Meat and fish

Meat is 肉 ròu. The character draws a cut piece, with its fibres, and it leads a double life: as a component, it has taken the shape of 月. The 月 in 肚 dù, the belly, in 肝 gān, the liver, or in 胖 pàng, fat, has nothing to do with the moon: it is flesh, and dictionaries speak of 肉月 ròuyuè, “the meat moon”, so as not to confuse it with the other one. This page follows on from Fruit and vegetables: meat, poultry, fish and what comes from the sea.

In China, 肉 on its own means pork. You specify 牛肉 niúròu for beef and 羊肉 yángròu for mutton, but nobody says 猪肉 zhūròu when asking for a bit of meat at the market: pork alone makes up more than half of the meat eaten in the country. Beef, on the other hand, was long frowned upon, for a simple reason: the ox pulled the plough. Several dynasties banned the slaughter of plough oxen, and people hardly ate the animal that fed them.

Eating meat was long a privilege. In the 左传 Zuǒzhuàn, a man of the people, 曹刿 Cáo Guì, wants to advise his prince before a battle; his neighbours tell him to leave that to the “meat eaters”, that is, the dignitaries, and he replies: 肉食者鄙, “the meat eaters are short-sighted”. Confucius, for his part, was willing to be paid in meat: he never refused to teach anyone who brought him, in Couvreur’s words, “were it only ten slices of dried meat”, the 束脩 shùxiū (see our page Chapter 7 of the Analects of Confucius). That said, the word is disputed: some ancient commentators read it not as a bundle of meat but as the sash tied at fifteen, the age at which one started school. I have no firm view. (The teacher in me would have nothing against ham.)

荤 hūn is the opposite of 素 sù: a 荤菜 hūncài is a meat or fish dish, a 素菜 sùcài a vegetable dish. But look at the radical of 荤: it is 艹, grass. The word first meant strong-smelling plants, garlic, spring onion, leek, which Buddhist monks forbid themselves because they heat up the body and the passions; these are the garlic and spring onions of the previous page. The meaning slid towards meat, and the grass stayed in the character. 开荤 kāihūn is going back to meat after a spell without.

鲜 xiān, the word that means both fresh and the savoury taste of a good broth (see our page The five senses), is written with 鱼, fish, and 羊, sheep. The explanation you find everywhere is appealing: fish and mutton together are the height of deliciousness, and some restaurants have made a dish of it. The 说文解字 Shuōwén jiězì says something else: there, 鲜 is the name of a fish, and the sheep is only there for the pronunciation. I lean towards the Shuowen. The legend, for its part, has one thing going for it: it is true in the kitchen.

Fish, 鱼 yú, is pronounced like 余 yú, surplus. That is why the New Year’s Eve dinner never goes without a whole fish, and why people often take care not to finish it: some must be left for the year to come. On the coast, another taboo is added: you do not turn the fish over on the plate, because 翻 fān, to turn over, also means to capsize. Once the top side has been eaten, you lift out the backbone and carry on underneath.

海鲜 hǎixiān, seafood, is literally “the fresh things of the sea”. Autumn is the season of the hairy crab, 大闸蟹 dàzháxiè, and a remark by 鲁迅 Lǔ Xùn has become famous: the first man to eat a crab must have been a brave one, for who else would have dared? 第一个吃螃蟹的人, “the first to eat crab”, today means a pioneer. Crayfish, 小龙虾 xiǎolóngxiā, came much later: they are said to have arrived in Nanjing from Japan in the 1930s, and they have become the dish of summer evenings, with beer.

Idioms are often cruel, like cooking. 杀鸡儆猴 shā jī jǐng hóu, you kill the chicken to frighten the monkey. 人为刀俎，我为鱼肉 rén wéi dāo zǔ, wǒ wéi yú ròu comes from the banquet at Hongmen, in the Records of the Grand Historian by 司马迁 Sīmǎ Qiān: the future founder of the Han, invited to his rival’s, realises that he is the fish on the chopping board and slips away before the end of the meal. Nobler, 鱼和熊掌不可兼得 yú hé xióngzhǎng bù kě jiān dé comes from Mencius: between the fish and the bear’s paw, he takes the bear’s paw, and between life and righteousness, righteousness.

Everyday language has kept some funny images from all this. Being fired is 炒鱿鱼 chǎo yóuyú, “stir-fry the squid”: in the wok, strips of squid curl up on themselves, just as the dismissed employee rolls up his bedding to leave. 吹牛 chuīniú, to boast, is “blow into the ox”: the most common explanation mentions oxhides inflated by mouth to cross rivers, which took plenty of breath, but I have found no ancient source for it. And a miser is a 铁公鸡 tiěgōngjī, an iron rooster, from which you cannot pluck a single feather.

That leaves the sentence that closes the list, 割鸡焉用牛刀. Confucius arrives in Wucheng, governed by his disciple 子游 Zǐyóu, and hears singing and stringed instruments everywhere. He smiles: “To kill a hen, does one use the knife that serves to cut up oxen?” Rites and music for such a small town: it is too much. Ziyou reminds him of his own teaching, and the Master gives in at once: “What I have just said was only a joke” (see our page Chapter 17 of the Analects of Confucius). It is one of the rare passages where Confucius laughs. It is also one of the rare ones where he admits the student is right.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.