There was a time in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, one could pay 100 kuai (15.71 USD in June 2012) and eat, and drink, as much as they liked/could. Now say what you will about the Chinese and their carbon footprint, they don’t know gluttony like we know gluttony, and each resulting meal would have been handled better with a snow shovel than chopsticks.
Of course we’re human, and we regret past foibles, so each experience was a spinning top on which “this is going to be so delicious, I can’t believe it’s been so long since we ate this much” is printed on one side, and a stark “Never again” on the other. When spun, this disk revealed—much like the classic bird in the cage—a supreme nonchalance, a bittersweet (I use this adjective in protest, as to my knowledge there is no word that combines the tastes of Plum Wine and MSG) nod to those frivolous expat years.
The way it goes is this. You sit down at a long table surrounding a flat grill (the teppan itself) and several menus are placed at the table. While you peruse the offerings—octopus, eel, steak— all helpfully translated into the international tongue of garish photographs, a waitress comes around with plates of California rolls. The idea was to make the most of the meal by ordering expensive proteins, bright and angular vegetables, frutti di mare. You don’t order fried rice. We were here to play Tetris in our stomach, and rice—oh so filling—was just going to screw everything up. A friend of mine argued deftly, “Why are you gonna go and order rice? Would you order Cheerios back in the states?”
The servers still brought rice, and we accept it, knowing that there was no subterfuge on their part. Serving white rice with everything wasn’t done to hamstring our attempts at engorgement. It’s not the same gesture as Applebees, who supplements their all-you-can-eat ribs special with a Sisyphean haystack of french fries. It is different, because it doesn’t even occur to the Chinese restaurateur that you are going to try to eat everything. It is a staple in the most fundamental sense: that which is necessary, a staff of life.
What does that mean in an aesthetic sense? Accepting the fact that some of the most lasting forms of Eastern art have been made on rice paper, we must think holistically. Rice is the canvas, the pause between verses; it is not, like Birds Eye Frozen Peas, just another side.
Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, an experimental travelogue from 1983, follows the thoughts and images of an unnamed cinematographer as he travels between the poles of human existence. In the Nishi-Nippori area of Tokyo, he stumbles into a small Teppanyaki restaurant, where:
…Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of ‘action cooking.’ He said that by watching
carefully Mr. Yamada’s gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients one could
meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting,
philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way
the essence of style…
With those spackling trowels, Mr. Yamada flings eggs, onions, steak, oil across the teppan—itself a hot and dirty mirror. Our gazes become tangled in his blurred arms and then blanched by a spurt of flame. If this were America, he’d launch a shrimp into our mouths. But it’s not. This is the joy of the teppanyaki, the dance of it. The rice, however, is prepared back stage in a pressure cooker.
The simplicity of Eastern aesthetics is not exclusive, nor silent. It is, like rice, a support structure for everything that is fleeting. White rice remains; it is accounted for. Like negative space, it has a mass that must be contended with. So in our efforts to deny rice, we threw off the balance between positive and negative space, and slipped down a greased slope of decadence. Iconicity often comes from extreme reduction. When we pare something down to its essence, we are simultaneously strengthening the positive space while expanding the negative. Just as white rice structures the rest of the meal, iconic designs, such as Verner Panton’s chairs, are molded under the weight of the negative.
