content: The French writer Simone de Beauvoir—reporting on her tour of China in the summer of 1955—wrote in The Long March (1958): “‘Oh, yes,’ the poet Ai Ts’ing told me one evening at table, ‘we eat everything: everything on four legs except the table; and except for our friends and relations, everything on two.’”  Apparently that last line about not eating friends and relations is occasionally ignored, too