On the 8th of March 1997, I moved from Xi'an, where I had been staying in hotel style accommodation, to Hunan hundreds of miles away. It was all very strange and a totally different culture from what I'd become used to but nice to have my own apartment and kitchen again. The only thing that upset me was that there was no 肉夹馍 (ròu jiā mó), which had kept me alive for the previous year.
But it had three redeeming features:
1) 湖南辣妹 (hú nán là mèi). This is used to refer to Hunan women, especially the younger unmarried variety and literally means Hunan Hot Sister(s). It carries all the innuendo that has in English both referring to their love of spicy food and their physical allure. It is also the name used to refer to the British girl pop combo, the Spice Girls. Every day in Hunan, for professional reasons, I was required to spend time in a lecture hall filled with around one hundred examples of these beautiful creatures in their twenties. Shit job, I know, but someone had to do it.
2) Spicy food. Hunan has the reputation of having the hottest food in China, hence one meaning of the previous. I loved and still love it. The Hunan people consider Sichuan to be full of irredeemable wimps on the spice front.
3) A TOTAL LACK OF GBPs. It took me a while to notice – I wasn’t looking for the wretched things – but they just didn’t have the things. Chilli peppers by the truckload but none of these insults to the capsicum clan. Of course, if they had been in possession, I wouldn’t have bought them anyway, but the total non-availability meant no one, no restaurant or friend could sneak them into my repast. Bliss. Looking back, I realise Xi’an didn’t have them either but as I wasn’t cooking here, so I hadn’t noticed.
Two years later, I moved again to Guangxi where I’ve been now for twenty-four years Unfortunately, they do have the miserable things here. They are a feature of Cantonese cuisine and Guangxi was, in the past, part of the same province as Guangdong, home of Cantonese food, my least favourite Chinese style. Xi means ‘west’ and ‘dong' means ‘east’ denoting the two parts the original province split into.
So I have to tread carefully, avoiding green bells and yellow kernels from Hades. It’s a hard life.
