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We talk about Chinese food in the West as if it’s a single, unified cuisine, but anyone who has visited China knows that’s not the case. There is East China food, West China food, and North and South China food, and that’s before we even start talking about the combinations between them and the sub-categories. Imagine trying to methodically work your way through successive regional variants until you’ve tasted every dish and cooking style this vast country has to offer. You might start your tour from some central point and swing out in an ever-growing arc, each day anew savoring new foods or culinary variations. But let’s face it. You could no more taste every variation of Chinese cuisines than you could see every gradation of hue in the seven colors of the rainbow’s palette from red through orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo to violet. The culinary expanse boggles the mind. So how do I fit in here? There are two kinds of Westerners. There are the bold, for whom no challenge is too great -- like, say, the swashbuckling privateer Sir Francis Drake, who plundered Spain’s silver shipments from the New World in the 16th century to serve Queen Elizabeth I of England. Then there are the lily-livered ones ... why single them out by name? They already have enough burdens in life. As Drake’s contemporary William Shakespeare wrote: “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once”. | 
