*More commonly translated as “Yunnan’s 18 oddities”
Although I was born in Shanghai and the only place I’ve ever lived in China is Shanghai, certain members of my family have always insisted that my real laojia or hometown is in Yunnan. The logic had an uncomfortably paternalistic twist even to seven-year-old me: Yunnan is where my father grew up. Nevermind where I grew up. (Mostly? Suburban Massachusetts.) Shanghai natives view the rest of China with the same preening snobbery as New Yorkers and “flyover country,” so I wasn’t particularly eager to claim Yunnan in my cultural inheritance. Not to mention Yunnan is one of the poorest provinces and the gateway for all drugs from Southeast Asia into China.
Okay, now let’s start over about Yunnan.
Yunnan is one of China’s most popular tourist destinations. It feels exotic even if you’re Chinese. Nearly a third of the population is made up of ethnic minorities, the natural landscapes are unique, and the weather is warm all year round, which accounts for one of the 18 weird things: 四季服装同穿戴 or “wear the same clothes all four seasons.” And you’ve got to give it some credit — any place that markets itself based on how weird has to have a few tricks up its sleeves. (Really, the other 17 things are weirder.)
I’ve been to Yunnan exactly once, with my family when I was seven years old. Aside from a crazy stay in an elephant grove — an essay I wrote about that at age 11 somehow led to my mother’s long-lost classmate finding her on the internet — most of what’s endured from that visit is the food. That’s why stumbling across Francis Lam’s Postcards from Yunnan in Gourmet, filed when he was on vacation with his family, immediately plunged me into food nostalgia.
A good number of the Yunnan oddities are food related:
- 竹筒当锅煮饭卖 - rice is cooked in a bamboo
- 过桥米线人人爱 - everyone loves “crossing bridge noodles” — a Yunnan specialty
- 牛奶做成扇子卖 - milk is make into fan-shaped cheese
- 草帽当锅盖 - bamboo hats used as wok covers
- 米饭粑粑叫饵块 - rice cakes called “ear pieces”
And the best one
- 三个蚂蚱一碟菜 - 3 mosquitoes make a dish (mosquitoes there are gigantic)
These phrases all rhyme in Chinese! Sorry it’s too hard to rhyme them in English translation.
The 18 oddities may just be are a tourist stunt, and you can even buy illustrated card sets of the oddities. (We own at least one such set.) Yet there seems to be no canonical list because I swear that grasshoppers and flowers as food were two of the oddities — at least in the set of cards I played with.
But the list doesn’t include what I considered the true culinary treasures of the region — stuff once worthy of fetish in my house. Yunnan ham, a umami bomb that assaults your palate with deliciousness. Jizong, a mushroom that grows in the mountains only after thunderstorms. Relatives used to smuggle jars of these fried whenever they came to visit the US. A teaspoon of only the jizong oil jizong can single-handedly rescued whatever crappy noodles I was making. And lastly, a whole pineapple, impossibly sweet, eaten skewered on a chopstick so that juice drips down your elbow. Its intensity of flavor that made these memorable, and intensity other than the aggressive sweetness is so often lacking in western cuisine.
Of course, it’s thinking about food that makes me want to go back to Yunnan and back to China.
