I intended to post last night but instead ended up at the Handsome Furs show at The Bowery Ballroom, which was INSANELY good and Dan Boeckner can’t write a bad song. But thankfully Blognut field corresponent, Beta Blognut, has stepped in with Shanghai Surprise #1. And stay tuned for more of Beta’s Asian Donut reporting in the coming weeks.

Beta Blognut finds himself in the Olympic host city of Beijing. Almost the first thing you see coming from the airport is the vaguely donut-shaped Olympic Stadium, also known as the bird’s nest. Construction goes on at all hours of the night, and Beijing’s skyline is filled starbursts of experimental architecture, lording over where hutongs once huddled. Rem Koolhaas’ controversial CCTV building continues to garner press. The cantilevered, 230-meter towers have no right angles, the resulting structure instead that of a loop. Critics and proponents alike call it “The Twisted Doughnut.”

Surely, an ancient culture such as the Chinese knows about donuts. What haven’t they stuck into boiling vats of soybean oil over the centuries? But as Beta Blognut imbibes the cement-flavored air of Beijing, he fails to catch a trace of baking dough. The 7-Eleven next door to the hotel proffers bread that tastes like a stick of butter rolled in chocolate, but they don’t sell donuts. Another bakery serves a Chinese version of a Monte Carlo that apparently is coated with shaved pork and then deep-fried, but no ‘nut.

I calm myself with a stick of glazed crab apple skewers (though in this photo, they look particularly like wee tomatoes). “Perhaps the Chinese don’t make doughnuts?” I crunch to myself, tooth and the thick glazed carapace alike crumbling in my mouth, at the same time mindful of the massive stone in these little candied apples.
Such a fear that China may not make doughnuts (meaning I can’t expense this trip to Blognut) manifests itself at the Pizza Hut across the walkway from Starbucks. A placard offers American style pizza: a steaming pie chock full of pepperoni and hamburger meat, its crusts stuffed with hot dogs. If that doesn’t say America…then what fate might await the beloved, benevolent ‘nut?

I tentatively asked local Chinese merchants if they knew where a tourist such as myself might have the finest example of doughnuts that Beijing has to offer to its Olympians come summer, but get blank stares. Soon after, I’m reduced to clasping my thumb and forefinger together, pantomime dipping it into their woks full of roiling oil. They start talking then, motioning at me like I’m a crazy western devil. But how else to convey a ring of fried dough? Taxi drivers pretended they didn’t speak English and couldn’t read Pinyin. Much like pizza, maybe doughnuts were lost in translation, too. Maybe these twisted breadsticks I saw on street carts were what happened when they made out the words “dough knot”?

Shanghai feels ever so slightly more European than Beijing, and perhaps because Shanghai’s combined sewage and coal factories aren’t quite as oppressive and lung-infecting as Beijing’s air, one day a familiar odor hits to our nose: baking bread!

The shop smells amazing, that too-rare scent of flour-raising and baking in an oven. Beta Blognut steps inside, only to find that this is the closest thing to a donut to be had inside. Alas, it tastes just like it looks: hamburger bun with a daub of gelatinous marmalade that immediately drops off.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Travelogue, Field Correspondent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.