Hakka Homeland - Marginalized China

Author: Huang Fayou
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: I spent three years in high school in the county of Shanghang, my hometown. What impressed me the most was the local snacks. In the early 1980s, life in the rural areas of my hometown was still quite impoverished, and having enough to eat was considered good. We, the boarding students from the countryside, regularly brought rice from home, and the school canteen would steam it for us. The vegetables were either homemade pickled cabbage or a five-cent boiled vegetable dish from the canteen, with just a tiny bit of floating oil on the soup, which was very bland. I remember a teacher’s wife set up a canteen at home, cooking fish offal soup, and surprisingly, some classmates even bought it. We were in our growing years, and studying was exhausting, so our stomachs were always ravenous. In Yu Hua’s The Story of Xiu Shuang Selling Blood, Xiu Shuang made red braised pork with his mouth for his sons on his birthday, cooked a clear fish soup for his wife, and finally made stir-fried liver for himself. This kind of optimism in hardship made people smile, but after laughing, it was hard not to feel sad. In fact, this wasn’t new to us. A large classroom housed over 30 students, and despite the teachers’ strict roll calls, we occasionally had late-night talks. I guess due to malnutrition and late development, along with the pressure of studying, we didn’t have time to think about trivial matters. Our late-night talks were mostly about food at first—red braised pork, white-cut chicken, and wild game from the mountains. Since we lacked fat in our diets, we talked about all kinds of meat. Later, our stomachs growled, so we got up to drink water or ate pickled cabbage with hot water. Some classmates who couldn’t stand it any longer would climb out the window. Outside were nearby farmers’ vegetable gardens, where they would pull up a radish or dig up a sweet potato to satisfy their cravings. More than a few classmates were too poor to afford vegetables, so they would buy a little soy sauce to soak their rice or simply swallow dry rice with coarse salt. I remember very clearly that soon after I entered school, a classmate named Lu Fazhong took me shopping. Near a small food stall, we found a piece of pork skin that had been hanging in the wind for several days. He was overjoyed and promised to take it to the school canteen to steam, to be shared between the two of us. But after steaming it several times, it was still too tough to chew! We were so hungry that we had to find a way to appease our stomachs, of course, with cheap food. With only a few cents to our names, we would run to the streets to look for cheap snacks. There were several stalls on Jiefang Road in the county selling pig blood soup, cooked in large iron pots for one cent per bowl. However, the pig blood soup was too fake—it was smooth to eat but would melt in your mouth. A classmate angrily said that it must take several pots of pig blood to make it this way. Many classmates liked the one-cent fried cakes, made from a mixture of rice and soybean paste, with some minced pork or beef mixed in for those made better. Some street vendors would carry the paste in white iron buckets and set up their stalls with a hot oil pan. Even early in the morning, the quiet alleys would echo with the endless cries of "Fried cake, fried cake," gradually fading away. When we had a bit more money, we would run to the opera house to drink two or three-cent bowls of "dou soup." In Hakka dialect, "dou" means "to hold," so dou soup is when the eater