Live crabs in a seafood restaurant in Guangzhou tied up and waiting to be picked out, cooked, and eaten.

There are plenty of famous sights in China—the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Warriors—but perhaps the one thing that can most change your outlook is the food. John and I were spoiled rotten with great food in China, as we sampled regional specialties from across the map and feasted night after night in the epicenter of Chinese cooking, Guangzhou. But restaurants in China, I found, have little in common with those in the States.

You Will Be Assimilated

Restaurants in China are multi-story affairs, laid out in such labyrinthine grids that you may possible require a map to find your way to and from the restroom. They are staffed by what seem like hundreds of waitpeople, all of whom wear smart little jackets with Mandarin collars and tags that identify them by number instead of name. It unnerved me, the first several times, to notice that the woman pouring me tea was designated “No. 367”: I felt like I was dining inside a Borg cube. After awhile, though, I began to see the advantages of the situation. No individual waiter was assigned to any table, so whoever was free could, and did, bring the dishes over as soon as they were ready. And no one interrupted with unnecessary “pleasantries” like “Hi, my name’s Kimberly and I’ll be your server tonight,” or the ghastly “You still working on that?” In China, a waiter is an interchangeable set of hands used to convey your dinner from the kitchen to the table, and little more. It speaks to the differences between China and the States: in China, efficiency is valued most, and it’s acceptable to view the servers as cogs in a machine, whereas here, we acknowledge the servers’ individuality more, often at the cost of forced familiarity.

In China, we often ate in a private room with just our tour group or family. These rooms were pretty nifty, and often contained a flat-screen TV, some couches, and a tea table along with our group’s tables. At the fancier places, we even had our own private restrooms.

Dining in China is, strangely, like eating Chinese food in the United States in that everyone eats a little from several communal dishes instead of ordering his own meal. The food is placed on a lazy susan in the middle of the table, on which the drinks, chopsticks, and napkins are also placed. There are a few new etiquette rules that go with this style of eating, such as checking whether anyone is serving themselves before rotating the lazy susan, or, if you have germophobes in your group, making sure you don’t accidentally use your eating chopsticks to serve yourself with. [Note: if you’re in China, you’ve got worse things to worry about, microbe-wise, than infinitesimal traces of American spit.] When a desirable dish is placed on the table, it also makes for a kind of poker-cum-roulette, leaving you thinking, “How much of that pine cone fish can I take without looking greedy? But if I don’t take a lot, will there be any left by the time it works its way around the table again?” Meanwhile, the little old grandma across the table is eyeing that same fish hungrily, while her son’s trying not to betray too much interest in it, lest he tip everyone off and they take extra.

“If it walks, crawls, swims, or flies . . .”

How do you ensure that your seafood is fresh? Pick it out of the tank yourself.

The most startling aspect of Chinese restaurants, to American eyes, is the live animal markets many feature at their entrances. The fish tanks in Beijing and Shanghai didn’t bother me, but I was in no way prepared for the vast array of animal life on display in Guangzhou. The Chinese have a saying: “If it walks, crawls, swims, or flies, the Cantonese will eat it,” and this was borne out by several of the restaurants we visited. One in particular, nicknamed “the new fishing village,” boasted a veritable aquarium of the damned. Most of its ground floor was occupied by rows upon rows of fish tanks, containing sea bass, grouper, sturgeon, eels, big prawns, little prawns, minnows, krill, and fish I’d previously only seen in tropical tanks. And then there were the turtles, the frogs, the snails, the sea urchins, the sea cucumbers, the forest of fish heads staring up from a bed of ice, and, my favorite, the gators. Other places we ate at displayed cages of live ducks, chickens, pheasants, and morbidly obese rabbits. The rabbits, truly Jabba-the-Hutt-like specimens of bunnidom, were kind of cute in their grumpy, immobile way. Their expressions radiated the message, “We know you are going to eat us, and we are not amused. At all.”

Worse, though, was the restaurant in Wuxi that offered dog meat. Posters advertised perfectly normal-looking slices of meat, served with a little parsley garnish atop a nice platter, and then, below that, a photo of a golden retriever. I had long wanted to dismiss accounts of Chinese dog-eating as mere nasty stereotype, but, after seeing something like that, it was impossible to ignore. In my time in China, I ate—and, more often than not, enjoyed—crane, sturgeon, eel, snails, “duckfish,” shark’s fin, abalone, sea cucumber, beef tendons, the meat which attaches to a cow’s stomach, and oogy, gelatinous “thousand-year-old” eggs. I munched the fried leg of a waterbird no one knew the English name of, holding it upright like some grisly lollipop with the feet still attached. (They were delicious. I ate four.) I kind of regret never having tried the gator. But had I been offered dog, I couldn’t have touched it, not even in the name of courtesy.

In this age of political correctness, I know, I’m supposed to get over my squeamishness and regard dog-eating as just another arbitrary cultural practice. After all, a Hindu might be repelled if I served him beef or an Orthodox Jew if he saw me eating pork. And I in no way fault the Chinese for eating dog. I don’t find it morally wrong. But neither does it feel like arbitrary distaste on my part when I tried not to look at the photo of that nice blond golden retriever as I munched my Wuxi ribs. It felt like a deep, primal taboo, like something bad would happen to me if I so much as touched the dog meat. In this day and age, it’s strangely comforting to think we still have such taboos.

Freshness is King

The other side to this omnivorousness, of course, is that Chinese food is incredible. I grew up in New England, where I used to think we had good seafood. We do, but China has fantastic seafood. I never ate better fish, prawns, or lobster than I did in China. The fish melted in your mouth and tasted subtly sweet, like the fresh water it swam in. The shellfish was succulent, likewise sweet, with the perfect amount of yield between your teeth. With food so fresh, Chinese cooks don’t have to do too much to it to make it taste good. All over southern China, we were served delicious shrimp that had simply been boiled, and fish that had been steamed with a little soy sauce and ginger, and it was wonderful.

Coming back to the States, then, it was disinspiriting to enter the meat section of Harris Teeter, with its geometrically-proportioned hunks of pork, beef, and chicken in identical Styrofoam packages, all pallid and odorless and doing their best to convince you that you were merely buying protein, and not the flesh of something that had lived and breathed. We Americans pay a high price for our squeamishness. One could never serve here, as is common practice in China, a simple boiled chicken, cut into pieces with maybe a little ginger sauce for savor, as a restaurant dish. It would taste like flavorless nothing. Here we have to fry our chickens, rotisserie them for hours, or cover them in sauce or stuffing to make them palatable.

There’s a lot to be said for the Chinese way of doing things. If you’re going to eat animals, why not own up to the fact, and get them live or freshly-slaughtered? You’ll get a far better meal, and you won’t have hide behind the mincing sterility of the meat section. If only that were an option here.