Zhuangzhou was Butterfly




In Republic of China Year 9 (1920), 25 years after the First Sino-Japanese War and henceforce the Japanese occupation of Korean peninsula and Taiwan islands, Zenichiro Kotobe obtained a travel permit from the Heilongjiang Military Governor’s Office to tour and investigate historical sites in the Han, Manchu, and Mongol regions of Northeast China (as well as the Siberian region of northern Heilongjiang / Amur river, then annexed by Russia for half a century).

In Taisho Year 13 (1924), Kotobe published Genghis Khan Was Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a work based on historical research and fieldwork conducted in Hokkaido, Kuye (Karafuto / Sakhalin), and mainland Northeast Asia. Written in a tone that oscillates between that of a hot-headed military youth 少壮派 (those who inspired the movement of the Young Turks) and a supposedly rigorous, cautious historian he articulated a theory that had long been popular among the Japanese people and had gained increasing traction at the turn of the 20th century: Yoshitsune—the legendary warrior and tragic hero of the late Heian period’s Minamoto-Taira war, younger brother of the first shogun of the Kamakura shogunate Minamoto no Yoritomo—did not commit seppuku at Takadate, but instead fled north in secret. He crossed the sea from Hokkaido, traveled westward into the Northeast Asian mainland, and ultimately became Genghis Khan, who then swept across the Eurasian continent. 

His arguments include:
The Sino-Japanese reading of Minamoto no Yoshitsune’s name 源義經, “Gen-gi-kei,” is similar to the pronunciation of Genghis Khan, as are other phonetic similarities;
The emblem of the Mongol tribes bears a resemblance to the Minamoto clan’s crest, the “Sasa-ryūten”;
Yoshitsune’s severed head, transported from Hiraizumi to Kamakura over forty days in the sweltering summer heat, would have rotted beyond recognition, making it impossible to verify its authenticity;
The primitive and dull-witted Mongol people, who “live in a drunken stupor and die in a dream,” could not have produced a peerless hero like Genghis Khan;
…

After World War II, due to its fanciful interpretations and overt racism, Genghis Khan was Minamoto no Yoshitsune and many other related theory works quickly faded into obscurity.


At least sometimes, for some people - you may reasonably call them the delusional jerks - history is memory, memory is history, memory is dream, dream is memory. Zhuang Zhou might in his dreams transform into a butterfly, or into Genghis Khan, or into Alexandre Dumas, or into some man; and upon waking, he might find himself to be Laozi, to be Pushkin, to be Minamoto no Yoshitsune, or to be a woman.

And it’s not difficult to understand that truly for a few Three Musketeers loving Russian old ladies; for certain eastern Jìn dynasty Taoists; for most japanese soldiers rotten in manchuria; for Zhuangzhou himself during some sleeps:

 Zhuangzhou was Butterfly
 Genghis Khan was Yoshitsune
 Shakyamuni was Laozi
 Alexandre Dumas père was Pushkin


To ruin a great ingredient with bad cooking is truly a tragedy; most of the time they don’t even need that much excessive treatments, crab is a good example. My most unforgettable encounter was in Chaozhou, where fresh, live crabs are chopped into chunks, steeped in a baijiu-based brine, and served raw—that is Shengyan. Sucking the meat from the shell, the texture is as silky and dense as ice cream, the flavor a wondrous fusion of the crab’s refreshing sweetness with a hint of seawater salinity.

To preserve the original essence of a good ingredient is an act of merit; to conjure wonder out of the mediocre is equally commendable. That is the spirit of Matching Crab 赛螃蟹 — it treats limitation and poverty as its most precious seasonings.

But when all the ingredients in the world, and all the recipes that use them to perfection are readily available, when all these dishes are made all the time everywhere, what is left for a young cook to do, still so delusional, aspired to innovate the cooking? The absurd and the grotesque, the crossbreed of the rustic and the exotic, the extreme heavy seasonings, the reheating of leftovers proclaimed a new creation...

Matching Egg 赛雞蛋 emerged right from this struggle of thoughts. It is the signature dish of an impetuous apprentice — one who is unwilling and probably unable to master the honest art of the stir-fry, yet refuses to let these abundant ingredients be. It uses abundance as its material to express the flavor of poverty.

Zhuangzhou was Butterfly is another thing conceived by this dreadful cook after a period of painful reflection and agonizing rumination. It takes as its raw materials the poorly paired, ill-conceived, and failed dishes of predecessors, reassembling them through the crudest, most clumsy, most fundamental methods and serving them all at once.

This is a more thoroughly conceptual dish, better suited to be picked up for a brief sniff, and laughed off. It takes the poverty created from those abundant ingredients as its material, to present the abundance of forms and manifestations of that very identical flavor of poverty.