Missed Out On Asking David Sedaris About Chicken Toenails and Such

I missed 'Love, Death and Family Life: Postcards from David Sedaris' at the Singapore Writers Festival. I'm quite a fan of his humor and how he conveys that through his very effective writing. Had to ask friends to fill me in, and I checked out reviews about it.

Asked by a member of the audience if he enjoyed reading his books out loud, Sedaris, whose recordings series on BBC Radio 4, Meet David Sedaris, involves him doing just that, said: "If I lost my voice, I might lose my will to write." 

"Reading out loud is really the laziest form of show business," he added, to much laughter from the audience. 

~ 'David Sedaris is sometimes mistaken for an old woman' published in a review in The Straits Times on 4 November, 2018

Do you remember that years ago, David Sedaris stirred up a bit of controversy with this article 'Chicken toenails, anyone?' published in The Guardian on 15 July 2011. The lines that introduced the article were completely clickbait, "David Sedaris would eat Chinese food – but only as an alternative to starving. So a visit to China was always going to be tricky..." 

I'm not very fond of Chinese food in China either (they always give me the runs) unless I'm in Yunnan or Mongolia and out in the grasslands or mountains. Also, American Chinese food is just WEIRD. I wouldn't eat moo shu pork or moo goo gai pan. I feel a little sorry for David Sedaris. Hahaha.

Chinese food and its ingredients can be a challenge to people unused to this sort of cuisine. Basically, anyone who only eats boring fried food, baked beans and pies and think pasta is adventurous, are going to have problem with any other food that isn't a chicken fillet. And if that's all David Sedaris knows of Chinese food in the diaspora in 2018, then he really has to check out more cities where there're plenty of Chinese restaurants. To that, I assume that when he's in Singapore, he'd not have any reference points to compare our local foods to China's, and that somebody has explained to him how Singapore Noodles doesn't exist in Singapore. 😂

To be honest, the essay he wrote is a little tedious and chockfull of stereotypes of Chinese. And a lot of talk about turds and people pooping in the streets. Unfortunately, he's talking about his own experiences, which many of us share. Ermm, I'm guilty of it too, only because I see it for myself all these examples unfold in my face. It's now 2018, and marginally better. But I still see perfectly formed steaming piles of turd ambushing me in the fanciest of toilets in the big cities. Well, just take a look at the forums, and you see enough people yelling about bad behavior of Chinese tourists too.

This was what I had grown accustomed to when we flew from Narita to Beijing International, where the first thing one notices is what sounds like a milk steamer, the sort a cafe uses when making lattes and cappuccinos. "That's odd," you think. "There's a coffee bar on the elevator to the parking deck?" What you're hearing, that incessant guttural hiss, is the sound of one person, and then another, dredging up phlegm, seemingly from the depths of his or her soul. At first you look over, wondering, "Where are you going to put that?" A better question, you soon realise, is, "Where aren't you going to put it?" 

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren't spitting, they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. "We Chinese think it's best just to get it out," a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it's disgusting that a westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.