you look?'

That does the trick: his attitude suddenly shifts and he becomes both angry and scared. His official smiling and bureaucratic gerrymandering end abruptly and he finally agrees to take us to a real village the next day.

On the way back, we visit a restaurant in Henan for some local food. Hwong tries to drag us off to a private room so that we don't see anyone eating, but I insist on sitting in the huge main dining room. We eat sharks' lungs (I didn't realize that they had lungs, but there you go), which are like crispy sponges, and sea slugs, which are so slimy that it's impossible to pick them up with chopsticks, and chicken heads, which are poached and gruesome, but interesting.

The Great Escape

Hwong is in a bad mood today, which is fine by me. Again, I am driven on an absurdly long detour through pretty orchards and smartly planted fields. Eventually we arrive at a small village surrounded by rice paddies and fish-farming ponds. I'm dragged straight off to visit the wealthiest family here, and Hwong urges me to cook with them. I politely decline. We are taken to meet someone else – a man who owns a vast picture of Mao. He knows nothing about food, but says that his daughter-in-law is a good cook, and that she could cook for us, but our minder takes him aside and forces him to retract his offer.

'Why are you stopping us from talking to people?' I ask.

Hwong says that I can't just stop and talk to anyone.

'Why not?' I ask – on the first day here he had specifically said we could talk to anyone we want.

He refuses to discuss it further.

On the way back to the car I meet a woman walking along the street with a bag of flower buds and ask her what she's doing with them. Hwong tries to stop me from talking to her, but I ignore him and we carry on filming. She's a gorgeous, proud and friendly woman and she says that she's going to cook them for supper. I plead with her to show us how to cook them, drowning out Hwong's objections, and then I practically drag her away from the crowd. She makes the mistake of pointing out where she lives, so I march her across the rice paddies – if Hwong wants to stop us now, he's going to have to physically manhandle me.

This woman is as close as I'm going to get to meeting a farmer – she has a fish-farming pond and lives in a grimy little shack next to it, although she has another house in the village too. She's the sweetest, loveliest lady, and inside her house I discover her ancient mother and aunt, both of them also beaming with joy and oozing hospitality. Fantastic.

'Let's cook your flowers,' I say, as Hwong and his cronies arrive to try to stop us. I ignore him and urge her to persevere. The house is dark and ragged, and the kitchen a picture of peasantly poverty, but the women are wonderful and friendly. We wash the blossoms in water, scatter them in rice flour, then steam the whole lot, wrapped in a cotton cloth. After ten minutes, we turn it through to make sure it cooks evenly.

The event is soured only by the presence of Hwong and his gang. I tell them to go away, but they don't, so I begin to yell at them to leave us alone. They finally retreat when the camera is pointed at them as I'm telling them to stop intimidating the women. They eventually storm back off to the van in a fury. I don't care any more – I am paying them $200 a day to
help
us. The women are great. I ask them if they would like to move to the model village we saw yesterday. They say no, they want to live here in the countryside.

The flowers are delicious, like eating steamed jasmine, and our lovely lady packs me off with a huge carrier bag full of them. It's an uplifting moment for me – finally I've seen a tiny bit of rural life – albeit in a pretty wealthy village, and I feel a wave of relief that subdues the rising anger in my gut.

Hwong is furious, and he tells me that I shouldn't just talk to anyone I want to. 'Why can't I talk to people?' I ask.

'Because they don't give a fair picture of China.'

'Why not? They are real people – you just want me to interview the wealthiest party members – what kind of reality is that?'

I'm feeling mischievous now, so as all the minders stomp off towards the cars, I ask Ruhi to hang back, and when they all round a corner, we both leg it up a side road like little kids, excited at the inevitable prospect of being caught. We spot a woman in a run-down house surrounded by goats – she waves at us. Then we are beckoned over by another woman who is feeding her kids outside a little shack by the road. We're hampered by our lack of a translator, but she offers us tea and proudly shows off her two boys, then takes us into her kitchen to offer us some of the dumplings she's steaming for supper. At this point, our minders find us and storm into the room, yelling that we can't just enter anyone's kitchen.

'Why?' I ask.

'Because the woman might be offended.'

I explain that she had invited us in, and Hwong is speechless. He marches us back to the car. On the way, I pass a group of beautiful, ancient men sitting smoking outside a house, and try to speak to them.

'No!' shouts Hwong.

I decide not to pursue this last one in case Hwong tries to confiscate our tapes.

The drive back to the hotel is gloriously tortuous, and Hwong's anger is written all over his irritating face. I feel jubilant.

When we get back to the hotel, the two local minders take Yan Yan and Penny aside and give them a thorough roasting, saying that we were being rude by running away from them. You bet we were. Yan Yan is scared – they have clearly threatened her in some way. She says that she's worried because she has to come back to work in China, and these Party members are powerful people – they could cause big problems for her. It's a dilemma – I don't want anyone to get in trouble but on the other hand I'm spending a large amount of the BBC's money to give a fair, unbiased view of modern China, and these people are stopping me. I can't just let myself be dragged around the show homes of China.

When the time comes to leave for our flight back to Beijing, Hwong is terrified that I will try to cut loose and film something I shouldn't, so he insists on escorting us to the airport. I interview him in the van, asking why he wouldn't let us film anything in Henan. He says he wants to make sure we showed the best of it. I ask why he's so scared of us filming the place on our own, and he says that if he came to London as a friend, we would want to show him our hospitality. I say that although I wouldn't class him as a friend, if he came to London I'd show him around, and then he can go off and see whatever he wants – there's nothing to hide. He ignores me.

Just before we check in, I find an extraordinary cartoon in the government-controlled
China Daily,
which shows a party official putting a smart new model of a house over a peasant's shack. It couldn't have been a more perfect parody of what Hwong had tried to do. I show him the cartoon and I ask if it reminds him of anything. A look of terror crosses his face and he backs away from me. His stumble turns into a run, and eventually he dashes right out of the airport, with me running after him, demanding to know what the cartoon means. He gets into the van and drives off, with a rictus grin still spread across his face.

Meat and Two Veg

Back in Beijing I visit Guo-li-zhuang restaurant. There's no point beating about the bush: this place is a cock-and-bollock joint, a specialist penis and testicle emporium that caters mainly to wealthy businessmen and Communist party officials (who are often one and the same, truth be told). It offers every conceivable John Thomas you could ever want, which probably isn't very many, but nonetheless, their menu is extensive and impressive. The place looks like a smart
kaiseki ryori
(Japanese haute cuisine) formal restaurant, complete with underfloor stream, secluded separate dining rooms and hushed, discreet staff. I have come determined to avoid euphemisms – we're making a current affairs programme after all – but I'll admit the temptation is strong.

I ask a chef to show us the preparation of a penis first so that I can get a feel for the process. He enters holding aloft an eye-wateringly large yak's knob. It's about 45cm long, but thin, so thin. It's been boiled gently and – I can't believe I'm writing this – peeled, except for a hunk of foreskin still clinging on to the end. He cuts the thing in half lengthways with a pair of scissors. As he chops through the very tip of this impressive member, I get an undeniable empathy twitch in my own penis and a bizarre feeling of nausea in my groin (I didn't think that groins could experience nausea). I can't help myself yelping in sympathy. He then uses a knife to make hundreds of little snips along the side of the penis and chops these into 5-cm long pieces. When these are dropped into boiling stock they curl up into little flower shapes that are so incongruous, I can barely believe my eyes.

I ask the chef if he thinks it strange to deal exclusively in genitalia, but he shrugs and doesn't know what to say. He's just happy to have a good job, really. His friends don't take the mickey, his parents are proud of him, and he does what he's told. OK.

Less taciturn is the female manager of the place, who says that Chinese history is one of famine, poverty, drought and disaster, which is why the Chinese have become used to eating every part of the animal – they have to extract every edible morsel from the food they have. I ask if this is good communist food, and she proudly says that most of her customers are male Communist party members. Their meal costs an average of two months' wages for a dumpling factory worker, and I ask how a conscientious communist can be seen here (up to £250 for the rarer penises) when the average peasant is on the poverty line. She holds her hands up in the air and tells me that they come for the virility benefits that genital-eating offers. Apparently you can go for hours after eating a good portion of penis.

We try the water buffalo penis first, in thin shavings. It started long and thin, but someone has shredded this noble old chap on a mandolin. It has the texture of squid, and tastes of the mild chilli stock it's been poached in. We are given three sauces to dip the penis into – lemon and soy, chilli and soy and a sesame seed paste. It's good, and the penile nature of the meat lends an undeniable frisson of excitement to the meal. I tell the boss that 'it's the first time I've had penis in my mouth, but I like it and I'm going to do more of it'. Well, someone had to say it.

She seems pleased and pours me some deer penis juice, which I'm delighted to say is the vilest concoction I've ever had the privilege to imbibe. It's as sour as a smacked lemon and as bitter as neat quinine. My face freezes in an agonizing spasm and Lord knows how I manage to keep from throwing up. Mr Hoo, the driver, asks if I want any more, and when I shake my spasming head, he grins and downs it in one. I pity Mrs Hoo – she's going to have a busy night.

We try goat's penis, chicken feet, bull's penis tip (that'll keep you up all night too, the boss warns), terrapin leg and all manner of radishes. I'm offered dog's penis ('the only one with a bone in it'), and served with a glace cherry placed pointlessly on the tip, but decline. All the knobs have intriguing, delicate and bizarre textures, although the flavour is mainly of pork braised in hot stock. But my favourite dish of all is undoubtedly the bull's perineum, which is a delicate piece of flesh the size of a chicken oyster that's been poached then slow-fried. It's sweet and crispy, with a deep taste of soy and honey. Fabulous stuff.

Yan Yan isn't too keen on penis, but she's adventurous in the face of adversity, and tries most things with a curled lip.

Just before we go, I ask why the girls get off lightly. Why don't they serve any female genitalia?

The boss bursts into giggly embarrassed laughter. 'That's a crazy idea – why would anyone want to do that?'

'Well, because it's protein and you Chinese are renowned for eating everything.'

'Don't be insane,' she says. Then she remembers that she's heard of a dish of donkey vulva but she's not sure where. She thinks it's a disgusting idea.

The Night Market

The next day I manage to stagger out of bed at first light in time to watch the legendary Chinese early morning workout in the park – accompanied, of course, by another two minders. Mr Chen, a local t'ai chi master, gets me up in front of hundreds of onlookers to show me some moves. Obviously I look like a tool, but doing the moves does make me feel calm and poised. As soon as I'm finished, a handsome old gent called Mr Huang comes up to practise his English on me. I tell him that I'm here to make a film about food in China and he tells me that he's a great cook, and invites me for lunch: 'I cook good Chinese food for you.' I gladly accept, take his phone number and arrange to meet him later that day.