Word: wu
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Among several brilliantly drawn characters is a bureaucrat--"the chief engineer of the First Light Industry Bureau" of the Beijing city government--a Madame Wu Hongbo, otherwise known to Clissold as "my old Chinese sparring partner." The accounts of his tangles with her--she "regulates" the Chinese partner with which Pat has bought a beer company--are hilarious, and sobering...
...village's mud-brick walls: foreigners, for some mysterious reason, were willing to pay exorbitant prices for what the locals dismissively call pig-snout fungus. "When we first asked the people in the countryside whether they had any truffles, they were shocked we wanted to buy them," recalls Wu Jianming, chairman of Kunming Rare Truffle Co, the province's largest truffle exporter. "An hour later, they brought us a whole bagful and still couldn't believe that foreigners wanted to eat what they usually fed to their pigs...
...Kunming Rare Truffle Co.'s Wu cheerfully admits that some of his European and American clients mix his fungi with French ones. But the former metallurgist is astounded less by the chicanery than by the prices his truffles can command abroad. What Wu sells to wholesalers for $80 a kilo can be resold to Westerners for 30 times that, or more than double the average yearly income in China. "Who would pay that much for a mushroom," Wu marvels. "Is it because they think it's an aphrodisiac?" (Since medieval times, many have believed just that.) Nevertheless, Wu does maintain...
...Back in China, though, Wu sees nothing but mycological possibility. In the past year, he has begun exporting his own truffle oil and is starting a canned foie gras business using geese imported from Hungary. Now, he's attempting to duplicate the soil and precipitation conditions of southern France in his Yunnan fields. Just like France's INRA, Wu has done his own truffle-DNA testing, and he is determined to reverse-engineer an Eastern facsimile of a P?rigord. If he can create the correct environmental conditions, Wu believes Yunnan's plentiful land and low fixed costs will make...
...None of that, though, changes one irksome fact that has limited Wu's business. For all their gastronomic enthusiasm for endangered sea animals or all matter of rare mammalian life, the Chinese so far appear immune to the pleasures of a black truffle. Mushroom gatherer Li Kun shakes his head when asked whether he enjoys the flavor of the black nuggets he's scooping up from the loamy soil near Hama. "When we're really hungry, we eat them covered with soy sauce, coriander, chili paste and MSG," he says. "That way you don't have to taste the truffle...