Review of "Hot Life" documentary on Netflix

[x_los]

Some notes on this documentary on hot pot in various regions of China:

- They use the term ‘hot pot’ far more expansively than I thought was permissible, in a way that encompasses set, planned and pre-prepared dishes. superborb says she thinks “the only common factor is soup served over a heating element”.

- This guy in the middle of Macau goes five kilometres up a mountain every day with two Culligan jugs yolked on a stick to fetch extra-good spring water. That is so much fucking work.

- Apparently Macau’s cooked food stands can only be passed to lineal descendants, and new licences aren’t issued.

- I enjoyed the intense dramatic montage of men making a copper pot. Their pumpkin-shaped bronze tea pot was very cute, as well. Yunan copperware can get it.

- ‘A fierce dog guards the entrance to the shed where the secret blend is made.’ Cut to: the most innocuous dog you’ve ever seen, just pure O-O.

- This guy lighting his cigarette with a kitchen blowtorch while he works is a whole sexuality for someone, I am sure. 

- This other restauranteur is a Taiwanese immigrant to Chongqing, which is interesting as that’s not a directional flow I’ve heard about before. 

- ‘My son was tricked by duplicitous goat sellers.’ What a problem to have.

- This child’s shoes have small stuffed dumplings on the tips. Astounding.

- This next guy is having ginger milk curd for breakfast. superborb gave me this recipe for it, but I couldn’t get the microwave version to work at all. I might try the stove-top version later. I saved the leftover ginger pulp for cooking: inclusion in a stock might suit it best. 

- WHY IS THERE A SNAKE? superborb says snake tastes fine, it just has too many bones. I say this is like “Condor Heroes” all over again. You can’t trust people. Suddenly, they’re eating a snake. 

- Man, now they’re showing the live bamboo rats they’re going to cook? Sigh. I’m not about that Hot Life. 

- This guy is like, “fuck work, it’s mushroom season and I’m driving home for special mushroom hot pot.“ Who among us?

- This chef is visiting his dad’s grave with hotpot sauce in fancy packages to tell him they introduced his sauce to the Belgian market and it won an award. 

- Some of the show’s participants live in a Tulou village, which is very pretty. 

-  At one point someone in Chongqing with seemingly little money mentions that his wife is pregnant with his second child. I suppose this must have been filmed after 2015, so one-child policy is no longer an issue (the fine previously having been multiple times an average annual income, growing larger with each violation—I think it might have been income-linked, as well). Yet throughout the show, I kept catching strange details related to the topic. A ninety-year-old had multiple daughters: that made sense. But then the show focused on three forty-year-old brothers. The family originally hailed from a village, so perhaps they’d qualified for a relevant exception? 

In general, one-child policy seems so much more situationally porous and time-bounded than I think of it as, in terms of a ‘rule’. There seem to have been many cases where it didn’t quite apply. I guess if your local ‘council’ makes a case for not enforcing this (or simply has other priorities), it’s like any other rule oversight. Croydon Council is 'supposed' to be doing regular rubbish collection, too: a lot of things are supposed to happen.

superborb found a reference stating that many “cadres were middle-aged women who went through the collective period when childbearing was encouraged. They experienced continuous childbearing, and so were strongly supportive of the one-child policy." She commented that she didn't “consciously realise the effect the sudden shift from 'have more kids!' to 'have [fewer] kids!' would have had. In the 90s rural areas also stop violating the one child policy as it becomes [normalised], and this is consistent with rising economic” conditions. She also pointed out that many families registered children under relatives’ names.

It feels like a situation where the original motivations on the ground aren’t immediately comprehensible in retrospect. My understanding of the topic has been shaped by a much later, contemporary reaction narrative that’s entirely external, and specifically Western. Western coverage focuses on this programme as an inconvenient limitation of rights, and is almost entirely disinterested in the policy’s stated goals and the realisation thereof. But from this earlier point of view, imagine the justification and support this must have afforded a fuckton of women who weren’t necessarily interested in being baby factories.