You Shan’t Shun Shanxi

Alas, poor Shanxi, who knows you well? The foreign devils visit you only by necessity or by accident, looking for some other Shaanxi with warriors, or on the way from Xi’an to Hohhot. Few but your own residents care to linger at your grottoes and pagodas, and then because they lack the time or resources to venture further afield, to Xi’an or Hohhot.

But you know the paper-thin joys of reputation, Shanxi. Were China to play at being the West, why you’d be the Ukraine, blessed with endless wheat fields, depthless seams of coal, and most importantly, good ruddy farm folk, devoid of Shanghai pretension or Beijing bossiness. Let us celebrate your homey charms, then, Shanxi, as a man wise enough to quit galavanting celebrates his wife’s meatloaf, and a Knight Rider marathon on TNT.

The Noodle Belt

When you work like a man, you eat like a man. Thick-wristed northern Chinese ploughmen have no use for dainty vermicelli slurping, and requests for rice only bring looks of disdain. How about a noodle you can hold your trousers up with? Che mian, also known as biang biang, has been satisfying honestly earned rustic appetites since the Yellow River ran clear. Rural custom dictates the belt noodle span two or three inches, thick as an RMB coin, and one meter long. You want what sauce on it? Here’s some vinegar, emperor.

Frying Pan-cakes

Just because you don’t have time to make a big belt noodle doesn’t mean you have to eat a small portion. But you don’t keep a Chinese boss waiting, especially if he’s a Tang emperor. Seems the hordes of serfs building his tomb took far too long queuing up for lunch, and were being lashed for their tardiness. One soldier, innovative as he was hungry, stirred some flour, water and salt in his copper helmet, and lit a fire under it. Thus was born guo kui, a fitting example of the northern Chinese genius for practicality, while southern talent runs to clever words and stratagems. Not so cleverly, ‘frying pan-cakes’ refers to the size of these guo kui, outsized as Shanxi noodles.

Hot Pepper Entrees

No, not as a garnish. As the entire dish. The Shanxi ren are provincial, but certainly not insular. Early on they learned from the Sichuanese to appreciate the fiery buzz of gobbling red peppers. So much so, in fact, that they dispensed with oily fish or beef slices to balance it with and made a meal of the peppers themselves. It doesn’t make them hot-tempered, as it does the Sichuanese – there’s too much sod busting to be done for that nonsense. But just try swiping a few of the dried red devils hanging in every honest Shanxi dwelling’s doorway.

The Trough Bowl

And what else would farmers haul around their belt noodles and giant pancakes in? At 36 cm in diameter, one of these mega-bowls served to hold enough grub for three or four hungry farmers. They call the bowls lao wan, and three or four men sitting down to eat together is still colloquially referred to as a lao wan hui [old bowl meeting].

Hanky Hats

Farming is dirty work; no pun necessary. Now hats make for some nice shade, but can you mop sweat with one, or doggie bag your left-over belt noodle-giant-pancake-red pepper casserole with one? When driven out of the fields, Shanxi ren take to spinning cotton, much as Zhejiang’s people take to mass-producing disposable goods. Cotton hats shrink, leaving the danger of being mistaken for a Xinjiangren the day after being caught out in the rain. A nice thick cotton handkerchief [headkerchief?] on the other hand, folded and worn at a jaunty angle, has enough uses to make Douglas Adams reconsider the towel as the ultimate travel companion.

Half a House

To the cultural relativist, building half a house might make as much sense as wearing a handkerchief for a hat. But form following function makes universal sense, and in the hard scrabble loess of Shanxi, simplicity and frugality are high virtues. If the shale and slate used to shingle a full two-sided roof are dear, why not stack up the sturdy loess mud bricks a little higher, and cut roofing costs in half? Furthermore, the increased height to floor-space ratio makes for more sunlight and better insulation. “Half the roof, twice the sense,” is the applicable formula here.

Why Sit When You Can Squat?

Asians can do everything you can do, and something you can’t – drop from standing to squatting while remaining flat-footed. Makes everything from waiting for the bus to waiting for nature to call much less equipment-intensive. Once Tang Dynasty nobles started improving on the little stools the Mongols carried around, though, most of China never looked back – sitting became the nobleman’s option, squatting the peasant’s. Literally down-to-earth people that they are, the people of Shanxi looked on all this chair-support as effete frippery. To this day, other Chinese joke that if you present someone from Shanxi with a chair, he’s just as likely to squat on it as sit on it. In their defense, secretary’s spread is a virtually unknown complaint in the region.

Chinese Rock Opera

Never believe that Beijing cornered the market on ambiguously-gendered caterwauling. And while the vocal timbre required for traditional Beijing opera ranges between a cat being vivisected and doing duck calls through a paper towel tube, Shanxi opera singing, known as qing qiang or chang xi, has a distinct heavy metal edge to it. Metallica could certainly earn the praise of inspiring zheng po tou in a Shanxi audience, that is, an intense feeling that one’s head is about to explode. The Bee Gees, not so much, though Barry Gibb could have ruled Beijing Opera as indisputably as he did the late 70s. Shanxi opera also rocks out in terms of physicality and stage theatrics. Aficionados jest that the three requirements of a Shanxi opera performance are a strong stage, strong lungs, and a strong audience that won’t be afraid of all the screaming and leaping. Jokes have always tended to die easiest in the translation.

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