I had hoped that coming to Guangzhou I’d be able to experience a winter different from that in the north, but I ran into a cold front. The numbers on the thermometer were higher, yet compared with Tianjin’s sub-zero weather there wasn’t much real difference.
The day before arriving in Guangzhou, I passed through Nanchang and stayed near Nanchang Station. It was already midnight by the time I got to the hotel. I went to a nearby restaurant and tried a dish of lihao with cured pork. The meat was fatty but not overly greasy, the greens were very fresh, and beyond that there wasn’t much that stood out.
It was there that I first saw tea water being served together with a plastic basin. Only later did I realize it was for rinsing cups and then pouring out the water easily. The room window faced directly onto an overpass. I still had work to deal with and was feeling irritable. The chair by the desk was originally placed facing into the room; I deliberately moved it to the other side of the desk so I could see out the window, and that’s how I ended up with this photo.
The happiest moments are the completely unexpected surprises. Early the next morning, I drew the curtains and everything outside was a sheet of white. I hadn’t imagined I would just happen to run into the biggest snowfall Nanchang had seen in 20 years.
The snowflakes were as big as goose feathers and very beautiful. In the morning, lots of people were taking photos with the snow at the hotel entrance. But it also caused no small inconvenience. I had specifically changed into mesh sneakers for my trip to the south, and now they were completely the wrong choice for the road conditions. Sure enough, my shoes stayed soaking wet the entire day.
After finishing my work, I hurried to Guangzhou in the afternoon. The driver told me that the roads had been salted, so there wasn’t much snow accumulation. It was already mid-afternoon when I arrived at Nanchang West Station. The station was packed with people, and the departure board was basically all delay notices.
The good news was that my train was only delayed, not canceled. Watching the anxious crowds, I felt a little ashamed of my own sense of relief. On the train I ran into a mother and son arguing with a crew member. The gist was that because the train was late, they had missed their connecting train.
They asked who would be responsible for their accommodation that night and all the resulting expenses. Naturally the attendant couldn’t take responsibility. After explaining that this was a force majeure event and still failing to convince them, she had no choice but to call in the conductor as reinforcements.
Because of the delay, it was already late at night when I arrived in Guangzhou. A cold wind with fine rain was blowing; my down jacket didn’t feel the least bit excessive. There were no chain hotels near the South Station, so I found a hotel on a booking platform whose photos looked particularly good and walked there, only to find it didn’t match my expectations. By then my stomach was already growling. Fortunately there were quite a few restaurants in the area. I spotted a Chaozhou–Shantou place and ordered frog congee and stir-fried seasonal vegetables.
I hadn’t realized that this “field chicken” was not the free-range chicken I had imagined, but the meat was very tender. The seasoning was on the heavy side, which in turn brought out the umami even more.
The next morning, because I’d had no umbrella the previous night and got rained on, I was forced to “cut the meat” at a convenience store and buy one. The place I stayed was roughly 100 meters from the metro station, and that was the only stretch of road on which this umbrella ever saw service.
A few of my lunches were also quite memorable. I finally got to eat my “free-range chicken,” in a style I hadn’t seen before. It was roughly equivalent to the Tianjin-style shouqie rou for hotpot, except it was “hand-cut chicken,” and the dipping sauce was swapped out for something with more of a southern flavor. I imagine it would also be delicious with sesame paste. The advantage of this method is that the meat is extraordinarily tender; the only downside is that it’s not very easy to chew. Later in Shandong I had Chongqing hotpot once, with a similar style of throwing chicken directly into the pot.
But on that occasion the chicken was overly “high-tech”—it was tender to the point of mushy, with none of the original chicken flavor left. Another time I had claypot rice made in a rice cooker. It might have been authentic, but without any vegetables for balance, having a whole pot to myself was a bit cloying. The other meals were nothing to write home about: the standard nationwide flavors. Perhaps due to my own choices, they didn’t match the preconceived notion I had of Guangzhou food being very sweet.
There was too much I needed to take care of, so whenever I was outside I was basically just switching between different modes of transport in Guangzhou. Apart from walking, I was mostly underground. I only took one look at the Pearl River near where I was staying, and found out later that the place I stayed was just one road away from the little white building where Lu Xun once lived.
Because this trip to Guangzhou coincided with a rare cold spell, I never got to experience even that little bit of novelty that might have come from a difference in temperature. Thinking it over, if I absolutely had to identify one tiny way in which Guangzhou felt different from other cities I’ve visited, it would probably only be the trilingual announcements on the metro.