Finding Meaning in a Chinese Mushroom

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Matsutake are an important part of rural Yunnan’s economy. But their value has never been fixed. In the 1990s, a translator working in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, received an unusual assignment from a local hotel: to find out how Japanese liked to prepare and eat matsutake mushrooms. During a recent visit by a group of Japanese businessmen, the hotel chef had cooked the matsutake they had ordered like he would termite mushrooms, a fungus native to the region, by shredding them and stewing them with chicken. After one bite, the guests stopped eating and laid down their chopsticks in grave disappointment. The translator, surnamed Liu, was tasked with asking the tour group’s Japanese chef to show the hotel’s cooking staff how to prepare the mushrooms. It didn’t take much convincing. The Japanese chef had evidently come prepared, and what followed was nothing less than a total culture shock for the hotel’s cook. Pulling out a gleaming set ………………………………