The Country with No Bowels / 无肠国：富人吃完的东西，仆人接着吃

A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 6

From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapter 14 · 第十四回 · 谈寿夭道经无继 论穷通路出无肠

By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

A coastal kingdom whose people are thin and anxious, eat constantly, and have no intestines. Food passes through them in minutes, unchanged. They are not embarrassed about this. The locals proudly explain that they are the most economical eaters in the world — because in a rich household, what the master eats once, the servants get to eat again. Tang Ao tries to ask whether this is hygienic. He is told that hygiene is a foreign concept and that the country, on the contrary, has eliminated waste.

The Story

The boat has been at sea for three days. After the embarrassments of Black Teeth Country (see [Tale 36]^{[1]For an earlier stop in the journey, see Cathay Tales, Tale 036: The Country Where Two Girls Outscholared an Old Man — the chapter where Duo Jiugong and Tang Ao are quietly out-talked in classical Chinese by two teenage girls from Black Teeth Country.}) and the slow vinegar-wine afternoon in Country of the Refined Scholars (see [Tale 44]^{[2]For the immediately preceding stop, see Cathay Tales, Tale 044: The Country Where Even the Tavern Boys Spoke Classical Chinese — Shūshì Guó, where the entire population dresses as scholars and the wine tastes like vinegar.}), the three travelers have settled into the rhythm of the voyage. Tang Ao (唐敖, the disgraced former imperial-examination third-place laureate, now a wandering Daoist-leaning seeker) reads on the foredeck. Lin Zhiyang (林之洋, Tang Ao's merchant brother-in-law, who runs the boat and the trading) catalogs his remaining inventory. The old helmsman Duo Jiugong (多九公, the seventy-year-old retired naval officer who has read every travel record ever written and who, since Black Teeth Country, has been quietly more humble about volunteering opinions) sits at the tiller and tells, when asked, slightly less than what he knows.

They have just passed Country of No Descendants (无继国, Wújì Guó) — a kingdom whose inhabitants neither marry nor reproduce, dying every hundred and twenty years and reviving from the same bones a hundred years later, by which arrangement the population stays exactly stable forever. Lin Zhiyang found the place unsettling. Tang Ao found it instructive. Duo Jiugong refused to leave the ship.

A new coast appears.

The chart calls it Wúcháng Guó (无肠国, "the Country with No Bowels").^{[3]Wúcháng Guó (无肠国, "Country with No Bowels") is one of the imaginary kingdoms in Flowers in the Mirror. The bare name and one-line ethnographic note are inherited from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》, Shanhai Jing), which records, in its Hǎiwài Dōngjīng (海外东经) chapter, the brief notation: "There is a Country with No Bowels. The people have long bodies and no intestines." Li Ruzhen takes this single line and, two thousand years later, builds the entire economic and moral system of "second-round dining" on top of it — turning a one-line geographical curiosity into one of the sharpest pieces of social satire in Qing fiction.}

Lin Zhiyang, who has been planning to skip this stop, hears the name and immediately wants to know what it means literally. Duo Jiugong, with the air of a man who has been quietly dreading this exact question for a hundred lǐ, explains.

It means literally what it says, he tells Lin Zhiyang. The people of this country have no intestines.

Lin Zhiyang stares at him.

No intestines, Duo Jiugong repeats. No bowels at all. Their food enters the mouth, passes down through the body, and emerges from the lower opening within a matter of minutes — exactly as it went in, unchanged in form, mostly unchanged in flavor.

Lin Zhiyang's face goes through several rapid stages. No digestion? he asks, quietly.

No digestion, Duo Jiugong confirms.

A long silence.

And you, Lin Zhiyang says, want to go ashore?

They go ashore. Tang Ao insists. The country's customs gate is small, lightly staffed, and unimpressive after the elaborate scholar-guards of Shūshì Guó. The two duty officers — both of them visibly thin, with the gaunt cheeks and slightly translucent skin of people who eat enormous amounts but absorb very little of it — wave the travelers through without much interest. The customs officers, Tang Ao notes, are eating while they work. Each holds a small bowl of rice and a pair of chopsticks. Each shovels the rice into his mouth with the steady, mechanical, unhurried motion of a person who has been eating for several hours and expects to be eating for several more.

Inside the gate, the town is, on first impression, mostly very ordinary. Streets. Shops. Houses. Children. Dogs.

It is the second look that begins to disturb.

Every person in the street is eating. Some carry bowls. Some carry baskets. Some carry, slung on a strap across the shoulder, a kind of long wooden box subdivided into compartments — like a portable lunchbox the size of a small ladder — and they reach into it as they walk, transferring food into their mouths in a continuous, unhurried, slightly absent rhythm. The children eat. The shopkeepers eat. The man pulling a small handcart down the middle of the road has a steamed bun clamped in his teeth and is chewing while he hauls. The two old men sitting on a bench outside a teahouse are each holding a bowl of millet and eating with chopsticks in opposite hands while continuing a leisurely conversation. Nothing about any of these people seems greedy or rushed. They are simply, perpetually, eating.

Tang Ao, who has been doing arithmetic in his head, notices something else. The number of public latrines on the street is unusually high. There is one at every corner — and not the discreet covered alleys of his own country, but small open structures, almost like rest-stops, with a quiet steady traffic of users going in and out at all times of the day.

They eat all day, Tang Ao says quietly to Duo Jiugong. And it passes through them all day. So they have to use the latrine all day. So there is one on every corner.

Duo Jiugong nods.

And what, Tang Ao asks, do they live on? If the food passes through unchanged in minutes — what is the body absorbing?

Duo Jiugong, who has been thinking about this himself, says: Almost nothing. They absorb the smallest fraction of each meal. To sustain themselves, they must eat continuously. The wealthy eat continuously and elaborately. The poor eat continuously and meagerly. But everyone eats continuously. To stop eating is to die in three days.

Lin Zhiyang, looking at a small child gnawing on a fried dough-stick while balancing a second one in her left hand, suggests that perhaps the three travelers should go and find lunch.

He immediately regrets having put it that way.

They find a roadside eating-house. The proprietor — a thin, courteous man in his forties, eating a bowl of fried noodles as he greets them — seats them at a corner table and apologizes that the front tables are reserved for the "second-round" clientele. Tang Ao does not understand this phrase yet. He files it for later.

The food, when it arrives, is the standard southern Chinese coastal fare of Tang Ao's own province: steamed fish, a vegetable stir-fry, two bowls of rice, a small plate of pickled radish. It is good. Tang Ao is hungry. He eats.

Lin Zhiyang, who has been watching the proprietor and the other diners with increasing unease, eats less than usual. The proprietor, having served them, has returned to his own bowl of noodles in the corner and is, Lin Zhiyang notices, continuing to eat as he sits there. He does not seem to be working. He is not bringing food to other tables. He is simply, methodically, refilling his bowl from a large pot at his elbow.

After perhaps twenty minutes, the proprietor stands up, walks across the small courtyard behind the eating-house to the latrine — visibly, in plain sight — uses it, and returns.

The next thing Lin Zhiyang sees is the servant boy.

The servant boy — a thin lad of perhaps twelve, in a clean but threadbare gray robe — emerges from the kitchen carrying a small covered earthenware jar and walks directly across the courtyard to the back of the latrine. He spends perhaps two minutes there. He emerges with the jar covered and warm. He carries it carefully back through the courtyard, into a small side-room off the kitchen, and disappears inside.

Lin Zhiyang puts down his chopsticks.

Tang Ao, who has been watching this whole sequence with the slow horror of a man assembling a sentence he does not want to finish, asks Duo Jiugong — in the carefully neutral voice of an imperial scholar inquiring about a difficult ritual — what exactly is happening in that side-room.

Duo Jiugong tells him.

The wealthy households of Wúcháng Guó, Duo Jiugong explains, have for several generations practiced what the locals call "second-round dining" (二食制, èr-shí zhì). The reasoning is, by local standards, entirely economical and entirely sensible.

Because the bowels do not digest food in this country, the food that passes through a person emerges in essentially the same form it entered — slightly warmed, slightly softened, but visually and (the locals will tell you with perfect calm) gustatorily very similar to its original state. The flavor, they say, is somewhat reduced. The texture is somewhat altered. But the nutritional value, such as it was, is largely unchanged.

A wealthy household therefore has at its disposal, after every meal eaten by the head of the family, a quantity of food that is — by the country's standards — perfectly edible. To throw this away would be wasteful. To eat it oneself would be, of course, beneath the dignity of the master. But to give it to the servants — this is the genius of the system. The servants, who would otherwise have to be fed separately, can be fed instead on the master's already-paid-for meal, reused. The household's food bill is roughly cut in half. The servants are not, strictly speaking, hungry. The master has not, strictly speaking, wasted anything.

This practice, Duo Jiugong continues, was once limited to the very richest households. In the past three or four generations it has spread. The merchant class has adopted it. The shopkeepers have adopted it. Now even the proprietor of a small roadside eating-house, with a single servant boy, considers it an obvious economy.

The servant boy in the side-room is at this moment preparing the proprietor's earlier lunch — warmed slightly, salted slightly, served on a clean plate — for his own midday meal.

Tang Ao stares at his bowl of rice.

He stops eating.

Lin Zhiyang, who has been silently going pale for the last three minutes, picks up his cup of warm wine, drinks it in one swallow, and asks Duo Jiugong, in a voice that is admirably steady under the circumstances, whether the wine they have just been served has also been through anyone.

Duo Jiugong assures him that the wine has not.

The wine, he explains, is the one luxury the country imports from outside. Wine, unlike food, would not survive the local digestive practice in any palatable form. The country trades for wine with its neighbors and reserves it for first-round consumption only.

Lin Zhiyang nods slowly. He pours another cup. He drinks it. He says: I would like to go back to the boat now.

Tang Ao, who is not yet ready to leave, has one more question for the proprietor.

He approaches the proprietor's table with the careful courtesy of a scholar addressing a stranger and asks — in his best polite Mandarin — whether the practice of second-round dining is not, perhaps, unclean.

The proprietor sets down his noodles. He smiles.

He answers Tang Ao in the patient tone of a local man explaining something obvious to a foreigner. The food, he says, was the master's. It has only passed through the master's body. The master is clean. Therefore the food, having only encountered the master's clean body, is also clean. To say otherwise — the proprietor's tone is now gently corrective — would be to call the master himself unclean, which would be a serious affront.

He adds, with the small smile of a man making a familiar point: Foreigners often raise this question on first arriving. After a few days they understand. Waste is the real impurity. Reuse is the real cleanliness. In your country, do the masters not throw away half of every meal? Is this not insulting to the grain?

Tang Ao opens his mouth.

He closes it.

He bows in his seat. He thanks the proprietor for the meal. He pays.

The three travelers walk back to the wharf without exchanging a word.

That evening, after the boat has put to sea and the coast of Wúcháng Guó has dropped below the horizon, Lin Zhiyang asks Tang Ao — over a cup of imported wine and a plate of bread none of them feel like eating — what he has learned from the visit.

Tang Ao thinks for a long time before he answers.

He says: I have learned that miserliness does not have a bottom. I have always known that some men will save half a grain of rice. I did not know that a culture could exist in which every household has agreed that the lower opening of the master's body is a kind of pantry. The country is not insane. The country has simply followed the logic of saving money all the way to the wall behind the kitchen. They have not stopped because nothing in their philosophy tells them to stop.

Lin Zhiyang nods.

After a while he adds: Brother-in-law, in our country there are also households that would do this, if they could.

Tang Ao does not answer.

Duo Jiugong, looking at the stars, says quietly that the chart shows another country two days' sail ahead, named Quǎn Fēng Guó (犬封国, "the Country of the Dog-Headed"), where the inhabitants have the bodies of men and the heads of dogs and speak Chinese only with great difficulty.

Lin Zhiyang says: Honestly, after today, that sounds restful.

Translator's Reflection

The country with no bowels is the chapter of Flowers in the Mirror that I find hardest to read out loud. It is funny. It is supposed to be funny. Li Ruzhen wrote it as a satire on miserliness, and the comic timing is impeccable — the servant boy with the earthenware jar is, in pure structural terms, one of the best comic reveals in 19th-century Chinese fiction. But the laugh sticks in the throat. The reason it sticks is that the proprietor's defense is so coherent. He is not insane. He has a fully worked-out moral case. The master is clean, therefore what passes through the master is clean. You can write that argument out as a syllogism. You cannot, without invoking categories that Wúcháng Guó has simply not adopted, refute it.

That is what Li Ruzhen is doing. He is showing you a country in which a single small premise — food can be reused if the body it passed through was a respectable one — has been adopted by everyone, and then he is showing you the country those people end up living in. They live in a country where every street corner has a latrine, where every servant eats secondhand, where the very wealthy host elaborate dinner parties at which the second-round seating is part of the social architecture, and where nobody is embarrassed. The horror of the chapter is not that they do this. The horror is that they have thought it through and concluded that it is fine.

Li Ruzhen's target, of course, is not literally bowel-less coastal kingdoms. His target is the merchant gentry of late Qing China. He had spent his life watching well-off households that would not waste a single grain of rice — and that, in their unwillingness to waste, would force their servants to eat the moldy leftovers of three-day-old banquets. The "second-round dining" of Wúcháng Guó is not a fantasy. It is a slight exaggeration of a class practice Li Ruzhen had seen in real Yangzhou and Suzhou households in the 1810s. He moves it offshore and makes the inhabitants literally bowel-less, and the chapter becomes safe to publish. The Qing censor cannot ban a book about a fictional foreign country. The Qing reader, however, recognizes the wealthy uncle.

The detail I keep coming back to is the proprietor's last argument. In your country, do the masters not throw away half of every meal? Is this not insulting to the grain? The argument is not wrong. The waste of food in a hierarchical household is a real moral problem. The proprietor has identified it. His solution — reuse all the way to the lower opening — is grotesque, but the problem he is solving is real. Li Ruzhen, here, is not letting Tang Ao off easy. He is asking, by indirection: what is your alternative? And Tang Ao, the imperial-examination third-place laureate, the philosophical traveler, the educated representative of the home culture — does not have an answer. He bows. He pays. He leaves. He sits on the deck that evening and confesses to his brother-in-law that the country was not insane, only that it had followed the logic of saving money all the way to the wall.

The line I think Li Ruzhen is quietly putting under all of this is: miserliness, taken to its conclusion, dissolves the boundary between food and waste. Tang Ao's country has not done this yet. Wúcháng Guó has. The space between the two countries is smaller than it looks. That is the joke. That is also why it is not really a joke.

Next tale: A new translation. Coming soon to Cathay Tales.