Liquid Gold

When I was young, I used to read Tintin comic books – delightful little mysteries in an easy-to-digest form. There was one that was entitled “Black Gold,” which referred to oil, as it is so often turned into gold (it’s almost like magic!). Before I go on, I should say that Tintin has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m writing about today. It is, however, about oil, which is what the title alludes to. On the other hand, it has more to do with cooking oil than the black kind so often used to make things go. Unfortunately, it would have seemed a bit silly to title this entry “Yellow Gold,” so my somewhat esoteric (at least in the sense that I doubt many people understood the allusion without the peremptory explanation) title is stuck being called “Liquid Gold.” At least we can all agree that oil is, generally speaking, liquid. The thing about oil in China is that it’s used absolutely everywhere, except where it’s needed most. Oil is used to prepare every Chinese dish I can think of. In my cooking class, we learned to make a number of dishes – for example, sweet and sour potatoes, in which the potatoes are deep-fried; fried rice, in which both the egg and the rice are lightly fried; tomato fried-egg, in which everything is, surprise, surprise, fried; fish-flavored eggplant, in which, drum-roll please, the eggplant is also deep-fried. In fact, of all twelve dishes we studied, every single one of them required oil in the preparation and/or cooking stages. Depending on the restaurant you go to, your food may even be sitting in a delightful-looking pool of oil. Yummy. Before I go any further, I would like to reassure you that yes, the people here are quite slim. My point is that oil is often available and present to excess – when it comes to edible things. Outside of food, though, oil is scarce to be found, often with painful, unpleasant results for everyone within a one-mile radius (which, considering the fact that this is China, is just about everyone). That is, imagine the sound of a street filled with vehicles. Buses, cars, bikes… they’re all there. People are crossing the street haphazardly, forcing cars to stop on a dime, as it were. This in turn causes a bunch of other random vehicles to screech to a halt. Now, let’s examine that last sentence for just a moment. When I say “screech,” I am speaking quite literally. These are brakes that have not been oiled since the day the vehicle was bought. And those buses are heavy – it takes a long application of brakes to make them come to a full stop. So the kind of “screech” in question is very much like the long-nails-scratching-a-blackboard, blast-out-your-eardrums, make-the-hair-on-your-arms-stand-up kind. I consider myself lucky to have not gone totally deaf already.