Just in from the airport, Chmura and I joined a group of his friends at Sun Yat-sen University and plunged into a snack of the world’s stinkiest fruit. It’s a large spiky thing, a durian, like a puffer fish that has swallowed a football; pried open, it yields individual gobbets of glutinous creamy pulp, maybe eight or ten gobbets per fruit, and an unwelcoming bouquet. The pulp tastes like vanilla custard and smells like the underwear of someone you don’t want to know. We ate barehanded, slurping the goo between our fingers as it oozed and dripped. This was before dinner, in lieu of peanuts and
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