I am suffering from chicken envy. I'm determined to cook a chicken like the golden brown ones you buy in any Washington grocery store, those beautiful roasted chickens done on a revolving spit. Those chickens you take for granted because you can just waltz in at 6 p.m. and buy one for dinner.

My Western-style house in China has a roasting spit in the oven, and I'm about to take it for a spin. I have my inaugural chicken right here, picked out this morning from a Beijing grocery store.

I remove the plastic wrap and something long and skinny flops down, bouncing off the sink. I look down; it looks back. This chicken still has its head, dangling on the end of a very long neck, eyes half open.

"It's looking at me!" My 8-year-old daughter squeals and bolts from the room.

OK, so it still has a head. I can deal with that. How hard can it be? Hack, crunch, grind. Finally, I've done the Marie Antoinette thing and the chicken looks a lot more...normal.

I pick up the metal spit and I'm about to stick it between its legs, but there's something in the way. Attached to the end of the drumsticks are feet—long, leathery chicken feet that end in sharp claws.

My housekeeper laughs as I struggle to remove the bottom part of the leg from the drumstick, and then shows me how to twist it just right to get the leg to snap off. Now I remember, too late, that I've been considering becoming a vegetarian.

The legs are off and the head is off and it's starting to look like most of the chickens I've known. But wait—something in the way and it's not one of those little white bags that contain the giblets. No, this is stuff I've never seen before.

"In my country, chickens come EMPTY!" I tell my housekeeper who finds this idea hilarious.

I reach in and start to pull out unidentified chicken stuff. Something very long and gray (don't ask), then something I recognize as a heart.

She moves me aside and lends a hand, reaches into the chicken and pulls out something so unexpected that it seems almost alien: five round yellow balls, the largest about the size of a ping pong ball, the smallest as big as a marble. They are slimy, but firm.

She points to her mouth, and the suggestion appalls me. People eat these things? Is she testing just how gullible I can be?

The yellow balls fascinate me. I put them on a plate and roll them around. They seem strangely familiar. I take a knife and gently poke one, and it splits open. The yellow inside runs freely, creating a puddle. And then, an epiphany. I had seen these mysterious yellow orbs before.

I run to the refrigerator and take out an egg. I point to the yellow balls, then to the eggs, looking to my housekeeper for confirmation. My housekeeper smiles and nods. I had gotten it right. These yellow orbs are eggs before they get a shell. They are un-laid eggs. For those of you who were way ahead of me, Okay, so I'm slow.

I watch as she pulls off short sticks attached to the bird. I think they're called "feathers".

She scrubs the skin and rubs off something that could be an outer layer of epidermis. I don't want to know what that is. Finally, we are confronted with a fully cleaned chicken. With all that "stuff" inside removed, this bird could stand to put on a few pounds.

Now it's the housekeeper's turn to watch, amazed, as I impale the bird on the metal spit and tuck the legs into a flap of skin and the wings into the neck cavity.

I put it in the oven, flip the dial and, voila! It revolves! We sit on the kitchen floor, amazed, staring through the glass door as the chicken slowly goes around and around. One leg slips out, and each time the chicken goes around, the leg flops. Turn, flop, turn, flop. Then the other leg slips out. Turn, flop, thump, turn, flop, thump. She motions that the chicken is trying to escape, to run away. We look back at the bird and her description is so apt that we both began to laugh, so hard tears pour from our eyes. A chicken doing the can-can transcends all language barriers.

An hour later it looks brown and beautiful and very small, less like a chicken than a good-sized pigeon. As I carve the bird I realize why the meat in kungpao chicken is cut into such small pieces. There is very little meat on a skinny Chinese chicken.

We are a family of four, so we each get a few bites. It's delicious.

Tomorrow, I'm buying a piece of pork.

The author is an American living in Beijing.