Wan Chai Market
Today Eric redeemed himself after the chicken-blood-spurting comment by composing a list of vegan restaurants for us to eat at.
"There's Chinese Vegan, American Vegan, Thai Vegan..." he pulled up the website of a place called Grasshopper that, aside from an unappetizing drawing of a grasshopper, looked promising. It was Asian Vegan and located fairly close to our house, so with great expectation we made our way there.
It was our first time in a vegan restaurant and there were a bunch of things called vegi-meats made from something our waitress described as seitan or wheat gluten. It didn't sound very appetizing but the taro pot with vegi-shrimp, vegi-beef, and vegi-chicken came highly recommended so we decided to go for that. To tell you the truth those pseudo-meats freaked me out. They looked like miniature marzipan meat cuts and tasted exactly what you would imagine "flavored" meat to taste like. The shrimp was particularly disturbing with pink lines across a crescent of white dough. Needless to say, our first vegan adventure was not a fulfilling one.
When I got home I looked up what "seitan"was and discovered that its exactly what the waitress said it was - a food made of wheat gluten that is often used in Asian, vegetarian, Buddhist and macrobiotic cuisines. I did a double-take when I read that its often used in Asia and then deduced that there must be two types of Asians in this world - the type that eat seitan and the type which eat anything. It didn't take me long to figure out that my family fell into the latter category.
Before moving to Boston five years ago I lived in Malaysia and Hong Kong. Two hectic, metropolitan cities reknowed for their cuisine. Food considered unusual in America are de rigueur in Asia, and I grew up eating things like duck tongue, pigs ears, coagulated blood, snake soup and pigeon. I used to follow my mother to the Wan Chai open-air market every weekend in Hong Kong, and while I enjoyed talking to the vegetable vendors and selecting ripe fruit, I dreaded the meat and seafood section. The open-air markets in Hong Kong are arranged much like the supermarkets in America - a section for fruits and vegetables, a section for fish and seafood, a section for fowl and a section for beef, pork and other meats. The big difference is that the meat in Asia is not processed, chemically treated and packaged in plastic. Asians are obsessed with freshness, and as a result most of the meat is live. That means chickens in wire cages, fish in aquariums, and eels in buckets of water. The only things I've never seen live are cows and pigs, and I think that's probably due to space constraints.
Going to an open-air market in Hong Kong is not for the faint of heart, and for me perusing the meat section was always a traumatic experience. I once spotted a pigs head in a bucket of blood and dry-retched uncontrollably, and still have visions of rows of fish sliced in half with their hearts pumping. That said, there is something healthier about the relationship people have with meat there compared to their counterparts here in America, where the meat is packaged to look wholesome but in no way, shape or form resembles the animal it came from. Perhaps if your stomach can't face the facts of how the animal is killed, you don't deserve to eat it.
I, as I'm quickly discovering, have a very weak stomach.
