Chicken Incarnadine

A Chinese Communist-era recollection of how chicken gets to your dinner bowl

When I was a child in China, it was always easy to know when my mother was cooking chicken for dinner. As soon as you pushed open the heavy, triple-bolted iron door (fireproof, for reasons I would only understand later), the smell of chicken feathers, chicken guts, and chicken blood would hit you long before you got to the kitchen.

The kitchen, like most Chinese kitchens at the time, was of communist-era design — long and narrow, with two gas…