One of the more colourful insults I've come across is wángbā 王八 or wángbā dàn 王八蛋, literally meaning turtle or turtle egg. It roughly translates to 'bastard', 'jerk' or 'son of a bitch'.

The turtle the insult refers to is the Chinese soft-shelled turtle. It has a snub nose, is kind of funny-looking and is farmed here in the millions (Wikipedia estimates at least 100 million per year) and sold as a delicacy, mostly for use in soups. I can confirm they're found in almost all wet markets, where they lie in large basins, awaiting their brothy demise.

There's another word for hard-shelled turtles/tortoises: wūguī 乌龟. When I asked whether wūguī were eaten, she looked at me as if I'd asked to eat her housecat. So, no, it seems.

Back to the insult. There are a couple of theories about its origin. My preferred one is that wángbā dàn and wàng bā duān 忘八端 are roughly homophones, wàng meaning to forget and bā duān referring to the eight characteristics of an upstanding man. They are - bear with me - as follows: xiào 孝, tì 悌, zhōng 忠, xìn 信, lǐ 礼, yì 义, lián 廉, chǐ 耻, or filial piety, loyalty to one's older brother, devotion, faithfulness, courtesy, righteousness, integrity, and shame. They're the uber-traditional Confucian virtues, most of which are still relevant today. So, saying someone has forgotten these eight virtues is basically calling them uncouth. Nice.

The other theory holds that in the past, people believed male turtles couldn't reproduce, and female turtles could only do so by mating with snakes. Therefore, male turtles had to depend on prostitutes for their livelihood (...naturally?). The word dàn (from wángbā dàn) is apparently northern Chinese slang for testicle, which is a fairly universal insult... particularly if it's the testicle of someone who often cavorts with prostitutes.

In terms of usage, it was introduced to me in an incident of road rage that almost came to blows, with one man getting annoyed at another's parking ability and calling him wángbā. Some native speakers have told me it's still a valid insult, but feels a bit dated - similar to how 'idiot' and 'jerk' were genuinely quite harsh insults in the 60s and 70s. Saying them on evening TV might get your show in hot water, that sort of thing. But they've now been normalised. A cursory search of Chinese internet swearwords does indeed bring up much more explicit zānghuà 脏话 profanity (lit. dirty speech). But I find the history of the turtle is far more colourful.

Next time, more of... whatever this was.

Today we discussed the beauty standards to which young people in China are held.

In essence, the fundamental desirable attributes for men and women are broken down into two pithy sayings.

For men, gāo fù shuài 高富帅, meaning 'tall, rich, handsome'. Often translated as 'Mr Perfect'. There's not a huge amount to discuss about that; this seems like a fairly universal beauty ideal. There is a whole other kettle of fish about women's expectations of men here that's much trickier. Women say the standards for male personal behaviour are incredibly low. Having a 'second wife' is normalised and so on. If you want to read a good book on this that will make you very angry, check out Leftover Women by Leta Hong Fincher. Men say they have almost unachievable demands placed on them before they're considered dateable: own an apartment, have a good job, have a car. I suspect both are true.  Particularly popular right now is nvxing duli 女性独立, or women's independence, but that's another subject.

And for women, bái yòu shòu 白幼瘦, meaning 'white, young, skinny'. Starting from the end, shòu 瘦 has the radical (a component of a character) for illness - a reflection of the not-so-recent past when being overly thin was a sign of sickness and poverty. But it is now very much in demand. All sorts of fad diets circulate online, plus unreferenced images of how much women at different heights 'should' weigh. It's judged, in BMI terms, to be borderline underweight.

The body positivity/'fit is beautiful'/'beauty at any size' movement that's really taken off in the west over the past few years is mostly absent here, at least in the mainstream. And given how extremely online much of life is here - particularly for young people - there seems to be immense societal pressure to look a certain way. You open Taobao, WeChat, Alipay - any one of the All In One Life Apps - and are quickly assaulted with photoshopped images of impossibly thin necks, emaciated legs, bleached faces. Even fashion styles are pretty homogenised within categories: princess, punk rocker, high fashion. There seems to be heavy convergence to a few nationwide fashion standards that are perpetuated by social media and apps that make buying new outfits extremely low-friction.

As for yòu 幼, it means young or youthful, but with a... well, an emphasis on being almost childlike. I personally find it a bit strange but it's very much in vogue here. A small, 'skinny', particularly white face with red lips/lipstick is usually how you see it expressed. It's very common on pop stars ('idols') and actors. The 'K-Wave' of Korean culture, which hit China in the early 2000s, is probably partly responsible for the current popularity of idol culture and for this very youthful aesthetic. Youthfulness is certainly considered attractive by almost all cultures, but it seems to be taken to another level here. Wearing iris-enlarging or colour-changing contact lenses is also totally normalised, and most camera apps and social media platforms will apply by default whitening, smoothing, beautifying filters to pictures. I recently bought a new phone here, and had to fiddle around in the settings to get the default 'AI enhancement' to leave my photos alone. (Although, to be fair, it did improve the photos I took, fiddling with things like exposure, saturation and colour balance.）

Finally, bái 白, 'white'. Back home, tanning under the sun is rapidly losing popularity as we learn more about skin cancer. But a 'healthy tan' still implies you have the leisure time to be able to exercise outdoors, maybe travel internationally - perhaps your hobby is boating. Here, a tan means you're a farmer, simple as that. UV protection is taken to another level: people often don niqab-like headwear, not out of a newfound love for Allah, but out of fear of shài hēi 晒黑 - a tan. ('shai' meaning to bask or sun, 'hei' meaning black). Almost all beauty products, from deodorant to moisturiser, have an added whitening function.

Next time: levels of reality and calling someone a jerk by calling them a turtle egg.

With mushroom season soon upon us in southwest China, I mentioned to my Chinese teacher that I was planning on heading back to Yunnan to find someone with whom to go mushroom hunting. From July to October, Yunnan is perhaps the most mushroom-rich region on earth. She brought up a recent - as in, the past couple of days - mushroom-related video that was doing the rounds on Chinese internet. As luck would have it, it's cross-pollinated to Youtube. Take a look.

This is just one example of hundreds of made-for-TikTok videos meant to spread the dangers of mushroom hunting to an online population. The speaker has a pretty strong Yunnan accent. You can find many more by searching Youtube for '红伞伞' (hongsansan - red umbrella). (Also, a brief aside about this video's thumbnail: this is a surreal example of cross-cultural memes-within-memes. It's a cute Chinese version of the Ghanaian coffin dancers meme (which Wikipedia calls 'dancing pallbearers' - incidentally a great name for a metal band). This meme, too, is wildly popular in China - you can often hear the distinctive music echoing through a crowded train).

A rough translation:

Red umbrella, white stalk (referring to amanita muscaria, or the 'fairy' toadstool: red umbrella, white stalk, white spots)

After you've eaten it you'll lie on the board (i.e. a stretcher)

Lying on a board, sleeping in a coffin

Then you'll go to be buried on the mountain

Buried on the mountain, crying and wailing (i.e. your family and friends mourning you)

Family and friends all come and eat together

Eating food, the food has the red umbrella (mushroom again)

The whole village lies together on boards (a longer version of the song then has the red mushrooms growing from everybody's graves, only to be picked again by an ill-informed forager, thus completing the fungal cycle of destruction)

fin

It's really quite catchy.

Ironically, the mushroom about which these memes are warning you, amanita muscaria, is actually not fatally poisonous - there are no recorded deaths from it. It is, however, both quite poisonous and mildly psychedelic. Ingested fresh, it causes moderate-to-severe diarrhea and vomiting along with barely-noticeable psychedelic effects (depending, of course, on quantity ingested). But Eastern Europeans have eaten it for centuries, boiling it multiple times to remote any active toxins before pickling and storing in jars. It's been hypothesised to have been used as a coming-of-age ritual for young men, or to have been used by Vikings in their 'berserker rage'.

The remarkable thing to me is how high-effort many of these videos are. They have individual animations, and there are lots of live-action versions - even a Minecraft one! - floating around. See this compilation for a better idea. Where did they come from? Why are people making these? Sure, after a certain point there's clout/social value in being an early adopter of a 'fresh' meme, but that initial push has to come from somewhere. I can't find anything online - even the Chinese version of Yahoo Answers, Ask Baidu, says it just 'started' about four days ago. I suspect there's some sort of incentive scheme for content creators put in place by the local government, as over recent years many hundreds of people in Yunnan have died eating the wrong mushroom. (I badly translated 'all mushrooms are edible, some only once', which my teacher found very amusing). Poisonous mushroom charts are commonplace in shops and homes, and larger, more specific booklets are also readily available.

But what's particularly interesting is that recently, a few descriptions of psychedelic mushroom experiences have gone viral on Chinese internet, sparking massive interest. The gradual rise of clinical trials and psychedelic medicine companies in the west might also have some influence. You could imagine a few Chinese-language articles about marijuana legalisation in the US mentioning other drugs being decriminalised, clinical trials with psychedelics and so on.

Either way, this is an example of guerrilla marketing done really quite effectively. Is it technically fake news? Yes: amanita muscaria will not kill you. But plenty of people are poisoned, some fatally, by mushrooms each year. I reckon this will make many netizens think twice before venturing out to pick their own mushrooms, and, on balance, save lives.

That said, I do wonder whether it will also fortify a small subculture, making them all the more curious about mycology. What's certain is that a psychedelic-mushroom-taking subculture will not be allowed to thrive any time soon, and that China is still decades off decriminalising any major controlled substance.

People need to eat. That's as true for people living in Mombasa as those in Maryland. And especially so for China, where a universal reverence is paid to the three meals.

A popular saying goes 一天两人三餐四季 (yītiān liǎngrén sāncān sìjì). One day, two people, three meals, four seasons.

So not being able to deftly handle your three meals presents a problem. Especially when you're living in the noodle capital of the world and, well, you like noodles. Walking into a busy noodle shop, not really speaking the language, and having the owner bark something at you - not unkindly, just businesslike - while you hold up the queue can be quite intimidating.

I'll walk you through what I've learned so far while living in Chengdu. The types of noodle, how to order them, and what the general deal is in noodle shops. This first step towards self-sufficiency will open a new universe of flavour, worlds apart from the convenience-store fare to which you may have been subjected (it's not bad, but it's not quite fresh noodles).

Noodle shops are everywhere here. Your basic choices are between regular wheat noodles (mian, 面), alkaline, slightly yellow, bouncy ramen-style noodles (jianmian, 碱面)， rice noodles (mixian, 米线) and starch noodles (mifen, 米粉 (a hard 'er' (儿) is often added to the end here to avoid mix-ups with mifan, 米饭 - rice. So it sounds like 'mifahr')). The starch noodles are often made with mung beans, potato or sweet potato. They're much better than 'starch noodles' would imply.

Next, you've got 'what else do you want in the bowl'. Dry and mixed (ganbande, 干拌的) or soup (tang, 汤) are the basic variants. Dry and mixed, naturally, comes with a healthy lagoon of red oil and flavourings at the bottom of the bowl. Patrons are strongly encouraged/threatened to mix before eating (imagine you told an Italian you wanted 'just pasta', no sauce whatsoever). The red oil is always more delicious than fiery - that is to say, it's always umami-rich, sometimes slightly spicy.

For soup, your main choices are clear soup/chicken broth (qingtang, 清汤), red soup (hongtang, 红汤), with a thin sheen of red oil on top, a more oil-laden 'soup' called just 'red oil' (hongyou, 红油) and hot and sour (suanla, 酸辣). These options can all be mixed and matched with basically any type of noodle. Though you most commonly see hot and sour soup with starch/rice noodles and only ever see liangfen (凉粉, thick bean jelly noodles served cold) with red oil.

When it comes to toppings and other flavourings, the world's your oyster. A menu will often list ten-plus different variants, with the main differences in the toppings of the noodles. Restaurants often have beef (niu rou, 牛肉), pork ribs (paigu, 排骨), fish and pickles (suancaiyu, 酸菜鱼) and black chicken (wuji, 乌鸡). Your best bet is to look to the top of the menu, see what other people are eating or just ask after the restaurant's specialty (tesecai, 特色菜). I usually order zhajiangmian (picture four above) or qingtangchaoshou (clear soup wontons, 清汤抄手).

It took me a few months to figure out you can order 'shucai' (熟菜), or cooked greens, for just a few kuai at basically any restaurant. By my estimation, that's a small price to pay to not get gout. It'll usually be a little bowl of green vegetable or cabbage that has been blanched for a minute in the noodle liquid.

Speaking of other goodies, there's usually an add-on menu where you can 'jiarou' (加肉, add meat) or a fried egg (煎蛋). But noodle joints here know the best things in life should be free. Introducing: bottomless pickles (泡菜, paocai). Each restaurant has their own pickle jar, tub or vat for customers to take as they please. These can be spicy, crunchy, sweet or - most often - salty. They're often made with radish, carrot or cabbage. Nearby, there's usually a large barrel of hot 'soup' (noodle cooking water) or, if you're lucky, slightly sweet soybean milk. Either way, appreciated on a chilly winter morning.

How much do you want to eat? Sichuan - I'm not sure if it extends elsewhere - has a system of liang (两). You can choose one, two or three liang (一， 二， 三) for correspondingly normal-to-enourmous bowls of things. I'll have 一两 if I've had a large morning snack, 二两 on a regular day, and I only really see 三两 being eaten by labourers and very hungry-looking people. I was told each liang corresponds to the amount of meat in the dish (it's used to measure both wontons and noodles) at 50 grams per liang.

There are many more noodle dishes, but this should hopefully get those new to Chengdu familiar with the absolute basics of noodle ordering. No one should go noodleless in these troubled times. Later, I'll do some deeper dives into other dishes like sweetwater noodles (tianshuimian, 甜水面), bed sheet noodles (pugaimian, 铺盖面) and knife-cut noodles (daoxiaomian, 刀削面). Let me know if you want to see anything specific.

Till next time.

Dan dan mian and jazz. Chalk and cheese. Going to Jurassic Park and not getting eaten by dinosaurs. Some things just don't seem to go together. Or... do they?

Dan dan mian is a Sichuanese specialty: perfectly tender wheat noodles in a rich emulsion of sesame paste and chili oil with some green onions, preserved greens and minced pork. The 'dan dan' (担担) refers to the bamboo pole used by the original vendors, who used it to carry two delicious: one with sauce, the other with noodles. They would cry out 'dan dan mian!' as they walked, and the rest is history. Sadly for romantics, those bamboo-pole days are over, but happily for the rest of us, it's still wildly popular and can be found on most street corners in Sichuan. You can find it all over China, and Chengdu, done with varying amounts of care - but it's generally excellent. On a recent trip to Beijing, some of which I might write up later, I was surprised by Michelin-guide-recommended zhajiangmian (lit. 'fried sauce noodles', 炸酱面). I don't usually seek out Michelin fare, but it was half-coincidence and seemed a good endorsement. But what surprised me was how... well, mediocre it was. It was good, sure. But not, to my mind, as good as even a moderately well-executed bowl of dan dan mian.

My current favourite dan dan mian shop is a small joint, rarely very full, but with exceptional Dianping ratings (a Chinese everything-app. More on this in a later post). They get the noodle texture just right. It's not on Google maps, but I'll link the approximate location. It's called 面面小面 (mianmianxiaomian).

Jazz, you already know. Chengdu has recently been blessed with a surprisingly good jazz bar, not far from the center of town. Riverside Jazz Club is in Lan Kwai Fung, next to the Jinjiang River. Perhaps its biggest achievement is, well, feeling like a 'real' jazz club. The aesthetic is neon signs and red velvet curtains, candles on tables, good (if expensive - 98 RMB for cocktails) drinks. I imagine the rent for a multi-storey venue like this is not cheap, so all alcohol except house wines and cocktails seems to be only sold by the bottle. They seem to know their market: a surprising number of tables had half-drunk 1,000 RMB bottles of whiskey wreathed in shadow and pleasantly little cigarette smoke. How was the jazz? I've only been once, to a ticketed show (150 RMB early bird, 190 RMB door), but the standard was pretty high. Everybody knew what they were doing, the energy was palpable, and although the show timings were poorly-communicated, the amount of music for your renminbi was quite generous (9:30-10:40pm and 11-12:20am sets). According to the calendar there's music every night, with a ticketed show every week or so.

Most times you step out of a jazz club into the cool night, breathing deep of the fresh air. In a Chengdu summer, you walk from pleasant chill to sauna - even after midnight. It's somehow more stifling than even Singapore, which was prone to a cycle of buildup-and-release with regular tropical thunderstorms and relatively fast-moving weather patterns. Here, after rain, it's just more humid. But the climate here seems perfectly languid and oppressive, just right for afternoon siestas in the shade, sipping tea and playing mahjong. You begin to understand how the locals here seem so relaxed, so equanimous. I've been surprised by how little road rage, or, well, general public anger I've seen. Maybe it's a function of different expectations. When someone cuts you off in traffic back home, or does something socially unacceptable, there's generally collective agreement that that is a Bad Thing. Here, not so - the Overton Window of Socially-Acceptable Behaviour is very different. (The Overton Window, named for its inventor, is the window of acceptable political discussion, with views outside the window judged too extreme and immediately dismissed). But more on that in a later post.

So, yes, it turns out jazz and noodles go together very well indeed.

This is a blog about culture, food, travel and language learning in Southwest China. I'll aim to publish Mondays and Thursdays, mostly short pieces on things that take my interest. I hope they'll be of interest to you, too.

Upcoming pieces include:

• Hunting down Nuodeng ham in the mountains of Yunnan
• Chinese onomatopoeia
• Best practice for learning Mandarin
• Cooking lessons at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine
• Where and what to eat in Chengdu
• The glories and tragedies of Chinese e-commerce

See you soon.