Shang huo

When I was in China (all my stories start that way), I remember once coming upon my friend Fang Ge spitting blood into the flowerbeds outside the teachers' dormitory. Alarmed, I asked him what had happened. He replied that he had eaten too much pork or bananas recently and was suffering from a touch of shang huo - an excess of internal heat. It has to do with the balance of ying and yang, I believe. I thought this was ridiculous, and my friend Xiaoxue (whose mother was a doctor) and I used to argue about it. Basically my argument boiled down to, "If there were such a thing as shang huo, we would know about it in the West." (There are, in fact, westerners who regulate their diet in terms of ying and yang, but these are people on macrobiotic diets, i.e. chumps.)

The other day, quite out of the blue and almost without precedent, I found myself craving Chinese food. I don't, on the whole, look back on most Chinese food with longing, but mostly because I got so sick of it, not because it was bad. I found myself thinking of my weekend breakfasts in Beijing: a hot glass of sweet soymilk, and a deep fried dough stick or a zongzi. On weekday mornings I would go to the dorm cafeteria for a bowl of noodles and a steamed bun filled with sweet yellow ... stuff. Anyway, today I found myself near the good international grocery store and I spent a good half hour just looking. I love this place; they've got everything from ghee to queso fresco and prawn flavored rice porridge. After much deliberation, I got some snow peas, dumpling shells (so I can make scrambled egg and tomato dumplings, my favorite), chicken and vegetable dumplings, steamed buns stuffed with red bean paste, and a mango.

I took it all home and sliced up the mango for my afternoon snack, and to my surprise I found I felt guilty about devouring it - there's not much better for you than mango, but I felt like I was eating cream cheese frosting with a spoon. I guess I must have internalized some of Xiaoxue's warnings. If I start breaking out or bleeding from the gums, I guess I'll owe China an apology.