My First Night in China: Are the Stingers Poisonous to Eat?

When the plane touched down onto the runway of Beijing International Airport, I had officially landed in my first foreign country. Sure, I had been to Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia up in Canada, and had taken various spring break booze trips to the Caribbean and "Mexico" (the shores of Cozumel). But, I had never really been immersed in a different culture with an unfamiliar language. I had taken a year of basic Chinese, but, as any college student who's taken a language course knows, the ability to say, "My aunt wears blue shoes," is not very useful in practical day-to-day conversations. This was cultural and language immersion at its best.

After the grueling 13 hour flight from Washington Dulles Airport, I was pretty exhausted and looking forward to a much-deserved nap. However, as the more savvy travelers on the trip pointed out, this would be entirely detrimental to recovering from the jet lag I would be experiencing shortly thereafter. So, after our group ate dinner at a local tourist-friendly family-style restaurant, four of us - Ricky, Eddie, Saul, and I - did what all Americans do in a foreign land. We headed for the bars.

Saul had been in Beijing for about a week, having arrived early to play solo tourist before the rest of the group showed up. However, much to his dismay, he caught a pretty bad case of traveler's cold/flu/diarrhea right away, and was relegated to his hotel room for most of the week. In the few times he managed to crawl outside, though, he was able to locate some key points of interest in the city, namely the trendy bar and club district called Sanlitun and the sprawling Dong Hua Men night market. We decided to hit Sanlitun that night, and delve right into Beijing night life.

Sanlitun consists of several blocks worth of bars and restaurants that cater to foreigners and upper-middle class Chinese. When the weather is favorable, as it was for us that early summer evening, the tables outside the bars are crowded with revelers trading traveler stories, working on their "foreign affairs," and basically living it up in a bar district that often stays open until 4 in the morning. As we walked past the bars, sizing each up and trying to decide where to begin, we were approached by shifty DVD peddlers and nearly accosted by loud bar representatives trying to lead us in the direction of their establishment. We would find that this combination of minor annoyances would be repeated in most of the bar and restaurant areas we patronized throughout China.

Picking a bar at random, we settled down at an outdoor table, and ordered some drinks. Though I would later become quite learned in the realm of Chinese beers, at the time I only knew of one, and so I ordered the ubiquitous Tsingtao. My companions went with a combination of American beers and mixed drinks, and as we drank (and tried to fight jet lag), we took in our surroundings.

There clearly appeared to be a lot of Westerners here. As far as we could tell, at least in our bar, the waiters and bartenders were the only Chinese people around. This wasn't the case at every bar in Sanlitun, however, but we had definitely picked a bar not frequented by locals. Consequently, we were harassed by wandering street peddlers at fairly regular intervals.

After several beers and even more refusals of solicitors (we were saying bu yao so often that it dominated our conversations), we summoned our waiter for the check. Laying our newly acquired yuan down, we left and started walking past the other bars, all of which were a bit more lively than our sleepy little Westerner bar. Oh well, ours had gotten the job done, and we were happy with our little bit of mild adventurism. Suddenly, however, our waiter, nearly out of breath, caught up to us waving money - the money we had left on the table.

"Do we owe more?" we asked in broken Chinese.

"No, no, too much, too much!" he insisted.

We smiled at each other as we realized the mistake the kindly waiter had made.

"No, no, it's yours. It's your tip. Thank you very much!" we assured him.

"No! No! Your money, your money!" he said as he handed the money back to us and walked back to the bar. It was then that we learned that there is no tipping in China.

Sufficiently awakened by the alcohol, and now with slightly more money on hand, Saul suggested we continue the first night blowout and visit the Dong Hua Men night market, within walking distance of Sanlitun. It'd be a great place to pick up a quick snack, he assured us. By virtue of having preceded us by a week in the capital city, Saul was the default expert on all things Beijing, so we happily followed his proposal.

A visit to China is not complete without hitting up a night market. It is truly a sight to behold. Dong Hua Men consisted of block after block of a long row of stands selling every food imaginable (and many that you never would have imagined), all manners of beverages (beer, wine, soda, bubble tea), and any other item that the vendors decide to sell on that particular day. The market smells as if every scent that has ever existed came together and threw a party. Skewers of meat, seafood, vegetables, and several unrecognizable foods sizzled on hot griddles. Vendors yelled their sales pitch to every passer-by. Even late at night, the market was packed with locals and tourists, eager to grab their favorite cheap fast food or try something new and unusual. And there were plenty of unusual foods to try, if you so desired. And being slightly inebriated, we so desired.

We bought a skewer or two of seasoned chicken and beef, but what we were really after was the strange food. After walking past a few bubble tea stands, we found what we were looking for. Skewers of bug larvae, scorpions, stinky tofu, starfish, chicken and beef innards, and other assortments of less than desirable foodstuffs were laid out on a table, ready to meet the hot griddle on demand. The vendors started teasing us with the scorpions, grabbing a few live ones out of a bucket and pushing them in our faces. 'I'll show them,' I thought, and ordered a skewer of their finest scorpions, as well as a bug larvae skewer.

"Are you serious?" Eddie asked.

"How bad could it be?" I answered. "Obviously people eat it, or it wouldn't be out here, right?"

The scorpions and bugs sizzled on the griddle, as the vendor smiled a toothy smile and covered them in seasonings and oil. After a few minutes, he handed the insect-laden sticks to me and watched, as did a crowd of locals - eager to see the dumb American choke on a stinger no doubt. I started with the scorpion because, why not?

"Is the stinger poisonous?" I asked the vendor, and those around me.

In answer, the vendor took a live scorpion and mimicked dropping it whole in his mouth. 'Ah, now I see,' I thought, and took the plunge. It tasted, surprisingly, like crispy french fries. Not bad, not bad at all. Now it was on to the bug larvae...

...which was terrible. I was pulling pieces of bug leg and exoskeleton out of my teeth all night. But, I figured, I started the trip out right, by giving my stomach a crash-course on the weird food I'd be stuffing it with in the next several months. And, hopefully, that scorpion stinger wasn't, in fact, poisonous...