They don’t have dental floss in Chengdu, so my father sends me seventy-five-foot dispensers of waxed floss in every care package. No tampons here either, but I don’t ask him to send me those. Also, the children don’t wear diapers. Instead there is an open gap at the back of their trousers from which they piss and shit in the streets. Even little toddlers are adept at this revolting habit. In this regard they are totally lacking in shame. You get used to seeing it by the third day and realize that it’s normal. Once I saw a woman put cabbage leaves out to dry on a piss-and-shit road.

In Sichuan the food is so hot with spices and fiery oils that it can raise blisters on the roof of your mouth, your inner cheeks, tonsils, and uvula. This hydrochloric-acid diet causes pieces of flesh to hang off the oral cavities like string, like you just ate a McDonald’s hot apple pie straight from the sizzling French-fry cooker. My father also sends me bottles of selenium, which he claims is deficient in the Sichuan soil, and the lack of which is rumored to cause stomach cancer. At his behest I take selenium and zinc.

Until my nineteenth year I lived on junk food. China has made a vegetarian of me not only for my health but also for ethical reasons. What right do we have to so demean animals as to reduce them to food? What kind of sadistic Adolf Hitler insanity is that? Come to think of it, Hitler was a vegetarian.

Twenty years ago people still thought smoking was glamorous. I can’t give the exact date, but I foresee that one day eating animals will become untenable. Meanwhile not only do the Chinese eat cocker spaniels and Chihuahuas, they’ve got restaurants that serve broiled rats. A damn rat ran across my foot with comic-book ferocity at the hair salon. This on my third day in-country. Its sharp paws scraping across the tile floor sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. I just about peed my pants. And the rat knew what he was doing; it was a calculated act of malevolence because after he ran past, he turned his head over his shoulder, bared his razor-sharp teeth, and caught my glance with his red squinty eyes. He didn’t squeal with pleasure. No, he had a low baritone voice like James Earl Jones and kinda went, “Huh, huh, huh.” Like some cartoon rat. Daddy loved that incident, though he was concerned that I might come down with rat fever.