The taste of Shuhe, why is it so unforgettable?
I made a trip to Lijiang. Strictly speaking, it was Shuhe. After all, Dayan is too noisy, too crowded, too packed, and even spending a single afternoon there feels draining and exhausting, let alone staying there for several days. But even in the relatively quiet Shuhe, because construction of guesthouses is going on in many of the alleys, sometimes I felt as if I were staying in a giant theme park, with no sense of relaxation or healing at all. In the course of a day, only between about five and seven in the morning are there especially few people on the roads, when you can wander and stroll on the flagstone paths of the old town without fear of bumping into anyone, or browse the small market pondering which kind of fruit rarely seen in Taiwan to buy. After that, the time is no longer leisurely.
And among it all, "What should we eat?" is the most anxiety-inducing.
As a popular tourist attraction, although guesthouse lodging is not expensive, the cost of a meal in Shuhe is on par with Taipei. A bowl of mixed-sauce ersi is 10 yuan (the exchange rate of RMB to NTD is 1:4.7), a plate of ten chive dumplings is 20 yuan, a cup of Yunnan small-bean coffee is 15 yuan, a tiramisu is 25 yuan, the price of set dishes on Bar Street starts at 38 yuan, and dishes with Naxi ethnic flavor (such as cured pork rib hot pot) cost at least 68 yuan. In particular, because in the entire old town there are no local residents besides tourists and guesthouse owners, even wanting to find a "restaurant where locals go" is impossible; either you go alone to eat a 30-yuan set meal, or you join up with fellow guesthouse travelers to scrounge a meal together.
Of course, there are also roadside barbecued skewers on Bar Street selling three skewers for ten yuan, but ever since chatting with the guesthouse owner one night, I no longer dared to eat them. That night, Old Mai, who is from Taiwan, said this: "I don't recommend cured pork ribs now, because with so many tourists, the shops all use chemical agents you can't figure out to make the cured pork ribs, so they can shorten the entire curing time; otherwise how could they meet the tourists' demand? The barbecue sold on the street is the same, all duck meat from who knows where smeared with coloring and beef essence, and then they tell you it's yak meat. In fact, only one restaurant in Shuhe uses real yak meat, but why would you eat yak hot pot, which people eat to fend off the cold winter, in summer?"
Thinking about it, that really is so. A small town originally isolated from the world suddenly sees so many tourists pouring in, crowding shoulder to shoulder every day looking for food on the streets, everyone clamoring to eat local specialties like yak, black goat, salmon and cured pork ribs; under the reality of time-consuming grazing and inconvenient transportation, only by bringing into play the production features of the motherland's "food industry" can the tourists' demand be met. And so, when we came to this quaint small town marketed as "spiritual healing," we, ignorant of the seasons and wolfing down our food, nibbled away bit by bit at our own health. In the end, when friends asked us what impression we had of Yunnan cuisine, apart from it being very oily, very spicy, very salty and very sour, we seemed to have nothing else to say.
Right now, if you ask me what food in Shuhe left a deep impression on me, I think I would say it was the tomatoes, radishes and cucumbers bought beside Willow Creek. Under the sunlight of Shuhe, I always felt that only these vegetables grown from the soil could truly heal my loneliness on the journey.
What? You're asking me about the pesticide residues on these fruits and vegetables? (Covering my ears)