I still have a hard time pronouncing Zhangjaijie, a city, a region, and the first ever national park in central China, about 1,000 kilometers from Hong Kong, though I went there via Cebu Pacific’s thrice-a-week flight direct to Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong in the southern tip of China just two hours and 40 minutes away. I was there as a guest of Travel Warehouse Inc., which organized the trip in partnership with Cebu Pacific and UOS Travel, a Chinese-run business-to-business tour operator and wholesaler based in Manila.

From Guangzhou, Zhangjaijie is only 100 minutes away by plane, closer than Hong Kong by just 20 kilometers and yet, Zhangjaijie is already so otherworldly, with landscapes that inspire movies like James Cameron’s Avatar, which has been proclaimed the “highest-grossing film ever.” I’m going to have to tell you about this place as a destination for soul-stirring scenery and mind-bending adventures another time because right now, after having just arrived from a weeklong trip to China’s fairy tale-like regions, I feel I’m thinking more about what I ate there.  
Zhangjaijie is in Hunan, a landlocked province nestled in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed in south-central China. It’s a different world, magical and magnificent in places, such as the Zhangjaijie National Forest Park, only one of four national parks in the Wulingyuan Scenic and Historic Interest Area, a 690-square-kilometer world of wonders that was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.

I don’t know why I was always hungry in Zhangjaijie. Maybe it was the weather, the beginnings of winter, when the temperature ranged from one moment to the next from six to 14 degrees Celsius and reel feels of maybe one degree when you were up in the mountains or under the intermittent showers or in the middle of the mist that would descend on Zhangjaijie in the afternoons. Maybe it was all the walking—I would average 14,000 steps a day, my health monitor knowing me so well set my daily target at only 6,000 steps.

But yes, in Zhangjaijie, where there was so much to explore, discover, and experience, I always looked forward to seeing, smelling, and eating what was on the table every time we took a break for lunch and for dinner.

At all the restaurants we visited day and night, the food was served on a round table with a lazy Susan in the middle, where everything would be spread out in family or Filipino style. The lazy Susan is so hardworking, even overworked, as much a staple on the Zhangjaijie dining scene as the red hot chili.

Hunan, where Zhangjaijie is, has one of eight celebrated cuisines in China—I say “celebrated” because China is so big and so diverse and so shrouded in political intrigue and biases I’m afraid the world has yet to discover all of China's riches, culinary or otherwise. Sometimes referred to as Xiang cuisine, Hunan food is unapologetically hot and spicy, or salty, or oily, or all of it at once, in dark, heavy sauces or piping hot soups clear or milky, thanks to Hunan’s wet hot summers and chilly wet winters. Most dishes are stir-fried, dry-fried, cured, preserved, braised, stewed, or steamed. 

Where we ate, usually the more accessible restaurants, mostly mid-range in terms of cost, food was always served like a feast, always, like I said, on a lazy Susan, always with pork, beef, chicken, duck, or goose, sometimes lamb, sometimes fish like sole, hardly any seafood, except for the occasional shrimp or abalone, and always with fresh vegetables sautéed or al dente and always, always with lovely tofu—I loved the tofu, stinky tofu, egg tofu, rice tofu, smoked tofu, any tofu! Every meal would come with rice to balance out the strong flavors, particularly the spiciness, also the saltiness.

Of course, chili, dried or fresh, often pickled, is at the core of Hunan food. “You can’t be a revolutionary if you don’t eat chilis.” said Chairman Mao Zedong, who was born in Hunan Province, in a rural village called Shaoshanchong in Xiangtan county, to a Soviet official. Edgar Snow, the Kansas-born author of Red Star over China and the first Western journalist to interview Mao, according to the magazine Bon Appétit, also reported that the Chinese politician, Marxist theorist, military strategist, poet, and revolutionary “even had pepper cooked into his bread.” Or, as Hunanese food writer Liu Guochu claims, he would also sprinkle ground chili on slices of watermelon.

Like me, Chairman Mao loved tofu, but his was a more frugal appetite, delighting in wild vegetables, smoked fish, and grains his wealthier brethren would consider inedible. Red-braised pork or hong shao rou has been said to be his favorite dish so much, including in the book Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper? by English writer and cook Fuchsia Dunlop, so that at some restaurants the dish has been officially named Chairman Mao’s Red Braised Pork Belly. It is said that the Chinese government established an official recipe, whose core ingredients are caramelized sugar and dried hot chili peppers, as a measure against unworthy imitation.

I cannot overemphasize that Hunan food is notoriously spicy. Often compared to Sichuan cuisine, it boasts of even spicier dishes, “arguably the spiciest cuisine in China,” according to CNN Travel. There’s an old Chinese joke cited in another book written by Fuchsia Dunlop, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, which says, “The Sichuanese are not afraid of chili heat; No degree of hotness will ‘afright’ the people of Guizhou, but those Hunanese are afraid of food that isn’t hot.”

Sour, however, is also emblematic of Xiang cuisine, citrus fruits being a major crop in Hunan province. The taste for sour is also why the Hunanese are masters of fermentation, of which their star product is the duo jiao or chopped chili, a staple ingredient, which is made by pickling red chili peppers in vinegar and salt.

I did enjoy my time in central China, and that’s thanks for the most part to the food. I was always craving food in Zhangjaijie that I was uncharacteristically conscious of time, always checking whether it was time for lunch or for dinner, even as I was ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the magnificence of the quartz-sandstone pillars that make up the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain or walking on air across the 430-meter-long Zhangjaijie Glass Bridge. I must also credit the company— Adyel Abarca, Angelo Comsti, Ian Laroda, Jaison Yang, Joseph Woo, Kaloy Tingcungco, Lyn Ching Pascual, Pepper Teehankee, Yvette Fernandez, and our super fun Hunanese tour guide Alan Lyu—but eating to me was enough of a great adventure in Hunan.
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