Chop Suey Syndrome

Yet the most provocative was that frog. The whole body is carved up into bite-sized chunks tossed with crisp bell peppers and onions in a sweetish red sauce. Riddled with bone shards, the meat is rubbery and virtually tasteless, save for the sauce. "In school, we were told to protect frogs," scolds Emily, a Chinese artist at our table, as I pinch hunks of frog. "They eat harmful insects."

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Dawukou doesn't even appear on most maps, and when it does, it is referred to as Shizuishan. At the northern tip of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region hugging the province of Inner Mongolia, Dawukou has an arid climate. A blanket of haze the color of dirty custard hangs perpetually over this city of some 200,000 on account of the widespread use of coal for everything from power to kitchen stoves. Although it is primarily an agricultural region, this stretch of Ningxia is rich in coking coal deposits and littered with small to medium-sized factories that manufacture everything from paper to metal alloys.

We make our way to Dawukou from Beijing in a "hard sleeper," a Spartan railcar with open compartments of six bunks stacked three high opposite spring-loaded fold-down seats that intrude into the narrow aisles. Over the course of the 16-hour ride, we eat in the dining car on tables covered in green and white checkered tablecloths. We eat gray gristly beef in a light brown sauce littered with crisp scallions. We pluck pieces of bright green and crisp zucchini with delicious tofu cubes. We pour beer into tiny tumblers from tall, green Tsingtao bottles.

Accommodations include a toilet--a lipped depression terminating in a hole in the railcar floor with a bucket to be filled by a small faucet for flushing. It empties out directly onto the tracks, and just before the train rolls into a station the toilets are bolted shut until the train is a safe distance from the depot. The condition of the hole grows more graphic as the journey unreels.

We're whisked from the final train stop by an American English teacher to lunch at a restaurant called Family of Three Mouths in Dawukou. We order tall bottles of Xi Xia beer and are given tiny glass tumblers from which to drink it. The teacher pours a little beer in the glass, swirls it around and then dumps it into the next glass and the next, repeating it until the last glass is washed, and then the beer is dumped. "It's a Chinese custom," he says. It cleans the glasses, he adds. The value of the custom quickly becomes apparent. The floor is dotted with crushed cigarettes, crumpled napkins and twisted knots of browning vegetable debris. Clumps of garbage collect in the corners, while shallow pools of soiled water smear the floor. A huge plastic relief of Santa Claus' face hangs on the wall. "It takes them a while to de-decorate," says Anthony Kohler. We eat spinach in vinegar dusted with sesame seeds, beautiful pickled cabbage leaves, less-than-stellar pork ribs, pork with vegetables and Japanese tofu--gelatinous, spit-like stuff.

Though not as aggressively spicy as Szechuan cuisine, the food of Dawukou is closer to but more robust than the Mandarin food in Beijing. Because the Ningxia plain produces abundant wheat harvests, the primary staple is noodles. In a tiny noodle house in the city's core, diners drink the hot water "soup" left over from boiling noodles as an aperitif and chew raw garlic cloves as they scoop noodles from bowls with chopsticks. The meat staples are mutton and goat. "The mutton in Ningxia is seen as the best," says Wang Wanzhi, head of the English department at the Ningxia Institute of Science and Technology. "People say that it is because the water quality here is unique, and when the sheep eat the grass and drink the water, the digestive system can get rid of the strong smell of the mutton."

Whole sheep carcasses dangle from hooks in the open air market, carefully separated by some distance from the pig cadavers in deference to the large Muslim minority in Dawukou. Bins hold great heaps of pig's liver, lungs and intestines. Goat's heads are displayed on tables while carp and other fish flop and splash in shallow tubs fed by hoses. The pavement around the stalls streams with blood and pinkish trickles coursing around fish heads, scales and scraps of animal flesh.

As I strolled through the market, it seemed the reasons Dallas largely punts on Chinese food authenticity suddenly were irrelevant. Chinese food in Dallas will never be as explicitly authentic as it is in this secluded outpost or even in Beijing. For as restaurateur Chuan says, it takes guts to serve Americans the more traditional styles of Chinese food. Americans aren't much interested in guts.

Yet just as Americans travel more and slowly drift away from Americanized ethnic cuisines, the Chinese are increasingly more susceptible to a creeping Americanization on their tables. The McDonald's outlets in the capital city are not tourist strongholds but hives of the city's residents. After a hike in the bitter cold along a decaying section of the Great Wall through abandoned military bases in rugged northern Ningxia, Kohler and I sip hot chocolate and eat fried chicken strips in a large KFC in downtown Dawukou.

One of our last meals in Dawukou takes place in the small apartment of the parents of one of our guides, a young student of English named Luke. Smoke from a tiny coal stove seeps from the window as we enter the dimly lit kitchen where his mother and aunt rapidly stuff, fold and pinch dumplings, assembling them on a platter. In the dining room a tiny round table is sprawled with bowls of carp in thin spicy sauce, barbecued chicken, spicy noodles with vegetables, zucchini in hot pepper sauce, pork ribs, garlic stem, gelatinous pork skin, marinated cucumbers, beef and potatoes, and bright dripping tomato wedges dusted with sugar to blunt the acids. A muted television in the corner flashes a soap opera set during the Ming dynasty.

Communication is a babble of fragmented English and mangled Mandarin channeled through two and three people before the destined ears are reached, along with explicit commands to "eat, eat." It's exhausting. So we resign to express ourselves via toasts of Tsingtao in paper Dixie cups. We do this until the bottoms soak out.