THE CHINAMAN TALKS

8 July 2005

Up in Haydock in Lancashire, where the racetrack is, I’m making soup on the Soup Line. I was invited up here to be part of the St Helens Arts Festival, offered a generous fee and put up in the local Holiday Inn. My colleagues John Hirst and Gimpo are with me. Just here for three days. The people from the arts festival organised it so I was making soup not in people’s homes, but in semi-public places where I have to confront the indifference of the general public. This goes against the grain of what I think the Soup Line is all about but it is too late for me to quibble about such things. I’ve agreed and I’m here.

I started yesterday at 9am at Haydock High School. Spent the morning chopping and preparing and cooking on a table in the playground. One of the teachers had brought in a camping stove for me to use. While I was doing this John Hirst and Gimpo were in the school making a film. They had got all the Land Ranger Ordnance Survey maps that cover the Soup Line from coast to coast of England, from Southport on the west coast to near Felixtowe on the East. All these maps were carefully laid out on the floor, butted up to each other, making one 30-foot-long map of a diagonal strip across England. They had a length of string Blu-Tacked on to Southport beach pulled straight across the map, through the street in Nottingham where I did my second soup-making, and on down to the Suffolk coast. Then Gimpo, holding his brand new camera about six inches above the map, tracked the string across England. The plan is that we can shove this film of the English section of the Soup Line up on the website so interested parties can check to see if they live on the Soup Line or not.

At lunchtime the students from one class who were going to be taking GCSE Art queued up and were served a bowl each, as were an assortment of teachers who’d strayed from the safety of the staffroom. In the afternoon I was in the art block talking with the students. Telling them what I was doing and how it had started. They wanted to know why I thought making soup could be art. I told them that it is not my concern whether it is art or not. Even so, I desperately want you, the reader, to think it is art of the highest order.

After the school it was down the road a few hundred yards to the Haydock Valley Youth Centre. Started chopping the veg at 4pm, soup to be ready for 7pm. While I was doing the chopping the local mayor, decked out in the chains of his office, was handing out awards for something to local disadvantaged kids. By 7pm the Mayor and the disadvantaged kids had gone to be replaced by the local disaffected kids playing pool, giving attitude and generally being how teenage kids should be. The girls all done up, big earrings, orange tans and highlights, the lads with Burberry check baseball caps and trainers.

Haydock is almost half way between Manchester and Liverpool but the accent is more Scouse than Manc. It seems that Haydock is twinned with a German town and a bunch of German teenagers are expected to be turning up tonight too. They do. All looking healthier, better dressed and more intelligent than their British counterparts. The question ‘How on earth did we win the war?’ is asked again, by me. Gimpo replies, ‘We didn’t. The Americans and Russians did it for us.’

7.30. The soup is ready, the music is turned off and I tried to call order and cut a commanding figure while I gave a cut-down version of how the Soup Line came about. The lads playing pool kept playing, the girls blowing bubble gum kept blowing, the German teenagers laughed loudly with each other and I think ‘Why the fuck am I doing this Soup Line thing anyway? What do I think I’m proving? Who am I fooling? Not these kids.’ But most of them queued up anyway to be ladled a bowl of soup and most of them asked questions. Here are three of them that I remember.
‘My mum said you used to be a pop star. You look like you were the drummer. Did you used to do the clubs, or what?’
‘My dad said you burnt a million pounds on a beach. Did ya?’
‘What ya making soup for?’
There were plenty of other questions but the ‘What ya making soup for?’ was the one rolling round my head when I went to bed a few hours later. I mean, why the fuck am I doing it? ‘Because I want to’ no longer seemed a good enough answer.

After breakfast at the Holiday Inn we headed down to the Haydock Library for just after 9am. We were welcomed by a couple of the librarians, a couple of mugs of tea were made. John and Gimpo unloaded the Land Rover and got the Make Soup roadshow set up in the main part of the library. I picked up a leaflet from a pile on the desk and read;

Make Soup
As part of the St Helens Arts Festival internationally renowned artist Bill Drummond is coming to Haydock Library.

Thusday 7th July
12 noon – 2.00pm

If you live on a diagonal line from Belfast to Nottingham, Bill Drummond will come round to your house/venue and make soup for you/your family and friends. The event will be documented as part of a life-long artwork by Bill.

Bill Drummond is famous:
For being one of chart-topping KLF
For his written works: How to have a number one hit the easy way, The Manual (1989) Bad Wisdom (1996) 45 (2000) and How To Be An Artist (2002)
And for burning £1 million cash.

‘Life-long artwork’, I kind of like that. Not so keen on the ‘Famous for’ bit though.
A trestle table was set up just inside the entrance to the library. One of the librarians turned up with a Baby Belling cooker, it was placed on the table and plugged in. I put my big pan on the cooker, got my chopping board and knife out and by 9.30 I was down to the serious business of chopping onions.

By 10.30 I’d got all the vegetables chopped and sweating in the pan and I was back to questioning the whole validity of what I’m doing: I’m being paid handsomely for being up here doing this and they are putting us up in a smart hotel, but to what end? Just because the St Helens Arts Festival has a budget to spend and certain boxes have to be ticked and having ‘internationally renowned artist Bill Drummond’ up here doing something strange ticks at least one of the boxes.

Then a Chinese man walked into the library. In his late thirties he wants to know what’s going on. I start to explain. He wanted to know what stock I am using. I explain I am not using any. He then started on one about Chinese soup and the importance of stock in their culture, let alone in their soup. Suddenly I know that the appearance of this man has validated the whole thing of me being here in this library, hundreds of miles from my family, making soup for fuck knows who.

It turned out he owns the local chippy. He comes in to the library every morning to check the Chinese language newspapers and to check his email before he gets down to the serious business of heating his fat for the lunchtime fry. He agreed to be interviewed in the afternoon after he’s fried his last fish and after I’ve done with serving soup and washed up.

Later
John Hirst, Gimpo and I find the Chinaman’s chippy. It’s at the end of a run-down parade of shops on a 1950s council estate. It’s gone 4.30 and he is already open and frying for the teatime trade. Gimpo got him miked up and the interview began.

BD: So you were telling us about Chinese soup.

CM: Chinese soup. Well you see when you say you’ve got Chinese soup, you got ordinary Chinese family and usually the northern part of China and the southern part are different. If you say Tibet is part of China, then they have got different kind of things. And when you are talking about the soup we got seasons. Summer different from winter. So you see when we think about winter they are thicker, more stock in it and they got more meat. In summer it’s hot so they got more vegetable. We have preserved vegetable like watercress, we can dry them so you can cook them in winter. For example lotus root. We can have water chestnuts. All kind of things. You can use the leaf and the root. The leaf, they usually stir fry it and put it in hot water and then you put fish in it. You slice the fish. You see we have seawater and fresh water fish. The Chinese will take the fillet out and when the soup is boiling you just put on top. Some of the fish we have it rare so we won’t let the meat get tough, well done like that.
The two famous Chinese soups, people always think about are the shark’s fin soup and bear’s paw soup. The shark fins have no flavour at all. Nor the bear’s paw.

BD: So why do they use shark fins?

CM: The chef thinks about how you make money. We always say they want some trick to make it special, make it better. Why do they have the bear paw? I can tell you bear paw and camel hump they are not good. They have no flavour, they just used to make the soup famous.

BD: Just good to impress and make expensive?

CM: Yes but where they get the taste for the soup is in the stock.

BD: Ok. Tell me about the stock. What do you use for stock?

CM: The camel one is 40% gammon, old chicken and another 10% dry shellfish. They dry it and that make the taste.

BD: How important is the soup in Chinese families?

CM: We say that you can get the nutrition from the soup. You can either have the soup before the meal or after the meal. You see here the starter is the soup but for us, after the meal.
There is another kind of soup that is famous: bird’s nest. The bird’s nest has no flavour at all. That is exactly the same. Just used to make it famous. Over here we give you chicken and sweetcorn soup but it is not common in China. We have different character for soup. Here you call them all soup, in China we have different names but when we translate it they all translate into soup. But for us, different. Like the thickness, a different kind of soup. They got Chinese character.

BD: Do you use onions at all in making soup?

CM: Onions. You see when Chinese say onion they mean fallen onion. That means that onion composed of two words in Chinese, two characters. The first one is fallen. That means that they are an import.

BD: So traditionally you didn’t use onions in Chinese cookery?

CM: No we didn’t use onions years ago. Even the potato. They are from Colombia and then they import them to China. We have sweet potato but a much wider range. Different colour: yellow, brown, purple. And when you talk about the soup you have to realise everything can make soup for us. When we make soup, all the chicken you put in hot water first, get rid of the fat and then you make the stock. So sometimes they use charcoal so the soup can take more than 12 hours. That’s why some of the food have no taste but the Chinese add some flavour on it. We call that kind of soup High Soup. It doesn’t make sense in English but for us we call it High Soup. That’s why the chef is successful to make the soup right. Exactly the same as monosodium glutamate. The people first using it is the Japanese you see. But now it’s common in China.

BD: So were you born in China?

CM: Hong Kong.

BD: And how long have you been here?

CM: Eleven years. I don’t want a Chinese passport. I live here.

BD: If you make a soup, do you make it for one meal or would you make a big pot and eat it over a week?

CM: No. You thinking about refrigeration, how you keep the meat. That’s why the Chinese say finish it same day. And sometimes it can take a long time. For example Chinese New Year they take about one day to make meal. You start at midnight using charcoal and it’s ready at four o’clock in the afternoon. Our dinner is more important in the Chinese New Year. Because everybody come back to their home. Even if they work in other places hundreds of miles away. That is the last meal of the year.

BD: Is there a special soup you have for Chinese New Year?

CM: No. You see we are talking about soup in general. Not a particular kind of soup. The cooking in the temple, the Buddhism or the Taoism they are vegetarian. So you will find out they have lots of herbs and different kinds of mushroom. So the monks make the soup as well. All the herbs will come from the mountain. You see if you are ill we say that the solution, the herbs, will come from that place. That’s why they try herbal things.

BD: Is soup as common a meal in China as it is here?

CM: Well in winter you need something hot and something quick and soup is the best.

And that was about that. I bought a bag of chips and we went for a pint and everything felt fine with the Soup Line.