I was in a small town in China, Ganzi, if you're interested in looking it up, like a surprising number of people my age, trying somehow to find myself in the dust, eight-hour bus rides and chaos that is still most of Asia off the beaten track. The setting was unbelievably dramatic; as we were on the Tibetan plateau (but not in the province of Tibet), we were over 4,000 metres above sea level, staring at some of the highest mountains in the world. Though the town certainly had plenty of modern features, including an Internet café with fast, probably months-old computers, a short drive away left you in the wild, surrounded by rolling fields, snow-covered mountains, yak herders, and vultures so large I thought they were sheep when I first saw them.
We had come to the town in order to visit one of the holiest sites in Tibetan Buddhism, the Dege Scripture Printing Monastery, which was a one-to-two day drive away, depending on the state of a nearby mountain pass, but in the meantime, we were stuck in town negotiating a bus ticket. For all the wonderful organization of the Chinese state, its bureaucracies can be infuriating. We had visited the office at eight in the morning and been told to come back at eleven, had to wake up the attendant at eleven to find out the bus we needed did not exist, and were told to come back the next day. The next day, we were forced to negotiate with a bus station attendant who had planned to sleep through her work shift and apparently didn't even speak any form of the Chinese language, only Tibetan. We yelled, and gesticulated, pointed to words in the Chinese-English dictionary at the back of our Lonely Planets, only to be dismissed by a woman who was more interested in sleeping than selling us tickets. Needless to say, we were stuck in town for a while.
So my friend and I searched for things to do, as we always did. Cameras in hand, dressed in a total of $30 worth of clothing purchased around Asia, we strolled through the town finding everything worth visiting, every person worth seeing.
After a bit more wandering, we headed down a street in what was the closest this town of a few thousand had to a slum. Within minutes, I had one of the more memorable experiences (and photos) of my trip.
Squatting by a hose in the street was a Tibetan girl who couldn't have been more than about seven years old. She was dressed in ragged, possibly never-washed clothes, had sun- and wind-burned cheeks. She met my stare with dark, serious eyes, far too serious for her age. I always have to explain to people who haven't been to rural China that Tibetans look fierce, but there are reasons for this. The Tibetan plateau is one of the most inhospitable places on this earth, comparable to our own arctic. Temperatures can drop to -50 C in the winter, soar to 30 C in the summer, and a massive snowfall can happen any time of the year. Because of the high elevation and the local geography, the temperature swings wildly during the summer. Any kind of cultivation there is all but impossible, and Tibetans, traditionally, and to a surprising extent today, live on yak meat, yak butter, yak milk and barley. No exotic Chinese buffets here, just what my friend and I came to lovingly and respectfully refer to as "poverty food." Food too honest to be anything but simple.
So it was a child of these conditions, a child of this plateau that met my stare. As I approached, I realized that, nestled in her coat, held tight, was an absolutely enormous chicken. To many of us in Canada, chickens are food, vaguely pink blobs connected, distantly, to a feathered, clucking creature. But to this girl, this chicken was a friend. Though it was missing half of its feathers and looked like it had lived through a few wars, she petted it gently, rearranged its feathers, and spoke softly to it. With the hose, she doused its tiny, mud-stained feathers in a likely futile attempt to clean them and cupped her hand to try to give it drinking water. Chickens, by some accident of biology, greet their world at all times with a wild-eyed stare. With her actions, the girl seemed to be trying to make its countenance a little bit more peaceful.
It was at that moment I finally realized chickens weren't just things that we ate. I'd seen enough roasted dogs' heads on market tables in Vietnam to understand that what we consider food and what we consider pets is ultimately cultural, ultimately arbitrary. I'd argued, both to myself and to others, that our relationships to our food are incredibly strange. Sitting in front of a bowl of soup filled with whole cuttlefishes in Vietnam, I told myself over and over that if the locals ate marinated cuttlefish eyes, I could too. When I asked a woman I was taking cooking classes from in Nepal to prepare her favourite meal and she placed cubes of raw buffalo meat (with the skin attached) in front of me, I took a deep breath and dove in. I knew on a purely intellectual level that more or less anything could be food, and, conversely, just about anything could be considered a companion. But I'd never felt with such clarity that chickens were just living things that different cultures had decided to make into food or pets. I have no doubt the chicken the girl was nuzzling, that she considered more important than the foreigner with the camera rudely snapping pictures, would end up on the dinner table one day. But before it did, it may as well have been a member of the family with how she was treating it. After taking the photo, we got up and walked away. If the girl had noticed us there, she didn't show it.
There was something strangely foreign about the experience, the sort of experience I couldn't quite imagine having in Canada. Most of that feeling came, of course, from the fact that the chicken was out on the street. When I came back to Canada, I had to get used to not having chickens out on the street, as I saw them there in every country in Asia I went to. But there were other aspects of the experience that were foreign. Growing up in a city, chickens were food and not much else. For every live chicken I saw, I probably saw hundreds of pieces of chicken meat, neatly packaged, in a supermarket freezer, or, neck- and featherless, sitting on a table at the farmer's market.
But we aren't far from the attitude I saw all over Asia. After speaking to my 90 year-old grandmother, I learned the family used to choose one pig to keep as a pet when she lived on a farm in Saskatchewan. Chickens were also essential to housewives in the early 20th century, providing them with an income and a reliable source of food. While researching this article, I was surprised to learn even so famous a figure as Martha Stewart raises (and cares for) chickens.
"All of my chickens had names, all of them," she said recently. "I knew all of them. I worried about them. I was really unhappy when anything happened to them. For instance, I was unhappy when my Egyptian Fayoumi hen froze to death." She sighed and then added, "It was awful. I'll never get another Egyptian Fayoumi again."
For now, in most communities in Canada, chickens are food and not much else. But this is slowly changing. Along with urban beekeeping movements (Vancouver city council struck down bylaws prohibiting urban apiculture in 2005), increased urban gardening (along with guerrilla gardening and similar projects), urban chicken-raising is becoming more and more popular. Chickens, after all, are small, clean, surprisingly intelligent creatures. They can eliminate many insect pests and hens are quiet. As they were for housewives a century ago, hens are also a smart investment, and pay for themselves with fresh eggs quickly.
Cities throughout North America are gradually striking down laws that prohibit people from keeping chickens in their yards. While it might not make sense in our car-based culture to have chickens running wild in the street the way they do elsewhere in the world, I look forward to the day when we in towns and cities can have more of a relationship to our food and more independence from major food producers. When more of us can experience the feeling that that girl felt, caring for something that would eventually just be food.
