Memoirs of a Eurasian

by Vivian Yang

  Wang Hong was right. I was responsible for buying perishables and cooking during weekdays. A refrigerator was a luxury few had. Neighborhood open-air grocery stalls compensated for that. Meats were dear and sources of proteins scarce. Rationing was in place so all had bits to share. Vegetables were abundant and easy to prepare. Mother warned me about the manure so I cleaned them with care.

  The Sunday Russian dinner was an affirmation of our heritage discretely carried out. We painstakingly acquired the ingredients for its set menu. Cucumber salad for appetizer, khleb for bread, borscht for soup, and the fiery sorghum liquor baijiu for Mother’s faux vodka.

  To prepare the salad I used red bell pepper, green gourd, rice vinegar, and the prized brown “Cuban sugar.” The rations allowed 50 grams per month for an ordinary Shanghainese. Our special status qualified us for double that amount. The Bay of Pigs-triggered U.S. trade embargo was well into its second decade, but China would pay no heed to the U.S. Paper Tiger’s decree, our Politics teacher told us. We did business with Castro’s Communist regime and shared with it the same sense of international justice. “Guba bi sheng, meidi bi bai! -- Cuba will win undeniably and the U.S. imperialists will lose for sure!” and “Cuba Sí! Yankee No!” We used to chant this in school.

  I also bought at the store khleb, crisply baked on the premises the way the long-departed First Russian Bakery would have made it, genuine from the dough mix to the crumbs.

  “Ten percent off for our prettiest regular!” the chef-capped master baker called out to the centralized cashiers, triggering envious looks at me that I would rather have avoided.

  With our special dairy coupons I got half a pint of fresh cream and a stick of butter. At home, I poured the cream into an empty tin, tied up three pairs of chopsticks and beat it in one circular direction until a thick pile of white substance was formed. It was to be put on the borscht.

  Water was being boiled in one of our two aluminum pots, both with a crooked lid. I had dropped them on the floor. When the second one became dented, Mother could not contain her anger. “Why did you have to smash them like this one after another? I can’t exactly afford a new cooking pot, can I?”

  I had bowed my head each time to apologize, thinking in self-defense that I was practically an Ah Bu to her here in Shanghai: cooking, shopping, and cleaning in addition to school. Besides, despite being only twelve years old, I qualified as a full “overseas returnee”, effectively doubling our special coupons allocation.

  But Mother emphasized that she played fair even though she always had two servings of borscht and khleb versus my one. She always said, “To raise you I gave up my own professional dream. I derive little enjoyment from dealing with talentless students who are here because of their parents’ standing and connections.”

  Every Sunday we opened one can of tomato puree. The socialist planned economy meant that supplies rarely met demand. The cans were export rejects shipped to the store in bulk and Mother stockpiled them. Often they were not seen again for months on end. I used butter sticks for oil to stir-fry tomato puree with diced pork -- never beef as it was rationed to the Chinese Muslims only. “At least butter is made of cow’s milk so there is a connection to beef,” Mother once said.

  I cut a head of cabbage, diced two potatoes, and sliced an onion. The last task often reduced me to tears. Seeing this, Mother would occasionally laugh. In rare moments like these, she appeared content and I felt less unwanted.

  Everything would go into the water. We let it simmer. How fortunate we were to own a gas-powered “turtle’s head”! A bright orange rubber tube connected to the meter was all it took, although it had to go through Mother’s bedroom to reach the outside room cooking area next to my bed. Most people used coal briquettes for cooking.

  Turtle’s head was the affectionate nickname Shanghainese gave to this type of single-range due to its round body and neck-shaped stem. The phallic symbolism was utterly lost on me when I had first heard it mentioned by the now deceased “Chief Dog Chen”. Despite the visual resemblance of the turtle’s head in relation to its shell – now tucked in and now sticking out –actual male genitalia were nowhere for me to see at that time. Mother had refused to disclose my father’s identity and there were no men under our roof.

  No Little League. No trick or treat. No cooking show on TV. No TV, period. But the routine fortified my interest in cuisine.

  In the winter of 1974, we had an accident while cooking. What started out as a casual remark on Mother’s part had an indelible impact on my psyche.

  “Beetroots are rarely on sale and sour cream is simply nonexistent,” Mother said with a sigh when we were cooking that day. “But the sup-making efforts must go on! After all, our borscht is really good enough for Luosong biesan.”

  “You mean you and me – Russian beggars?”

  “Well yes, hierarchy-minded old Shanghainese used to call stateless refugees loitering in the French Concession that name. The true masters of this city were Western expatriates known as the Shanghailanders, the Yanks, the Brits, the French and the Germans, you see.”

  “How insulting! I’ll never submit to this kind of thing.”

  “We have no choice. You learn to be flexible to get ahead.”

  “But I got ahead by fighting back tactfully. A schoolmate of mine called me a Soviet revisionist and I said I’m a revolutionary descendant of Lenin and Stalin. Now everybody has stopped taunting me with that.” I related my confrontation with Condiments but didn’t mention the street sweeper.

  Mother grabbed a glass, filled the baijiu to its rim, and took a gulp. “So you demonstrated your smart-ass racial pride in front of them all? Did it ever occur to you that he could be a cadre’s son and his reporting on you could jeopardize my career?”

  “But he isn’t. He provoked me because he wanted attention.”

  “So you were right in endangering me further as if walking around with that face isn’t enough!”

  “But I got that face from you!”

  Enraged, Mother charged in my direction. Her drink spilled onto the lit stove. The tongues of flame spread along the greasy rubber tube into the bedroom. She dropped her glass on the floor and dashed into her room. I followed her in.

  Mother threw her burning bed sheets in my direction and set my clothes on fire. Still, she pulled a cardboard box from under her bed and smothered the flame with her body. Only then did she call out at me, “Roll over! Roll over quick, Mo Mo!”

  I did so in reflex. Luckily only my outer clothes got burnt a little. I was unscathed.

  “Thank goodness everything’s fine,” Mother said. “I’ll get a replacement rubber tube from Old Wang so you can resume cooking.”

  After the former Bureau Chief Chen’s suicide, Old Wang was assigned to the Conservatory’s sister institution the Film Studio as a stage set attendant. Mother periodically recorded for revolutionary film soundtracks there.

  With no apologies to me, Mother went on to examine the box she had rescued. Part of what appeared to be newspaper clippings was burnt. I reached over to get a closer look but she immediately thrust the paper back into the box.

  “Get out of my room, now!”

  Upon returning from school the following afternoon, I noticed that a different, newer rubber hose was connected to the turtle’s head.

  On the door to Mother’s bedroom, a black iron padlock had also been installed. The brand name cast in its middle read: FOREVER.

  5 Don’t Know Much Biology

  Fifteen years since China’s 1949 Liberation, remnants of Shanghai’s days as the Paris of the East still lived on in the prevalence of pidgin words in our city’s patois. La ss ka for “the last”, jiu ss wun for “deuce #1”, and so on. La san, derived from the English word “lassie”, referred to an adolescent girl with a burgeoning curiosity for the mystery of human procreation.

  “Do you know where we come from?” Wang Hong asked me once after school.

  “Nn-no,” I stuttered, fearing that a question about my b
irth would follow.

  A smug but hesitant smile appeared on her chubby face. “If I tell you the truth, would you let me go see your home?”

  The embarrassing image of a padlock on a door within a flat came to my mind. “I’m afraid my mother wouldn’t allow it.”

  Wang Hong stared down at the ground, her foot making a pattern on the cobblestone street to conceal her disappointment. Her big toes were poking out of her aluminum-buckled black cloth shoes. Come to think of it, other than her plastic sandals, I had never seen her in a different pair of footwear.

  Presently, she looked up at me and said, “I’ll tell you anyway. Come to my place and I’ll show you.”

  “But I have to go to the wet market.”

  “Ai-ya, Mo Mo, it’ll take only a minute!” Without giving me a chance to object further, she started to drag me.

  She lived with her parents in a room on the ground floor of a house. “Our home used to be the garage of a bourgeois family. We moved into this house with four other proletarian families after they were ‘swept out like dust’,” she said.

  I recognized the familiar term from the height of the Cultural Revolution when the homes of many former European concessions residents were divided and reallocated to working-class families. Suddenly, I thought about the street sweeper. He could very well have been “swept out like dust” from a house like this and ordered to literally sweep the dust on the street to reform himself.

  As Wang Hong opened the door, I realized that it was the first time I had been invited to someone’s home. I stood by the entrance, as there seemed to be little room to move about. It was even smaller than the room Mother and I had rented from Ah Bu, although my memory of Hong Kong was extremely vague now.

  Four wooden planks atop three benches formed the bed that took up a third of the Wangs’ living space. A tiny square table sat in one corner of the room with two stools tucked underneath it. Reading my mind, Wang Hong explained, “I sit on the edge of the bed to eat. Come in. We can sit on the stools now.” I nodded, noting with my nose first that the only space left in her home was occupied by a wooden chamber pot for human waste. This household of three had to perform Taoist rites in a snail shell.

  Wang Hong touched the uneven surface of the bed we sat on. “This is what caused my birth, because our parents slept together. It’s called ‘sex’ and it’s a lot of fun!” she announced knowingly, her butt moving about on the squeaking bed.

  Ah, sex. I had heard that topic discussed amongst the men in Condiments’ dad’s stop. Sex was a decadent bourgeois act that our over 800 million people nonetheless never ceased to engage in.

  “Too much sex and too many Chinese,” one man had complained.

  “That’s why the government allows us one child per couple,” said another.

  “But you cannot always resist the temptations from those la san,” a third admitted.

  Wang Hong was not a la san but she was interested in sex. Wang Hong wanted to play hard and live well. She was envious of older la san who dared to give tantalizing smiles to peach-fuzzed boys, boys who would whistle or compliment the girls’ swaying bodies as they passed by. Most of all, Wang Hong wanted to be asked out on a date even if just to share with the boy a bottle of yanqishui, the salty, carbonated soft drink whose pre-Communist day sultry formula was as well guarded as that of Coca-Cola.

  Not that yanqishui should be considered the Shanghainese cousin of the ubiquitous beverage elsewhere in the world. To my generation of youngsters, Coca-Cola was not only unavailable, but also unthinkably undrinkable. Most would associate its dark brown color with a common cough syrup extracted from herbs. We had not yet encountered a Coke in any form, medium or state -- not the can, the bottle, or the sizzling bubbles floating atop the liquid. Nor had we seen Chairman Mao headshots à la Jackie O ones, or for that matter the Campbell’s Soup Cans, be they Chicken Gumbo or Tomato Rice. The canned tomato puree rejects Mother and I made our Sunday borscht out of, yes. But those weren’t the ones that would get you wall space at the MoMA or the Guggenheim. Red on top, white at the bottom, like the flag of Monaco, or the flag of Poland upside down, those red and white Andy Warhol prints we had never come across. We young successors of the Chinese revolution simply did not share the rest of the contemporary world’s collective retinas.

  Never heard of Woodstock, nor a bar of the music played there. Never knew about the Pill. Never realized pot was a recreational drug and not a container for collecting human feces where indoor plumbing was nonexistent. Never been told our city’s bygone glories. Never watched “Shanghai Express.” Never known Marlene Dietrich as Shanghai Lily. No Greta Garbo. No Joe DiMaggio. No Marilyn Monroe. No McDonald’s Happy Meal. No Madonna soundtracks from “Papa Don’t Preach”. Nothing. Nowhere. China the country sealed off as good old Middle Kingdom ought to be. All imperialists and revisionist poisons were banned: English, Finnish, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Yiddish – all rubbish, except in the case of the aforementioned resilient pidgin.

  Yanqishui was available for sale in the condiments store but Condiments himself would never be allowed to get a sip. Only couples who were dating bought the drink and they had to take turns imbibing it as one free straw only came with each bottle. Just as well, since it was the closest thing to a French kiss. For the pairs walking up and down the French plane tree-lined boulevards, capturing the right mixture of adventure and gratification was the key. The European atmosphere had an effect on Shanghai’s adolescents especially then. When deprived, every little bit goes a longer way.

  The motive behind sharing a drink was not always romantic. For ten fen (five cents), a stove-wheeling street vendor would sell you a hard-boiled egg in five spices, one of our city’s favorite snacks. At a time when Chairman Mao declared the property-less the leading class, few could afford to indulge in a whole bowl of soup alone. A la san perching on an open-air stall could slurp down her half of a noodle soup without a second thought if only it were available to her. She was thus looked down upon by the politically-proper plebeians. Perhaps the most contemptible thing about a la san was her ability to discern the anatomic differences between the genders in a human ocean of navy blue Mao-style tunics and use the observance to her advantage.

  Endowed with a la san-ready body, I was quietly fighting my pubescent embarrassment when Mother asked me a question in the tone of an accusation. “You’re not a little girl anymore. What are your plans for the future?”

  “Nothing specific yet, but …”

  “But what?”

  “You see, Mother … I’ve never felt completely comfortable with … looking different and …” I paused, exhaling.

  She looked at me askance. “I’m sorry my precious darling – that you’ll have come to this world to put up with all this.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Mother. I’ve always strived to better myself and to become someone who is not judged by the way I look. I don’t yet know how but I’m determined to make that happen someday.”

  The expression in her deep chestnut-colored eyes softened a bit. “You should learn to create opportunities for yourself using what you do have. When I was your age, I could already read the notes, so when the Conservatory –”

  “You seized the opportunity and enrolled in it at age 12,” I completed her sentence, knowing that she had learned to read the notes from her early Catholic school education.

  “Let me finish!” she snapped. “All I can see is a growing blob with no brains to match it.”

  “That’s not true! In fact I’ve already signed up for the tryout for the School District Sports Authority’s junior swim team.”

  “Really?” Mother frowned. “I would prefer that you audition at the Studio. I hear they’re planning to reinstate the acting program. Why didn’t you tell me you were interested in swimming?”

  “I didn’t know if I’d be selected, knowing our classification. I don’t want to disappoint you if I were ruled out from the outset.”

  She nodded pensively. “At
least you took the initiative. We’ll see how this will turn out, then.”

  Mother announced on Sunday that I was allowed two servings of everything during dinner.

  “You’re in.”

  “The swim team? But they didn’t even ask me to go to the tryout?”

  “That won’t be necessary. They know what you look like.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You tell me, you idiot! Now train hard and try to make the boarding program eventually. Don’t you dare blow it!”

  I started swimming the following month. Like the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, China had a state-sponsored system to cultivate future Olympic medalists. We received after school free training three times a week. During the day we were taught little. Don’t know much about history except for the communism over capitalism victory, Don’t know much biology except for my own developing breasts, Don’t know much about a science book, Don’t know much about the French or English I never took.

  But our goals were clear: to excel on the team and to advance to the next level. Competition was fierce and the attrition rate high. Only the crème-de-la crème could join the district, municipal, provincial, and eventually, the National Team. The ones making it to the municipal team would automatically turn pro and become boarding athletes, a status that, if obtained, would make both Mother and me very happy.

  Most girls like me had not yet heard of menstruation. On the team, boys wore navy blue trunks with a white string as their uniform. Girls wore red suits with elastic bands sewn from inside such that they became virtual blobs of cloth bubbles. This design was intended to conceal the female body curves lest the boys should be distracted. The girls had a nickname for what was tucked inside a boy’s shorts -- little sparrow which would mature into turtle’s head complete with a thicker, extendable neck.