by You Jin
If my daughter were a bird, my greatest wish as her mum was not to build her a comfortable nest on the thin branches, but to give her all the support and encouragement she needed, and the freedom and independence she deserved, to follow her heart and pursue her own dreams in the blue sky.
CHAPTER 8
The Universe in a Bowl
Who Gets the Drumstick
AN INTERESTING QUESTION: if there is a big, juicy steamed chicken on the table, who gets the drumstick? When I ask my friends this question, the answer is invariably: “Of course, I give it to the children.” In the traditional Chinese view, the child is king of the house, always getting the sweetest, tastiest and best of everything. This effectively passes a completely mistaken notion to the children, making them think that they can have things their own way, and the parents will always give in to them.
I have witnessed many examples of this in life. I once saw a mother and her eight-year-old son eating together. The son treated the food he did not want to eat like garbage, tossing it all rudely onto his mother’s plate. Then he started picking the food he did like from his mother’s plate, without any thought for how she might feel about it. And all the while, she just sat there smiling at everything he did.
There is a popular old story: when a child was very small, his mother intentionally told him that she did not eat fish, except for the fish head. As a result, she always waited until the child had finished every morsel of the fish, then ate the head left behind. When the child was grown, he believed she only liked the fish head, and so thought he was pleasing her when he only gave her that to eat. This is what is sure to happen when parents tell white lies to their children.
But another situation is just as likely to develop. If a child is always treated as the most important thing on Earth, then even if he knows his mother likes to eat fish, it will be impossible to correct his ways. He will always take the fulfilment of his own desires as the top priority, not caring in the least what his parents do or do not like to eat.
The way I see it, if a mother likes to eat fish, she should enjoy it together with her children, sharing the snowy white flesh among the whole family. If the fish is small, everyone should just take a smaller portion. In this way, both joys and hardships are shared. There is no need to tell white lies, or to torture oneself to eat the lesser fish head while the rest enjoy the succulent meat. (Of course, for those who really do prefer fish head, that’s a different story.)
Talking of sharing hardships, it calls to mind another story I heard:
There was a village that suffered from famine. One mother decided to bring her three children through the jungle to another village, where her relatives lived. Unfortunately, when they travelled deep into the vast jungle, they lost their way, and soon the mother ran out of the food she had brought on the journey. She wept and prayed for help, but none came. Eventually, she came across a fruit tree. The mother plucked the fruit and gave it to her three children, but because she did not want to deprive the little ones, she could not bear to eat any herself. In the end, she starved to death. The three children survived on the fruit for a few more days. After they had eaten all the fruit, two of the children starved to death, leaving only one to be finally saved.
Most people who hear this story praise the mother for her sacrifice, but I feel she was quite foolish. As the old saying goes: “as long as the green hills last, there will always be wood to burn”. If she had shared the fruit with her children, who knows whether they might not have come across another tree as they continued their journey through the forest, then a third, a fourth, and many more. There could have been countless fruit-bearing trees around them, which would have allowed the mother and her children all to live. But as it stands, because the mother had great affection but no wisdom, she and two of her children died for nothing. From this we can see that blind devotion is useless, and blind love is even more so.
In the early 1990s, I went for holiday in the Czech Republic. While I was there, I heard a true story that made a profound impression on me. The country had just opened up after years of being closed off to the rest of the world. Products from overseas were very expensive. Even bananas were an exotic treat. Buying a bunch of bananas was unheard of. They were so precious and so hard to come by that each banana was sold individually.
I was told this story by a local person there:
Once when he had earned a little money, a man decided to buy a banana for his elderly mother to satisfy her craving. When she saw the bright yellow banana, looking like a gold bar, the old woman’s eyes lit up with pleasure. She looked at it and touched it, but could not bear to eat it. When her son was not looking, she hid it. Only that evening when her grandson came home from school did she take it out, happily giving it to him. The boy saw the banana, which resembled the crescent moon, and his eyes lit up with delight. He too looked at it and touched it, but couldn’t bear to eat it. He quietly hid it away. When his mother came home from work the next day after doing the night shift, he took it out, his face bright, and presented it to her. Seeing the treasured fruit, her eyes filled with tenderness; she looked at it and touched it, but couldn’t bear to eat it. When her husband came home, she gave it to him. When he saw that the banana had made the rounds and come back to him, his eyes filled with tears. The banana had been ripe when he bought it, but now, after this roundabout journey, it had become soft and mushy. In the end, he cut it into pieces and the whole family sat down and shared it.
In my home, my elders are always put first. The tastiest and best of everything is always given to them. Next in line is me and my husband, with the children coming after us.
If you think about it, the elderly have already walked a good portion of their life journey, so shouldn’t we do all we can to make their later years more enjoyable? And for ourselves, shouldn’t we take care of our needs after a hard day of work? But the children are still young, and they still have a long road ahead of them in which they will have plenty of opportunities to experience the delicacies of this world. Why, then, should we give them all the best and tastiest things now?
So when it comes to food and drink, I always practise this habit quite scrupulously. If I invite my dear parents to my home for dinner, I always prepare their favourite dishes. When we go out for a meal, I always take the best portions and place those in my parents’ bowls. Everything else is for me and my children to share.
Thinking back, my parents did the same for my grandparents when I was growing up. My father would take the juicy white meat of the fish and put it in my grandfather’s bowl, filling the blue and white porcelain vessel to overflowing as a huge smile appeared on my grandfather’s face. This is an enduring memory from my childhood.
Respect for one’s elders should filter into every detail of one’s daily life. Only then can our traditional values be passed down to the next generation.
When we do not have other elders eating with us, I become the one in the position of authority. At our house, the following scenario often crops up: there is a chicken on the table (whether fried golden brown or braised), with two drumsticks sparkling proudly with greasy brightness. My young kids, fork in hand, will lift their heads and ask, “Mama, who gets the drumstick?”
I happily pull off the drumsticks, place them in my bowl and James’s and say, “Last time you and your brother ate the drumstick. Now it’s our turn.”
Open and Shut
As the evening sun fell through the window, golden patterns of light danced along the kitchen walls. The pot sat on the stove, lotus root soup boiling inside. In the soup were a chicken, dried scallops, wolfberries, red dates and dried cuttlefish, and it had already been simmering for four long hours, filling the whole kitchen with its aroma. I quickly fried beef with onions and a preserved vegetable omelette, and stir-fried green vegetables. Just as I finished cooking, I heard the school bus pull up in front of the house.
At the time, Fung Teck and Ke Jun were both going to school at the nearby Henry Park Primary
School. Fung Teck was in Primary 3 and Ke Jun in Primary 2.
Walking out of the house, I saw the sun setting, a beautiful red blaze in the sky. My children jumped down from the school bus, backpacks slung over their shoulders. They called excitedly, “Mama!”
I walked them into the house and by the time they had finished showering, dinner was on the table. We all sat around the table and started eating.
My family never observed the rule of “don’t talk while you eat”. As we ate, the conversation flew happily about.
Fung Teck said the teacher made his classmate Guo Qiang stand in the corner that day because he had not done his homework. He felt Guo Qiang had been treated unfairly: “He lost his exercise book. How could he do his homework? Without even asking what really happened, the teacher made him stand in the corner. She shouldn’t do that!”
I asked, “Who lost his exercise book? The teacher?”
He shook his head and said, “Of course not.”
So I said, “Then who lost it?”
He said, “Guo Qiang.”
I replied, “Guo Qiang is already in Primary 3. He should take responsibility for his own actions. The teacher made him stand in the corner to remind him that failing to take care of his property is not the right thing to do.”
My older son, Fung Yee, usually did not have much to say at the table, but he spoke up at this point, noting, “Even though it is Guo Qiang’s own fault, the teacher shouldn’t make him stand in the corner.”
I looked quizzically at my son, who was in Secondary 2 at this time. I asked, “Isn’t it a universal rule that the one who does wrong gets punished?”
He explained, “But there are two types of wrongs. One is done purposely, the other is an accident. If you do it on purpose, of course you should be punished, but Guo Qiang didn’t lose his exercise book on purpose, and he certainly didn’t skip doing homework on purpose, so why does the teacher want to punish him?”
His argument made me think. When a child makes a mistake, big or small, we who are parents and teachers should put forth the effort to find out why before we issue punishment. In fact, for teaching purposes, it is more important for us to address the reasons for a mistake than to implement punishment. After I gave this question some thought, I became a more compassionate person.
When I was teaching and a student did something wrong, I always gave her or him a chance to explain. If the reason was one I could accept, I often simply issued a warning, instead of reporting the student for further disciplinary action. Sometimes, especially if the school rules were quite strict, I chose to be more lenient.
Education is a two-way street. Those of us who choose to become educators are also signing up to receive coaching ourselves. We cannot look down on the ideas held by young people. Sometimes they are the ones who teach us new ways of thinking.
This is why I always see our family meals as a good time for communication. We always use it as a time for “Open and Shut” family discussions. What is “shut” are all external streams of communication: television, computers, phones. What is “open” are our hearts, minds and mouths, as we enjoy both a good meal and good conversation.
For many years, we observed this rule quite strictly. It quickly became a matter of habit. Even though my children are grown now, we still share this family tradition. In fact, this tradition was handed down from my parents. When I was growing up, dinner was a major event in our house. Because my father wanted to enjoy my mother’s delicious dishes, he would often take the phone off the hook at dinner time. We would chat as we ate, sharing news and catching up on what was going on with each other. It was at this time that all manner of mistaken thoughts or misperceptions were brought to my parents’ attention.
I really don’t agree with the method that many families employ for dinner. Taking some of my distant relatives as an example, as soon as the food is prepared, they place it all on the table, and each person eats at her or his convenience. One of the children watches television, one plays a computer game, and another plays with the food on his plate until it is all just a big mess. Worst of all, when the dishes prepared by the domestic helper don’t suit the family’s taste, no one wants to eat it, and some even order fast food to be delivered, while all that perfectly good food sits there on the table going to waste.
I have a friend whose children like to watch a TV show at seven o’clock every night. Eating their meal in front of the television, the children do not even really know what the food tastes like. This is completely at odds with my notion of family education through the culinary arts. In other words, you spend half the day cooking, but if they just gobble everything down without a second thought, isn’t that like putting forth great effort to move a huge stone, then just dropping it carelessly on your own foot?
After I had children, the importance of education through food was impressed even more deeply upon me. At first, I had a huge gap in my understanding of the culinary arts, but after a great deal of effort and hard work, I gained some skill in this area. I first signed up for a cooking class, but I soon realised that the strict sort of “one tablespoon of salt, two tablespoons of sugar, three tablespoons of soya sauce, four tablespoons of wine” approach most people learn from chefs did not work for me. I decided to learn from books, and to discover the great pleasure of life through self-learning. After all, in the business of cooking, it is all about drawing inferences.
So I went to the bookstore and bought many cookbooks. With titles like Matching Ingredients, 100 Chicken Recipes, Professional Fish Preparation, Four Seasons Home-cooked Meals, All About Snacks and Tonic Soups, I built up a wide body of knowledge. The book that was the biggest help to me at the time was one published by a Taiwanese press, Weiquan Publishing House, entitled Chinese Cooking, edited by Huang Shouhui. The book is a collection of many delicious recipes. Fish, duck, chicken, vegetable and tofu dishes are all there in abundance. Boiled, deep-fried, stir-fried, braised, steamed, poached and grilled methods are all employed. Most importantly, it is easy to learn from this book, and the dishes created by following its recipes are truly delicious. After learning from this chef, I could cook many popular dishes, including kung pao chicken, braised brisket, sweet and sour fish, fried prawns with pepper sauce, fried french beans with minced pork and preserved vegetables, and tofu omelettes. Hearing my family members ooh and aah over the dishes was really a good feeling.
Once I had grasped the basics of cooking, I wanted to move deeper into the subject. It was then that I turned to friends as my instructors. My major principle of learning is, “don’t ask twice”. In other words, I only asked once, but in great detail; then I would experiment, modifying the method as I went along. I did not want to make a nuisance of myself by asking the same thing over and over, so when I humbled myself to ask, my friends were usually very willing to share their knowledge.
My skills quickly expanded, and the more I learned, the more I was able to pick up along the way. Chinese cooking, western cooking, and snacks were all part of my repertoire. But it is really astonishing how broad and profound culinary science is. I learn every day and all the time, but there is always more to learn.
Even though what I learned really just scratched the surface, it was a great boost to the quality of our family meals. Each day I cooked different dishes, not repeating one in a month’s time. Dinner became the time my children really looked forward to.
When my daughter was in primary school, she said something I will never forget. “Mama, every day after school, I’m always the first student to leave the classroom. I always want to hurry home and eat what you’ve prepared.”
Food made with affection is like a strong cord, which can tie our children’s hearts to home even when they are thousands of miles away. When my daughter went to London for her studies, she sent me an email that included these words:
Mama, it is cold and windy outside, making me just want to stay inside all the time. Do you know what I miss most? Your ham and winter melon soup. In the sou
p, round mushrooms, radish chunks, and chopped scallion float, filled with flavour, and the soup is thick and tasty. Mama, I want one bowl—just one bowl! That would be enough to lift my spirits. But now, there’s nothing to drink here but the cold north wind.
Rainbow Snow Cones
Many parents explore all sorts of methods and spend large amounts of money on boosting their children’s health, feeding them bird’s nest, ginseng, Chinese caterpillar fungus, etc. I don’t do this. I believe that if a child has a wide variety of foods in her diet, all the nutrition she needs for her development will be included. Because of this, I did not allow my children to pick and choose their own food; they had to finish whatever was on their plate, and to cherish it as well. I prepared just enough for each meal, and in both word and action, I taught them not to waste food.
Because my husband and I both love good cooking, we often took the whole family out to different restaurants. During such times, we adopted a democratic spirit and let the children order the dishes. But we also made it clear that, even if the food did not suit their tastes, they had to finish it. There is one exception, though: I do not allow my children to eat snow cones.
When I was small, I often came across roadside stalls selling this rainbow-coloured dessert. The ice was shaved and formed into a ball, and then sweet, coloured syrups were poured over the top. We would hold these in our hands and eat as we walked. The sugary syrup would flow like a frigid river, from my mouth down my throat and to my organs, chilling them. By the time my children were born, these sorts of stalls could no longer be found; snow cones had moved to indoor convenience shops, with a much higher price tag. And even though I knew that the kids loved them, I would not let them eat the icy desserts. The reason was that both Fung Yee and Fung Teck had asthma, and I believed that the shock of cold from the snow cones could trigger asthma attacks.