Wyatt Olson
MY relationship with turkey is complicated.
Take, for example, Thanksgiving Day last week. For weeks I'd been fantasizing about the turkey dinner to be served at Champs Bar & Grill at the Shangri-La Hotel Shenzhen, the kind of feast I'd had so many times with my extended family in the United States.
I cleared my calendar. I fought off entangling commitments. Because getting a taste of what the Chinese call "fire chicken" doesn't happen by accident in China. It takes determination and focus. Here, they break out the bird only once, maybe twice a year, so immense care is needed to be in the right place at the right time on the last Thursday of November.
I arrived early. Surrounded by a bevy of fellow Americans, I chatted and drank draft beer. Sure, Champs had asked each diner to make a reservation, but I was there, in the flesh, so it was obvious I would be eating. Who needs something as formal as a reservation? After all, we're like a family here tonight in Champs, right? And as the evening went on, it actually started to feel a bit like a regular Thanksgiving at home: a cacophony of voices, camaraderie, the aroma of food just out of sight.
" I'd like to order the turkey dinner now, "I eventually told the waitress.
" I'm sorry, "she said with true pain on her face." We're out of turkey. "
Oh, that bird. What pain and pleasure it has brought me in life.
Turkey and I have a history that few others share. Soon after I graduated from high school in Minnesota, I worked on a turkey farm for a few years. We raised hundreds of thousands of "broad-breasted whites," which , as the name suggests, were a hybrid developed for the bodacious amount of white meat hanging from their chests.
One of my jobs was to reach beneath the hens and pick the eggs, which were then incubated and hatched. Many was the time I reached into a wooden nest to hear the peculiar, sour hiss of a brooding hen shortly before its cobra-like head would strike at me.
; But the task that's indelibly burned into my mind from those days was artificially breeding the hens. Their natural method of fertilizing the eggs was deemed too inefficient so we stepped in as middlemen, delivering with various contraptions the payload from the strutting toms to the squawking hens. I'll spare the details, but they remain vivid to me.
And so, after those formative farm years, turkey hasn 't been just a delicious meal; their consumption is also a time to reflect upon past pain and misdeeds.
But I'll admit, the anguish I felt at Champs had everything to do with satisfying a craving.
Half out of my mind with hunger - and beer - I pleaded with the manager to find some turkey. I don't know if he sensed more anger or anguish in me, but he dipped back into the kitchen for what seemed a fortnight.
"We have enough for one plate," he announced upon his return.
I tucked in, longing for the satisfaction that would carry me through another year.
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