Ye, a man from Shanghai, loved listening to Nordic metal music, especially melodic death metal from the north of Europe. After graduation he formed a band with some friends, but because they could not find a suitable lead singer for death growls, they had no choice but to play covers of speed metal. One winter, Ye went to western Sichuan for folk research, and his guide invited him to eat a local medicinal hotpot. Since Ye had grown up in Shanghai, many of the ingredients common to such a hotpot were things he had never seen before, and he ended up eating a great deal of the medicinal base itself. After returning to Shanghai, he suffered violent vomiting and diarrhea and fell seriously ill. Yet when he recovered, his voice had turned thin and rasping and could no longer return to what it had once been. This new voice, however, was perfectly suited to death-metal vocals. Far from feeling distressed, Ye threw himself into the band’s performances with even greater delight. Within a few years, bars throughout Jiangsu and Zhejiang all knew Ye and his band.
Later Ye asked that guide from western Sichuan to make him a list of the ingredients that had gone into the hotpot that day. Looking it over, he saw that only one item, yellow throat, seemed as though it might have something to do with his altered voice. When he asked the Sichuanese what yellow throat actually was, they replied that it was the cow’s throat. Ye was overjoyed, and from then on made sure to eat a portion of yellow throat every day. In truth, yellow throat is not the cow’s throat at all, but the wall of the cow’s major artery. By popular misunderstanding, the name somehow evolved into its present form. I suspect that Ye’s voice was really damaged by one or another of the medicinal herbs in that hotpot. Yet because he happened to be a musician who loved death growls, one cannot help thinking again of the old saying about the old man of the frontier who lost his horse.