By Emma Graham-Harrison
TONGXIN, China (Reuters) — Say “get rich” when you step
off a bus in the shabby northwestern Chinese town of Tongxin,
and a swarm of taxi drivers rush to offer their services.
None hopes to make a fortune, but for a few notes the
drivers are happy to guide visitors through a warren of muddy
backstreets to gated compounds where an illegal trade thrives.
But instead of dealing in guns or drugs, the criminals in
this corner of Ningxia province have caches of a tasteless
vegetable, prized only for the sound of its name.
Facai (pronounced fa-tsai) is a blue-green algae that grows
in the sandy semi-desert of western China, anchoring the fine
soil in place and retaining moisture to support other plants in
an area struggling to stop the desert expanding.
Its name sounds almost identical to characters meaning “get
rich,” making it popular — and extremely expensive — in
southern China, Hong Kong and cities with large ethnic Chinese
populations such as Singapore and New York.
Hunger for edible good luck is devastating China’s western
provinces, because it is harvested by raking up all the sparse
vegetation the facai grows among, leaving the sandy soil
exposed to the wind.
Dried and clumped together, its spindly black strands look
like a scouring pad or a head of very messy hair. Cooked, it
acquires the spongy texture of tree fungus, with a bland flavor
usually impossible to detect under heavy seasoning.
Groups of impoverished facai pickers, nicknamed “the
central fungus commission” in a bitter word play on the
all-powerful Central Military Commission in Beijing, then take
the bundles home to pick out the black strands and sell them on
to traders.
“The facai serves as a net that covers the sandy areas and
forms the base for other species to grow on,” said Lister
Cheung, chief executive of the Hong Kong Conservancy
Association which has been campaigning against eating facai for
several years.
“When it is collected they rake over sandy areas, and to
collect just one catty (21 ounces) they plow up the equivalent
of four to five football fields,” she added.
For that amount, a trader in Ningxia can earn almost as
much as the 300 yuan ($38) average monthly cash income for a
Chinese farmer.
Extra acres of exposed land contribute sand to the whirling
storms that each spring travel as far as the capital Beijing,
over 500 miles away, turning the air there as orange-yellow as
the Martian atmosphere in low-budget science-fiction films.
NO OPTIONS
This environmental devastation — and its visible impact on
the seat of China’s government — led to a ban on collection,
sale and export of the algae six years ago.
But the trade continues, centered on the predominantly
Muslim south of Ningxia because in one of the most
poverty-stricken regions of China residents have few other
options.
It is a land of dry river beds and scrappy exhausted hills.
One village, summing up a desperate thirst that has only
worsened with the mismanagement of recent years, is called
Hanjiaoshui, meaning “shout for water.”
Drug trading and use is rife, recurrent droughts make crops
fail regularly and even herding sheep and goats is strictly
controlled because their grazing speeds up desertification.
“It hasn’t rained for four years. How can I support my
family here?” said 22-year-old Ma Weijun, an unemployed father
squatting despondently beside his house outside the hamlet of
Xiamaguan.
Food handed out by the government to compensate for land
placed off limits by anti-desertification programs is of such
low quality only animals can eat it, other villagers say.
But the facai, which no one there will admit to picking,
sells for 400 yuan a kilogram (2.2 pounds) in nearby Tongxin.
It goes for five times that much in Hong Kong where it is
so prized that a double black market — for fake versions of
the illegal plant made from dyed seaweed or corn husks —
flourishes.
SELLERS FRET, DINERS ENJOY
The whole town knows where to buy the facai, but the ban
has pushed the trade underground and created a climate of fear.
A wholesale market, officially closed in 2000, is now
hidden down a maze of winding streets in the town’s
impoverished heart.
Sacks of facai in every stage of preparation from bundles
of grass to silky black bundles line the road. But there are no
Han Chinese or foreigners, and the Muslim traders block
photographs, grill outsiders and refuse to answer any
questions.
Even in the homes of wealthier middlemen, many of whom are
trying to shift into the wool trade, there is tension in the
air.
“I don’t do this any more, this is just the last of my
stock,” said one seller, glancing nervously at his courtyard
gate as he pulled bundles of the dried plant from a back room.
Only wealthy diners seem unconcerned and, ironically, the
ban and environmentalists’ campaigns have pushed up prices,
making it an even more prestigious treat for guests.
“We can’t eat it at home,” an official from one of the
city’s top state-owned firms explained at a dinner for foreign
visitors before popping a clump into her mouth.
“It’s expensive and it’s banned. But good for your health.”
($1 = 7.976 yuan)
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