The satirist thinks Chinese people (and food) are repulsive, which makes former Sedaris-fan Jeff Yang sad

Here's a question: How should you respond when one of your literary idols decides to take a huge metaphorical dump on the culture and civilization from whence your ancestors emerged?

It's something I've been grappling with over the past few weeks, ever since I read the latest opus from master mock-and-droller David Sedaris -- the brilliant, best-selling author of "Naked," "Holidays on Ice," "Me Talk Pretty One Day" and the recent "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk."

The work I'm referring to isn't a book, but a lengthy if somewhat slapdash essay he penned for the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper, titled "Chicken Toenails, Anyone?" -- written after Sedaris's return from a brief and apparently unpleasant trip to China, where he was invited to speak at Beijing's Bookworm International Literary Festival.

As you might guess from its headline, Sedaris considered the prospect of visiting China itself as a less-than-appealing proposition: "'I have to go to China.' I told people this in the way I might say, 'I need to insulate my crawl space' or, 'I've got to get these moles looked at.' That's the way it felt, though. Like a chore."

The reason for Sedaris's disdain soon becomes clear: In his view, China is ugly and filthy, Chinese people are universally rude and hostile, and Chinese food is composed of vile ingredients prepared in the most unsanitary and grotesque fashion possible. This isn't an exaggeration: Sedaris's narrative is condescending, xenophobic and thoroughly venomous -- a sweeping 2,700-word dismissal of an entire culture and society based on a few singular anecdotal experiences.

When you are surrounded by turds

To be fair, this is a fair description of many of his genuinely funny essays as well. The difference is that in recounting his adventures in Paris, Tokyo and his hometown of Raleigh, N.C., he's usually as self-deprecating as he is misanthropic, styling his persona as an equal-opportunity hater in the classic Molierean vein (well, perhaps with a dash of added fabulousness). He aptly sums up his worldview as follows, in the book "When You Are Engulfed in Flames": "Though I wish it were otherwise, I'm actually a very intolerant person. When I see a drunk or drug addict begging for money, I don't think, There but for the grace of God go I, but, I quit and so can you. Now get that cup of nickels out of my face."

So yes, David Sedaris is not an author you go to for sympathetic portrayal of human foibles or sensitive examination of foreign cultures.

And yet, even at his harshest, his previous writings have always taken care to create real human characters out of the oddballs, eccentrics and exasperated normals he encounters, enlivening them with personality and often, native wit; rather than being mere ciphers or mute targets, they're his comic foils, or he theirs, in situations that illustrate the hidden absurdity of the defiantly mundane.

"Chicken Toenails" has no such nuance or balance; it's a screed, plain and simple, designed to make China look as ghastly as possible for exaggerated comic effect. Not that Sedaris tries to hide his agenda! He details how he arrived in China after a week traveling through vastly more civilized (but no less exotic) Japan -- which he extolls as being sublime, delicate and very, very sanitary. "In Tokyo, every subway station has a free public men's room," he writes. "The floors and counters are aggressively clean and beside each urinal is a hook for hanging your umbrella ... In Tokyo, I once saw a dog pee on the sidewalk," he writes. "Then its owner reached into a bag, pulled out a bottle of water and rinsed the urine off the pavement."

And then, by contrast, there's China, where "the supermarket cashier holds out your change and you take it thinking, 'This woman squats and spits on the floor while s__ing and blowing snot out of her nose.' You think it of the cab driver, of the ticket taker and, finally, of the people who are cooking and serving your dinner."

As a result, he says, the landscape of China is virtually beslimed and encrusted with mucus -- "I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls."

But Chinese loogie-hawking at least has a purpose: "We Chinese think it's best just to get it out," a dinner companion explains, noting that Chinese find Western use of cloth handkerchiefs equally disgusting. No such rationale exists for the blithe comfort Chinese seem to display with their own s--t -- according to Sedaris, the Chinese are a people who gleefully defecate everywhere, dropping trou and planting yams in bathroom sinks, on the sidewalk, in supermarket aisles and on the surface of skating rinks.

In fact, s--t, in its many forms -- stacked, stinking, frozen, floating, free-range -- ends up being the closest thing Sedaris is able to find to a comic sounding-board on his voyage to the Middle Kingdom. S--t is the Costello to his Abbott, the Laurel to his Hardy, the Calvin to his Hobbes; s--t is his nemesis and his obsession, his partner in a kind of capoiera-like martial ballet, bobbing, ducking and unexpectedly popping up again in every direction he turns. But unlike the language teachers and department store Santas and fruit-factory foremen and other human foils of his past canon, s--t is inanimate and has very little to say, leaving Sedaris to talk s--t all on his own.

Which means that, by the middle of the essay, Sedaris's copromania has become less shocking than annoying, and by its final throes, less annoying than tedious.

Naked lunch

But while Sedaris displays a sort of love-hate relationship with poo, he saves his most vitriolic language for its biological precursor, that is to say, Chinese food, which he describes as being composed of body parts that no ethical person would consume from animals that no sane person would consider, cooked in ways that would cause public health officials to blanch. In short, suggests Sedaris, digesting and excreting it probably improves its appearance, taste and sanitation. "I'll eat it if the alternative means starving," he writes.

It would likely be a tough call. Sedaris describes a meal he had at a mountain farmhouse, prepared by a local family, and it sounds like something out of a Wes Craven film: "The rooster was senselessly hacked, as if by a blind person, a really angry one with a thing against birds. Portions were reduced to shards, mostly bone, with maybe a scrap of meat attached. These were then combined with cabbage and some kind of hot sauce. Another dish was made entirely of organs, which again had been hacked beyond recognition. The heart was there, the lungs, probably the comb and intestines as well. I don't know why this so disgusted me."

Then there was the dish of xue doufu, that is to say, congealed blood, a further offense to Sedaris's sensibilities: "In clean, sophisticated Japan the rooster blood, arranged upon a handmade plate between the perfect, tempura snow pea and a radish carved to look like a first trimester fetus, would have seemed a fine idea ... Here, though, I thought of the sanitation grade, and of the rooster, pecking maggots out of human feces before being killed. Most of the restaurants in China to me smelled dirty, though what I was smelling was likely some unfamiliar ingredient, and I was allowing the things I'd seen earlier in the day -- the spitting and snot blowing, et cetera -- to fill in the blanks."

Now, talking s--t about Chinese architecture, manners and sanitation is one thing: These are things that the Chinese people often critique themselves. But slandering Chinese food? Those are fighting words. Call a Chinese person's baby ugly and she might forgive you, but tell her that Chinese food is disgusting and you have crossed a line that cannot be un-crossed.

Given that, I will now address David directly, writer-person to writer-person, though the chance that he'll ever read this is as slim as the likelihood that he'll be asked to serve as a goodwill ambassador for the China National Tourism Office.

Here's the deal, David: Chinese people eat weird food. There is a saying that "Chinese will eat anything with its back to the sky," and another that says "Chinese will eat anything with legs but a table and anything with wings but an airplane." These are Chinese sayings, I might point out -- which should be a sign that Chinese aren't exactly unaware that the "delicacies" that send prim Westerners to their fainting couches are a little off the beaten path.

But Chinese are far from the only culture that eats weird food, and heck, given that you're from North Carolina, have you looked at what American Southerners traditionally eat? No? Chitlins! Possum! Muskrat! Bull testicles! Oh wait, you're from suburban Raleigh, so probably not, given that most of the more exotic dishes in Southern cuisine, like in many culinary traditions, were the offspring of necessity -- invention midwived by destitution.

The fact is, if you're hungry enough, rodents start to look tasty, as do chicken toenails, random innards and balls. And once you've eaten them long enough, all these things become a nostalgic part of your cultural identity -- especially after you've pulled yourself out of poverty. They go from things you have to eat all the time to things you chooseto eat once in a while, to remind yourself you no longer have to eat them all the time.

And that's what's truly ugly about your essay, David: For someone who's spent a lot of your career puncturing middle-class aspiration and self-delusion, your piece is painfully blind to the fact that all of China is just a few generations removed from dire, desperate want, and that many people, like the peasant family you had such a bad experience sharing a meal with, continue to subsist on an annual income that's a tiny fraction of what a sophisticated awesome American literary superstar like you loses in his sofa. And in a country of 1.3 billion people, even having braised pig's stomach to occasionally go with your daily rice is a freakin' luxury.

Meanwhile, you should note: Those 1.3 billion people have a standard of living that's skyrocketing upward. They're crawling up and out of the economic muck, while we seem determined to drag ourselves down into it. And more and more of them are learning English and traveling abroad and reading international newspapers like the Guardian. So, just sayin': The next time you're eating at a fancy New York restaurant near a table of tourists from Shanghai ... maybe you shouldn't turn your back on your Coke.

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PopMail

As much as I'm irritated by the broad-brush disparagement of Chinese culture, society and people -- or any other culture, society and people, for that matter -- I also believe it's important that we not whitewash the bad and ugly in favor of the good: Unless we engage with the darker aspects of the places we've come from, we can't ensure that they change in the present, or that they won't recur in the future.

The hideous practice of footbinding -- folding and mutilating the toes and arches of young girls to create "perfect lotuses" the size and approximate shape of a clenched fist -- is one such element of Chinese history, and one of the most shameful chapters in the annals of humanity's abuse and repression of the female gender throughout recorded civilization.

The story of China's bound-foot women has rarely been recounted with as much richness, detail and color as in Lisa See's best-selling "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," which explores not just the practice itself, but the way it came to define Chinese society for generations. Footbinding was the rare thing that could allow a low-born woman to rise in society, so well-bound feet were simultaneously a great opportunity, a grand indulgence and a terrible handicap. At the same time, footbinding was only a part of the greater architecture of control and commodification of women in 17th through 19th century China: Ultimately, the transfer of women to the control of their husbands' families, where they were confined to separate "female quarters" and expected to do nothing but perform domestic chores and await impregnation and eventual birth of a (male) heir, meant that the fate of Chinese women of that era was not far removed from livestock.

Yet the very circumstances that oppressed them forged unique relationships among and between bound-foot sisters -- some of which were formally encouraged as a means to provide women relief given their harsh lot. Two young girls with similar backgrounds, complementary personalities and shared cosmological signs might be offered to one another as sworn sisters -- forming a relationship known as "laotong," or "old sames," considered to be as solemn a tie as marriage, and in many ways deeper and more emotionally rewarding. (Also more sensual: While the film's producers deny any sapphic subtext, the book's author, Lisa See, acknowledges that perhaps one out of 10 sworn sisters found comfort of a different kind with their female partners -- and other estimates suggest as many as 40 percent of lao tong relationships had an erotic component.)

The book "Snow Flower" is at its core the story of two such "old sames," and how their bond grows, twists, breaks and is reformed; it is a melodrama and a tragedy that resolves not with satisfaction but with sacrifice and survival. The book is now a movie, in theaters as we speak: The movie is a decidedly different thing from the book, taking the primal story of "Snow Flower" and weaving it together with a complementary one set in contemporary times, giving a tale that is wrenchingly sad in its original telling a rather more uplifting ending.

Some fans may be disappointed as a result, though See herself says that she loves the film, and that the "part that is true to the book is absolutely true to the book," while the modern scenes create a "continuum that brings the story right up to the present, a present in which China is now a global economic superpower."

It's also a present in which the role of women has evolved considerably, to the point where smart, educated and ambitious individuals -- like, for instance, "Snow Flower"'s Xuzhou-born co-producer Wendi Deng Murdoch -- are able to rise to the heights; though Murdoch has been subject to no small amount of vilification in her years of marriage to much-older media tycoon Rupert, her story is more extraordinary in many ways than the fictional one depicted in "Snow Flower." Even detractors acknowledge Wendi Murdoch's formidable will and nerve -- as demonstrated recently in the viral video of her literally leaping to defend her husband from assault by a pie-throwing prankster. The incident, which has now attained Internet meme status, is proof positive that the name she and producing partner Florence Sloan (the Malaysian Chinese wife of MGM chair Harry Sloan, and an impressive woman in her own right) chose for their production company is both apt and saucily ironic: Big Feet Productions.

"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" is currently playing at Century San Francisco (835 Market St.), the UA Stonestown Twin (501 Buckingham Way), and the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland (4186 Piedmont Avenue).

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