Vegetarianism In China

I found this online and instead of para-phrasing just thought i would post the whole thing. I wanted to post it in regards to all my friends and family that think eating lesser meat and more vegetables is easy to do here in China. I thought this blog entry rang very true for my experiences. Enjoy.

It's Hard Out Here Being a Vegetarian
"As locals are quick to point out, life is tough in China for a vegetarian. Most of the best dishes are made with meat, and vegetables are often used only to compliment the main attractions. Announcing that you do not eat meat is usually met with a combination of disbelief and pity.
A life without meat is a sad life indeed to most Chinese. In a country where famine and mismanagement of agriculture are bitter memories for most middle-age people, it is hard to fathom why someone would voluntarily give up a luxury that is finally so plentiful. Aside from that, many Chinese equate eating a strong appetite for meat with a healthy sex drive. Over the years more than one man here has made a point of making it clear that even if I don’t eat meat he surely does, winking and nudging his friends on the assumption that I fail to grasp the underlying implication.
Explaining to people why I don’t eat meat is not an easy thing, but it is much more difficult in China. Each answer begs another question, usually leading us down a path that ends up with a diagnosis that I am either nuts or silly. In the beginning I used to say vegetarianism was “my personal philosophy”, which was probably the most useless rationale I could have given. Later I changed it to “It is a little like Buddhism”. This was somewhat more helpful, although people frequently tell me either that most Buddhists now eat meat, or the cheekier types like to debate over whether eggs are in fact animals.
When I was living in Sichuan I did not eat fish at all, which at least gave me some cover from hypocrisy, although it led to terrible confusion. Wait staff would insist that there was no meat in a dish and it would arrive with seafood in it. That did not bother me so much because it seemed like a logical mistake. Now that I eat fish I am stuck in the same quandary of trying to tell people that I am a pseudo-vegetarian. However not all mixed up make sense to me.
The one that always baffled me was when people brought me “meat-free” dishes that were chock full ‘o ham. After a while it occurred to me that the problem was not one of stubbornness, but rather linguistics. In Chinese ham is huotui (火腿) or roughly “smoked leg”. It is missing the key character for meat rou (肉) that is used for beef, pork, and chicken. The dishes were not rou, but tui? And leg is not meat.
Finally, there are two other tricks of logic that people try to pull on me from time to time. The first is bringing primarily vegetable dishes with generous bits of meat. In their eyes the dishes were vegetable dishes, which was indistinguishable from vegetarian. The second, and my personal favorite, was that no matter how clear I made it that I did not want even a little bit of meat, sometimes a dish would come that was mostly animal.
The answer that I would get when I asked about it? “It tastes better that way.”"


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