Book Knife Swag

Part II of The Cross-stitched Pig

(Left: Qin Dynasty bamboo slips excavated from Shuihudi in 1975. Right: “ce,” the Chinese character for “volume” or “book.”)

Part I is here.

In The History of the Former Han we are told that Wen Weng, the administrator of the Shu commandery during the reign of Emperor Jing (156-140 B.C.), sent the best and the brightest of his province to study in Changan, the imperial capital. To pay their expenses, he equipped them with Shu brocades and book knives, objects in high demand in the great city.

Shu is the ancient name for Sichuan, a province legendary for thousands of years for the quality and beauty of its silk embroidery. The popularity of Shu book knives is more restricted in time, confined to the era, prior to the Chinese invention of paper, in which bamboo was a standard medium for publishing.

To record the teaching of the sages or the laws of the emperor, scribes would paint characters on thin strips of cured bamboo. Occasionally, mistakes were made, or a particular text was considered outmoded and recyclable. Out came the book knife, a tool for shaving off the surface of the bamboo strip so new characters could be painted on. An eraser made out of iron.

In Han times, possession of both knife and brush marked the credentialed imperial scribe. “Shu knives” were the best in the empire, held in such high esteem that the emperor would often give them as gifts to show imperial favor. In the Later Han, the poet Li Yu memorialized a particularly sought-after brand of Shu book knives:

The Golden Horse Book Knife

It is skillfully smelted and tempered,

Finished with a design of a golden horse;

Polished and carved with yellow lines,

And inscribed with the manufacturer's name.

Typically, book knives were hung from the scribe’s belt by a silk thread attached to a ring on the handle of the blade. Can you imagine how much swag Han Dynasty scribes commanded as they strode through the imperial library with their book knives slapping against their thighs? Writers have never had it as good since: quills are elegant, typewriters are cool, laptops are efficient... but book knives rule. 

In his magisterial history of Chinese writing, Written on Bamboo & Silk, Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin observes that the traditional Chinese practice of writing sentences that were read in vertical columns from top to bottom probably dates back to the bamboo era. Bamboo slips were too narrow to permit any other approach. To construct literature that expanded further than a single sentence or two, multiple slips were woven together with silk thread. Ce, the Chinese word for “volume” or “book” (冊), is a direct pictographic representation of a bamboo text.

No wonder the word that eventually came to describe literature, 文 (wen) originally meant “pattern.” Han scribes were writers and weavers.

And no wonder, as Tobias Zurn writes in his essay Writing as Weaving, that the early Han dynasty text, the Huainanzi, “repeatedly utilizes in its self-illustrations an image that gained prominence during the Han dynasty, namely, that writings are textual fabrics.”

We have created and composed these writings and discourses as a means to knot a net of the Way and its Potency and weave a fabric out of humankind and its affairs, above investigating them in Heaven, below examining them on Earth, and in the middle connecting them all into a pattern.

Zurn and other scholars have pointed out that the construction of texts via multiple bamboo slips conveyed an intrinsic modularity. Texts were like Lego constructions, endlessly open to reassembly. Need to revise? Just unwind the thread and shuffle the slips...

The inherent slipperiness of this modularity has complicated the issue of discerning authorial intention with respect to many of China’s ancient classics. In 1993, the discovery of a bamboo text version of the Daodejing that was at least a hundred years older than the previously recognized oldest version of the text intrigued Daoist scholars with its radically different order of chapters.

Was the difference between the newly excavated text and the received version the haphazard result of Han dynasty scholars piecing together narratives that had been physically jumbled apart by the chaos of the Warring States era and the imperial censorship of the First Emperor of the Qin? Or did changing times result in a changing consensus on what the most appropriate chapter order really was? Or maybe the whole idea of original authorial intention was misbegotten. Maybe all these texts were cobbled together my multiple authors, mixing and matching bamboo slips over the centuries with wanton malleability.

The idea that a narrative is woven by an author (or authors) is of course not exclusive to ancient China. When I write these newsletter posts, I take pleasure in alternating threads on Sichuan food, Chinese history, contemporary politics and my personal life into my own version of a Shu brocade. Zooming out, the newsletter, taken as a whole, is a strange kind of book made up of chapters that can be read in any order. Up to this point, it’s all been generated more or less unconsciously; I just go with the flow.

But once one starts writing about writing, a more explicitly intentional approach is called for. Inspired by the Huainanzi, I want to unify form and content in this multi-part rumination. I am at peace with the realization that there is no “right” order of the virtual bamboo slips I am stringing together. When -- if? -- I find a suitable ending point I am prepared to shuffle the deck and reweave the pattern. But I am also reminded of the first line of a poem that Su Shi, the author of Song of the Stone Drums, wrote after being brought up on trial on charges of treason against the realm.

In all my life, writing has brought me into trouble...

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         In Praise of Pork

Wash the pot clean

Add a little water

Firewood smoldering, the fire dimly gleams

Hurry it not, let it slowly simmer

When cooked long enough it will be beautiful

There is good pork in Huangzhou

Its price as cheap as dirt

The rich will not eat it

The poor know not how to cook it

Rising early in the morning I down two bowls

Never you mind, I'm full and content

         Su Shi

As described in a gossipy biography by the twentieth-century translator of all things Chinese to the West, Lin Yutang, Su Shi would have made a great party guest.

“[He was] an incorrigible optimist, a great humanitarian, a friend of the people, a prose master, an original painter, a great calligraphist, an experimenter in wine making, an engineer, a hater of puritanism, a yogi, a Buddhist believer, a Confucian statesman, a secretary to the emperor, a confirmed wine-bibber, a human judge, a dissenter in politics, a prowler in the moonlight, a poet, and a wag.”

Su Shi (aka Su Dongpo) was involved at the highest level of politics in his time; momentous events that shaped the course of the Song dynasty. He is without doubt the most famous poet of his era. He wrote authoritatively about a vast number of subjects, from metallurgy to irrigation technology. His tendency for sarcasm and mockery when composing elliptical critiques of imperial economic policy riled the court and put his life in grave danger. Revered today as one of China’s towering cultural heroes, he would, if alive today, be constantly running afoul of China’s online censors.

But all these gleaming facets of Su Shi’s personal narrative are distractions. In the world of Chinese food, his fame endures because his name is attached to one of China’s most famous dishes: Dongpo Pork.

As I write these words I have yet to take my first stab at cooking Dongpo Pork, an oddity that has provoked some self-criticism. Su Shi hailed from Sichuan, a province legendary for its love of pork. Su Shi wrote the poem In Praise of Pork. I too love pork. The first three Sichuan dishes I ate my first day in Taiwan all contained pork. So what am I waiting for?

I’ve humored myself by arguing that Dongpo Pork, despite its author’s provenance, is not a Sichuanese dish. It is most commonly associated with the city of Hangzhou in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, where Su Shi served as an official. My tastes run towards flashy bombast and spicy extravagance; Dongpo Pork is supposed to be an exemplar of subtle sophistication. Dongpo Pork was also, traditionally, an upper class indulgence. Sichuan food, as I originally came to appreciate it, is home cooking for regular people.

Case in point: Twice Cooked Pork (hui guo rou), a classic representative of Sichuan cuisine, a dish that became so popular in my household that my youngest child and I decided we had to hold ourselves to a limit of eating it only once a month, lest we drown in rendered lard. When I was in Chengdu searching for the best Twice Cooked Pork I could find, a guide who was leading a food tour laughed off the question, saying: “everybody’s grandmother makes hui guo rou; there is no best version.”

Twice Cooked Pork is especially significant to me because I’m convinced that learning how to make it was a key catalyst transforming me from an obsessive recipe-follower to an in-the-moment cook. That was kind of a big deal, way back when.

So how can this newsletter be two-and-a-half years old, and I have not yet written about pork? This is China food writer malpractice.

After all, long before Shang diviners began scrawling marks on turtle shells in an effort to predict the future, signs of growing wealth inequality in Neolithic burial mounds could be discerned by counting the number of pig skulls buried alongside the deceased. The Chinese character for "home" places the character for a "roof" above the character for a "pig." Those born in the year of the pig are considered optimistic, trustworthy, and especially adept at handling money. It is possible to track economic growth in China since the mid-70s just by tracking rising per-capita pork consumption. A folk saying associated with the third day of the Spring Festival, "fei zhu gong men" -- "there is a fat pig at the door"  -- means good fortune and happiness will arrive in the new year.

"Meat -- specifically pork -- is the most highly prized item in Chinese cuisine. Shortages of pork spark street disorders, initiate bank runs and (if allowed to continue too long) threaten the stability of the state. Many countries, including the United States and Britain, maintain strategic petroleum reserves. China has a strategic pork reserve. Pork plays a leading role in Chinese ancestral rites, wedding banquets, funeral rituals, graduation celebrations and communist party festivities. Pork, in other words, is central to all discussions of food in the Chinese world."

James Watson -- "Meat: A Cultural Biography in (South) China"

To mark my own birthday I have buried whole pigs in pits with lava rocks and banana leaves, Hawaiian-style, rotated them on bicycle-propelled spits, Filipino-style, and barbequed them in a box Cuban-Chinese-style. My sixtieth approaches fast. There will be swine: A sustainably grown, free-range pig probably raised by organic farmers in Sonoma country.

And here is where things get sticky. If I ate politically correct pork just once a year, on my birthday, I could sleep easy. But I don’t. I regularly buy cheap pork belly and baby back ribs from Costco, which ineluctably implicates me in a catastrophic collision between capitalism, the environment and the moral treatment of animals.  Over the past decade, I have dramatically cut back on my consumption of red meat for both climate and budgetary reasons. But even though I eat a lot less bacon than I used to, I can’t shake my love for pork.

Just a few weeks ago I even invented a new dish: twice cooked pork belly home fries. It was so good it felt sinful. And it was! Because every time I make twice-cooked cheap Costco pork I am complicit in the destruction of the planet.

Once one starts writing about pork and China, one has to get serious. Messy contradictions stand ready for embrace. The task of feeding Chinese pigs is a global resource conundrum, a process that is remaking the topography of Brazil and polluting the watersheds of North Carolina and Iowa. Indulging our global taste for bacon is a climate disaster.  CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) are an abomination.

 I haven’t yet published on pork because I’m afraid of the trouble my writing will get me into when I face up to the contradictions between what I know and what I eat. I’m afraid that the end point of a honest journey of self-discovery will require changing my ways.

So I’ve been resisting the flow.

End of Part II. Read Part III.