Chapter 7.
Such sweet dreams on a Sunday morning in Taichung.
I had gone to bed early the night before, but got up at 2am to have a brew of Yorkshire tea.
But before I actually got up I dreamed. I dreamed about dreaming. I slept about sleep.
I remembered the location with some clarity. It was a triangular section of a glass fronted protrusion at the end of a building. There was light rain outside and the floor gently rocked and moved direction as I dozed.
A couple of females were present I remember, one of whom tried to wake me, but I still pretended to be asleep.
It also struck home with a certain sadness that Michelle was now 70 & myself 75. Lives that could have been.
After a lazy familiar breakfast at the hotel; for by now I was becoming a long staying guest and merged imperceptibly with both the staff and décor, I eventually got down to writing this piece.
I’d missed out the week before, despite having gone through the experience of an earthquake located the other side of the island. But then, that had already been adequately covered by the usual serious faced news outlets, along with; bombings, Brexit, and Trumps’ predictable antics.
No, I needed something nearer to home, and the inspiration, (if that is not too strong a word) came in the Bear Bar off Chaoma Road one night, when Danny the bartender suggested Kung Pao Chicken for dinner after my usual relaxing end of the day sundowners.
For those of you not familiar with this dish, it is a spicy, stir-fried Chinese dish made with chicken, peanuts, vegetables (traditionally leek only), and chili peppers. A classic dish in Sichuan cuisine, it originated in the Sichuan Province of south-western China and includes Sichuan peppercorns. Also, I might add, it is delicious.
Which at last, you might eventually grasp, comes the actual story.
It is to my mind a rather exotic, complicated tale from the Far East, akin the intermittent musings of the late David Carradine to his blond girlfriend, in “Kill Bill” whilst sitting cross legged and gently blowing into a musical reed.
Once assiduously researched, (as is my wont,) it is quite credible; apart from transitory doubts concerning the main characters and circumstances; namely: a civil servant, a chicken and the Cultural Revolution.
I’d heard of Beef Wellington, named after the great man, but then I’d been raised in England. So, who exactly was Kung Pao and what was his claim to having a dish named after him?
It turns out that the gentleman in question was in fact named “Ding Baozhen” (1820–1886), a late Qing Dynasty official and governor of Sichuan Province. His title was “Gongbao” literally: 'Palace Guardian' Thus, by a cunning process of deduction, it is deduced decisively and definitively that he name “Kung Pao chicken” has evolved from this title.
One hiccup along the way of this important aspect of Chinese history however, is that during the Cultural Revolution, the dish's name became politically incorrect because of its association with the imperial system. Hence the dish was renamed “fast-fried chicken cubes (hongbao jiding)” or "chicken cubes with seared chilies" by Maoist radicals until its political rehabilitation in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping's reforms.
But what had Ding done to deserve such a distinction? It appears that he was appointed a government official in the 25th year in the Jia Qing Reign in the Qing Dynasty, in Pingyuan in Guizhou. He had been the head of Shandong Province for ten years, and then the governor of Sichuan Province for another ten years. Apparently in his lifetime, he had been an outstanding government official, contributing a great deal to society and was much remembered in the hearts of the Chinese people. As evidence of this, a TV series on the Mainland captioned “Ding Baozhen” is currently on display attracting the national attention.
There you have it: a tale written by an Englishman, inspired by the culinary suggestion of a Taiwan bar man, involving a Chinese civil servant with an impeccable reputation in both the Qing Dynasty and todays’ Mainland China.
What a disparate stream of threads and free wheeling imagination is called upon today to form a tale!