Get as close as you can to the object of your desire.
LOMO Rule
Some say that the character cheng in Chengdu is really a pictograph meaning “electric scooter.” If you have ever seen the rivers of scooters during rush hour, you would be inclined to praise the sheer force of numbers.
It was already well past midnight now, so Lin Fei could ride the scooter at full stretch. Even so, the black shadow was faster than he had imagined, so fast that he could barely keep up. Yet it behaved like a cat teasing prey, always pausing for an instant at crucial corners to wait for him. Even then an ordinary person would long since have lost the trail. Fortunately Lin Fei still had another camera in his backpack: a Polaroid SX-70 Alpha 1 that looked like an elegant leather notebook.
Born in 1937, the Polaroid was the ancestor of instant photography, able to develop its images on the spot. As Lin Fei pressed the shutter, 700 film sheets slid out one by one from the bottom of the camera. To tell the truth, with Polaroid long out of production and 700 film nearly sold out, taking a shot every few steps, at more than a dozen yuan each time, made his heart ache. By the time he reached the First Ring Road, more than a hundred yuan had already flown away.
“Good grief, this is pricier than taking a taxi. Mendenger had better reimburse me for this later,” Lin Fei muttered, while keeping up the chase by studying the still-warm images on the 700 sheets.
Right before his eyes, he watched the black shadow steal and eat all along the way. First it stopped in Xinhua Park to devour the famous hotpot beef rice noodles, while also carrying off the beef hotpot and its master broth. Then it ran to the cold-snack drinking stalls of Shuijingfang and shouldered away a bronze wine vat together with a whole vat of plum wine. From there it went to the douban wonton shop at Qingshiqiao and stole the great crock in which the chili bean paste was marinated. Then, switching direction, it ran to the Zhang Yazi shop at Niuwangmiao, known as Mouse Hole, and absconded with the pot for braised duck, not forgetting as it left to change the shop’s old sign from “Cold-Plain Cup” to “Cold-Sipped Cup.”
When Lin Fei, panting and half-spent, caught up to Mingting Restaurant in Caojia Alley, he found that the shadow had not run on after all. It was sitting boldly in the middle of the empty main room of the little restaurant. At its feet lay a jumble of pots, bowls, kettles, and vats. Counting in the small steaming pot used at Mingting for braised brains and tofu, there were exactly eight in all. They differed in size, but every one of them bore three handles and taotie patterns. Clearly, they had all come from the same line.
Only now did Lin Fei finally get a clear look at the black shadow’s face. It belonged to a fat man even fatter than Mendenger, with fair skin, but enormous fan-like hands and ears that were pitch-black. A little tuft of black hair sat atop his head, and around his eyes were dark birthmarks, as if he had been punched there. In short, he was as unattractive as it was possible to be.
Trying to match this extremely shabby-looking fat man with the taotie he remembered having seen, Lin Fei found nothing in common apart from the similarly bulky body. “You…” he asked cautiously, “why did you stop running?”
The fat man was concentrating on several dishes set before him: braised brains and tofu, scallion-baked kidneys, duck intestines in water-bean gravy, and pork-rib seaweed soup. Never mind that Mingting looked utterly shabby. It was the number-one fly restaurant in all Chengdu, bringing together the raggedness of a roadside stall and the supreme deliciousness of Chengdu cooking. Chengdu is just that kind of city, one that cares for enjoyment but not face. If you see someone driving a Porsche into a back alley to eat hot-and-sour noodles, do not be surprised.
Slurping up some brains, the fat man shook his head contentedly and said, “Couldn’t carry any more. Since you’ve chased me this close, I figured I’d stop and have a proper meal.”
“Who exactly are you?” Lin Fei asked. “Are you related to taotie or something?”
“That ugly freak? You’re the one related to him. Your whole family is related to him!”
“Hey, why are you insulting people? Let’s speak properly. What’s your name? And why are you stealing all these three-handled pots?” Lin Fei demanded with righteous indignation.
The fat man set down his chopsticks and looked at Lin Fei with disdain. “Aren’t you Dingcat, that so-called Mr. Lomo? The public-interest LOMO wall on Dingdingmao last time, you did that, right? I even went to see it. And you don’t even recognize me?” Dingcat was Lin Fei’s online name, as well as his ID on the secret ancient-Shu forum Dingdingmao, a forum named after his father, Old Dingcat.
“You know the Dingdingmao forum?” Lin Fei asked in surprise.
“What rubbish. I’m a senior member.”
Dingdingmao was a closed-registration forum. It did not have many members, but Lin Fei certainly had not met them all. “You’re not Shu,” he said. “All the Shu people, I’ve met.”
“That’s right. I really am not human.”
Lin Fei thought about it. There were not many users on the forum. If this fellow was not Shu, then he must be some sort of auspicious beast or spirit. Looking again at the dark rings around the fat man’s eyes, Lin Fei felt a sudden shock. “Could it be… you’re a pixiu?”
Patting his plump round belly with satisfaction, the fat man beckoned and said, “Now that’s more like it. You should have guessed sooner. My name’s Qu Mao’er. Come on, sit down and eat a little.”
Don’t think. Fast.
LOMO Rule
“Pixiu” did not mean the auspicious beast pixiu. Nor was it some online alias of Qu Mao’er. He really was a “pixiu,” or so he claimed. In ancient Chinese legend, pixiu, those auspicious beasts, come in male and female forms: the male is pi, the female xiu. In the south they are usually called pixiu together, while in the north they are often called bixie, warders-off of evil. Throughout the dynasties, the armor of imperial guards bore pixiu heads and those troops were called the Pixiu Guard. No one knows in exactly which dynasty it happened, but someone in Guanzhong once captured several ferocious beasts, fierce as bears, and presented them to the emperor. The doctor standing before the throne did not recognize them and invented, on the spot, the claim that they must be heaven-sent auspicious beasts: pixiu. From then on those beasts became the bodily representatives of pixiu. In truth, pixiu are not fierce at all. Though sharp-toothed and clawed, they never eat meat. It was not until 1869 that the French missionary Armand David rediscovered the pixiu in Sichuan and named it the black-and-white bear; two years later it was more precisely named the cat-bear. In the 1940s, at an animal-specimen exhibition in the museum at Beibei, Chongqing, because Chinese at the time were used to reading from right to left, “cat-bear” was misread by everyone as “bear-cat.” From then on the word “panda” spread, and the mistake has persisted to this day.
Qu Mao’er, then, was in fact a genuine panda. In Chengdu dialect, however, qu mao’er means frog. He had chosen the name only to express one tiny wish of his own: to be photographed in color.
Sure enough, after only a few bites, Qu Mao’er opened his mouth to ask for exactly that. “Dingcat, I hear LOMO makes colors come out absurdly bright. Later on, take a few shots of me, would you?”
“With your looks, every shot is still just one color. First tell me why you stole the Sanxingdui three-handled cauldron,” Lin Fei said irritably. “You’re an old cat on the forum too. You must know Sanxingdui is the foundation of ancient Shu culture, the root of our lives. Why touch it? And you stole all these pots and pans while you were at it.” Lin Fei pointed at the eight vessels on the ground. “Chengdu tabloid gossip is famous all over China. Heaven knows what kind of uproar tomorrow’s news will stir up.”
“So you really don’t know,” Qu Mao’er said, putting on an expression of pained concern. “Do you remember that year when bamboo flowered across all of Sichuan, and we pandas were nearly starved to death?”
“I remember. There wasn’t even any internet then. All the radio hams in Chengdu organized a relief drive. You ate plenty of the special supplies from us Shu folk.”
“But in the end it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t modern people either, who saved the bamboo. The news said it was climate-related. But I know the truth. It was taotie, that really was his doing, who took rubbings of the taotie pattern on the pair of Sanxingdui bronze cauldrons and used them to save the bamboo.”
“Hm? I thought the pictographs on those cauldrons were supposed to be a cookbook.”
“Wrong. What they contain is your ancient Shu materia medica, the Shu Arts. One entry in it is specifically on ‘healing bamboo.’ If Sanxingdui had never been excavated, you Shu people would still have your peace, and it would have been much easier for us to take things when needed. Ever since one of the two bronze cauldrons was smashed, the complete text of the Shu Arts has been lost among the people. That’s thanks to your father, by the way. He was the one who overruled everyone else and had the patterns of the Shu Arts copied out in rubbings.”
“Then this time you stole them because…” Lin Fei asked.
“This time I had no choice. I came to retrieve the Shu Arts. To keep you people from worrying, I even took something from another Sanxingdui site and left it there to calm your nerves.”
“What? There’s another Sanxingdui?” Lin Fei leapt up in shock.
“Easy, easy. That’s another story. We’ll talk about it later. This time it’s because… the rabbits are in trouble.”
“Rabbits? What rabbits?” In Chengdu dialect, rabbits are simply called tu’er.
“Do you know why Chengdu people love eating rabbits so much? Like the rabbit heads from Shuangliu Laoma.”
Lin Fei licked his lips. “In legend, the rabbit is the incarnation of what King Wen of Zhou vomited up after eating the flesh pie made from the corpse of his eldest son, Boyi Kao. And since our ancient Shu kingdom was destroyed by Zhou’s treachery, generation after generation of Shu people longed to eat him alive. That’s why Boyi Kao’s incarnation gets treated the way it does.”
“Exactly. And in so cruel a manner too.” Qu Mao’er made a chopping motion at his neck. “Still, to be fair, rabbit head really is delicious.”
“We’ve stopped nursing that grudge ages ago. Don’t forget I’m on the board of the Chengdu Anti-Cruel Slaughter of Domestic Animals Association. Get to the point. What do you mean the rabbits are in trouble?”
“Right, right. You have to understand that rabbits come in two sorts: domestic and wild. The ones we eat are all farmed rabbits, and their situation is still tolerable. But wild rabbits? They have it hard. The Chengdu Plain is nearly filled with people now. There’s very little wasteland left for them to live in. Beneath Chengdu proper there are now countless underground rabbit settlements. That was an aid plan first launched years ago by us panda people. Chengdu’s old nickname is Rong City, and underground there is a kind of fungus called rong mushroom. The wild rabbits survive on that now.”
“And what does that have to do with the Shu Arts? Does it also cover protecting small animals?” Lin Fei asked.
Qu Mao’er raised his eyebrows again. “Are you even from Chengdu? Have you heard they’re building the subway now? Seven whole lines, digging Chengdu’s underground into Swiss cheese.”
“Ah!” Lin Fei slapped his thigh. “So the rabbit warrens got wrecked? Does the Shu Arts have some secret technique for destroying subway lines?”
“Stop interrupting nonsense. We already tampered with the subway issue ages ago. The current routes all curve around the rabbit warrens,” Qu Mao’er said crossly.
“No wonder so many people online keep complaining the subway planning makes no sense. So that was your work.”
“But now there’s a new problem. The subway cut Chengdu’s underground water veins, so the rong mushrooms won’t grow anymore. The rabbits have nothing left to eat.” Qu Mao’er spread his hands. “We’ve already planned dozens of new wild-rabbit settlement zones in Xindu, Jintang, Pixian, and Qionglai, places that probably won’t get a subway for a hundred years. But rong mushrooms don’t grow there. Taotie says the Shu Arts contains cultivation methods for more than a dozen kinds of fungi and for cruciform vegetables, meaning radishes, arts now long lost. So I planned to copy them out, learn them, and plant one of those things underground in the new settlements to save the rabbits.”
“Qu Mao’er, you’re a good comrade.” Lin Fei solemnly patted his shoulder. “But taking other people’s things at random is still wrong. How are those shopkeepers supposed to make a living?”
“Come on, I left them new cookware, didn’t I? Pure gold. I’ve already taken a loss.”
“Rubbish. Gold’s that soft, how’s it supposed to stand a stove fire? Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll help you photograph all the patterns. We’ll piece them together and study them slowly. Then hurry up and swap the cookware back.”
“Deal. Dingcat, you’re a good comrade too.” Qu Mao’er slapped him so hard that Lin Fei nearly sprawled to the floor. “But this is urgent. Let’s photograph everything now and return the stuff tonight.”
Put your pictures together any way you please. You don’t need to know in advance what you’ll get.
LOMO Rule
Lin Fei and Qu Mao’er went back to Lin Fei’s place, developed the photographs of the bronze cauldron and the other eight vessels, scanned them into the computer, and used a stitching program called AutoStitch to combine them. At last they obtained the complete text of the Shu Arts.
Lin Fei posted an announcement on Dingdingmao about the rabbits, and Shu people responded at once in large numbers, willing to help plant new food sources. Then he phoned Mendenger and told him to come retrieve the three-handled bronze cauldron the next day, not without taking the chance to nag a few words about reimbursement. Once all that was finished, Lin Fei let out a long breath. Only then did he hand Qu Mao’er the rubbings concerning the cultivation of fungi and cruciform vegetables.
Qu Mao’er thanked him over and over and tucked the rubbings into his jacket. “This time it’s all thanks to you. At last the complete Shu Arts has been preserved. Now even if it goes missing again, I can still look things up.”
“I should still thank Brother Pixiu. Without you, I’d never have known such a huge matter was brewing,” Lin Fei said.
“Then I won’t waste any more time here. I’m off to the rabbit zones to start experiments. Bye-bye.” Qu Mao’er turned to go.
“Wait.” Lin Fei grabbed him. “Can I ask you something?”
“Ask whatever you like.” Qu Mao’er’s eyes flickered a little.
“Isn’t it supposed to be that pandas eat only bamboo? How come you can eat absolutely everything?” As he spoke, Lin Fei edged closer.
“Aha, so you figured it out. Actually…” Qu Mao’er spun around and lunged for the window. Lin Fei seized a long furry tail sticking out from under his trouser cuff and squeezed hard. “Miaow!” Qu Mao’er cried out. “I confess! I’m not a panda at all! I’m just a black-spotted white cat, miaow…”
“You liar. I’ll smack your ears off.”
At midnight, on the empty streets, there rose the roars and scuffling noises of a man and a cat chasing and fighting.
Ignore these rules.
LOMO Rule
The spirit of LOMO is like reading fiction: never mind the rules.
The only thing that really needs saying is this: all the Chengdu delicacies mentioned above are well worth trying. Every one of them is real, and every address is correct.
This piece is dedicated to all lovers of photography and good food.