Sichuan hotpot is where you find out some very dark things about yourself. You look around at the others in the crowded, painfully bright dining room in Chengdu, wiping the backs of their necks with cold napkins, their faces red and contorted with pain. Some of them hold their stomachs. But they plow on, as you do, dipping chopsticks loaded with organ meats, fish balls, and vegetables into the giant woks of dark, sinister-looking oil. It’s like that Victorian brothel in London you’ve read about, the one that had a spanking machine—could paddle forty customers at a time.
Artak Kalantarian liked this
