The Sweetest Melons: Memories of the Congo

Photo by Aravind Sivaraj CCx2.0

By Jenni Gate

We drove down the hill from our home through the city of Kinshasa. Just outside the city, the jungle was thick. The road was full of pot holes and ruts. Our car bounced along on the rough pavement, heading towards vast stretches of farm land. About 8 miles from Kinshasa, we turned off the road into an open area with several low, concrete-block buildings spread out around a farming compound. Rice paddies stretched into the distance, surrounded by jungle. It was the summer of 1970, and we had arrived at the Chinese Agricultural Research Center. 

The circumstances of our visit were this: Dad, an agriculturist, was working with a Taiwanese agricultural mission in coordination with U.S. efforts to develop rice varieties to help ease the food shortages in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). But they had a problem—the Congolese people would not plant or eat the rice in production from the Chinese Agricultural Research Center. Dad commented to his Chinese counterparts that he couldn’t understand why the Congolese rejected the rice, because all rice tastes the same. The Taiwanese were shocked. The Head of Station invited all Americans and their families out to the farm to taste the different varieties being developed.

Oryza sativa

My sisters and I jumped out of the car, eager to stretch and explore. A group of Taiwanese and Chinese men came to greet us, smiling and nodding at each of us. I don’t remember their names after so many years. They were dressed in tan, gray or black slacks with white, button-down shirts, and polished leather shoes. A few of them wore tightly woven straw hats. A couple of the men gestured at their young sons to come and meet us, and we were soon running and playing tag on lush, green grass in front of the Center.

We toured the farm, learning that the land for the project was provided by Mobutu. There were papaya and mango trees, citrus trees, bananas, and coconuts dotting the landscape near the driveway. Surrounding the homes and research buildings were the rice paddies, each marked with signs bearing numbers representing the variety being produced. The plants looked like long grass in the water, with some that grew as high as 5-ft. tall. Most of the rice was about 3-ft. tall.

Photo: IRRI CCx2.0

We were led through Quonset huts where we saw rice and other vegetable and fruit seedlings in nurseries. In broken English and French, but with great pride, our hosts showed us a large variety of rice seedlings. There were several varieties each of long, medium, and short grain rice plants.

In one Quonset hut, we saw many melons, from honeydew to watermelon. At the time, all watermelons had seeds, so we were impressed when we discovered that the Chinese Agricultural Research Center had developed seedless melons. The seeds inside the melons were miniscule, which  was great news to me. Dad had always told me the big, black seeds that I accidentally swallowed every time we ate watermelon were going to sprout inside my stomach and grow. I didn’t really believe him but, then again, I had no desire to find out.

Seedless by Scott Ehardt CCx2.0

At dusk, the Taiwanese brought us indoors for dinner. We ate a gigantic steamed fish and a dish called Lion’s Head Stew, which was ground meat cooked in a rice-pasta pouch. It was so delicious that I’ve searched for Lion’s Head Stew on the menu at every Chinese restaurant I’ve been to since then, including when I visited Hong Kong years later. I’m still searching, without success. Our hosts had us sample several rice dishes of different varieties of rice. We sampled white, creamy, and brown rice in every shade imaginable. Some rice was white and sticky and tasted like the rice we were used to eating. Some of the rice was almost sweet. A lot of it tasted like cardboard. This was the reason the Congolese would not plant and eat the rice produced by the Center. The rice available in sufficient quantities for use by local farmers had no flavor. But there were many varieties still being developed. When we tasted one variety of rice with a clean, nutty flavor, Dad said, “I want 100 kilos of that.” Our hosts exclaimed that it was their favorite as well.

Red, White, Brown & Wild Rice by Earth100 CCx2.0

For me and my sisters, the best part of the meal was dessert. Iced platters, bearing slices of cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon, and yellow-flesh watermelon, all garnished with curlicue shavings from the rinds, were brought out and passed around. The novelty of melons without seeds kept us awestruck.

It was summer in Africa, and those melons were sweet and refreshing.

Photo by Kelly-Wikimedia CCx2.0

That summer treat, exploring all the flavors of rice and melon, has stayed in our family memory for decades. I still love melons, especially honeydew, and the memory of those flavors on that hot summer day still outshines the mundane, commercial flavors of the rice and melons we eat in the States today.

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As a side note: Years later, Dad took a flight from Jakarta to Hong Kong. He sat next to a young, Chinese man who had been to Jakarta to buy rattan. As they sat talking, the young man mentioned he had been to Zaire. In a flash of recognition, Dad said, “I remember you! You were at the Research Center.” The young man remembered my dad bringing him with us to the Embassy swimming pool on occasion. They exchanged contact information, both commenting on what a small world it is. Indeed, it is.

Love Food

By Leslie Hsu Oh

Lulled to sleep in the backseat of the car, I woke as Bà Ba swerved across five freeway lanes and exited on one of Arcadia's busiest streets. Chinese characters in neon lights blazed on a number of establishments populating strip malls. Bà Ba pulled into one of these where fans crowded in front of Din Tai Fung Dumpling House as if in anticipation of a rock concert.

Bà Ba’s ninety-five-year-old mother grumbled in the front seat. She had refused to ride in a wheelchair, even though her bound feet forced her to teeter precariously. I offered her my arm and she patted it, saying in Chinese that Bà Ba must love me very much to endure this hassle. She nodded at Bà Ba's wife and my half-brother, who both disappeared into the crowd, and whispered that Bà Ba rarely came here.

The wait for a table could be nearly two hours long. Nonetheless, this annual holiday tradition of eating at Din Tai Fung was perhaps one of the few things we agreed upon.

I lived in Alaska, while he lived in Southern California. We rarely spoke on the phone and I visited him only once a year, usually at Christmas. Mainly, I disagreed with the way Bà Ba grieved. After Mā Ma and Jon-Jon died, he immediately sold our house. He donated the cherry wood bedroom set that Mā Ma promised I would inherit. He replaced Jon-Jon as soon as he could with another son.

The more I wanted to preserve everything, hoarding boxes and boxes of Mā Ma  and Jon-Jon's belongings, the more he seemed to erase them from his life, gifting Mā Ma 's paintings to close friends, asking me to hold onto their wedding album, and mailing all of Jon-Jon’s toys to me. Sometimes I hated him for moving on, when I could not.

Bà Ba's wife pushed her way through a mass of bodies and returned with a ticket and a menu snapped to a clipboard. We browsed through 79 different kinds of dumplings and noodle soups printed in Chinese and English. The star of the lineup was Juicy Pork/Crab Dumplings, which failed to adequately capture the elegance of their Chinese name: Shea Fun Xiao Long Bao, Crab Powder Little Dragon Bun.

About the size of a dollar coin at its base, a translucent wonton-like skin kneaded into a twist at the top contained a bite-sized morsel of pork swimming in a pool of soup. A dash of crab powder to tease your senses. Served on a spread of lettuce in a bamboo basket, it arrived steaming at the table beside a dish containing strings of ginger soaked in black vinegar. Although other restaurants on occasion served this dish, Din Tai Fung (the only branch to open in the United States) in our opinion, made the best Shea Fun Xiao Long Bao. Perhaps it was because you could see the dumplings being made with metronomic precision. In tall white chef hats, one man spun a rolling pin, tossing rounded flour medallions to another, who twisted the dough, and laid them gently like jewels within bamboo baskets.

The cooks were so quick that I never saw them stuff each dumpling. I suppose that made the dumplings taste even better, especially after Bà Ba taught me the art of savoring them. He said the first challenge in enjoying Shea Fun Xiao Long Bao is to pick it up gently with a pair of chopsticks without poking holes in its paper-thin skin. Place a few strands of vinegar-soaked ginger on top, perhaps to cool it down or enhance the flavor of the soup sliding like silk down your throat. Then, patience is required. You must know exactly when to pop the dumpling in your mouth. The soup has to be at the right temperature; otherwise, like a dragon's fiery breath it could sear tongue and throat, stripping away a complexity of salt, sweet, and sour flavors rippling across taste buds.

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Photo credit: http://travelerfolio.com/yue-fei-hangzhou/

Bà Ba and I pulled apart a pair of deep-fried You Tiaos, a deep fried Chinese breadstick that is served only on weekends and sells out by eleven a.m. in select Shanghainese restaurants. He folded his You Tiao into a Sao Bien, a flaky sesame seed sprinkled pita. I dipped mine directly into soy sauce.

We listened to the crunch of You Tiaos between our teeth. We welcomed Chinese chatter from neighboring tables because there was nothing easy to discuss this Saturday morning. My grandma was not sitting at her usual place beside Bà Ba. She had died several days earlier at ninety-six. 

Sipping some tea and smoothing my long black hair in place, I swooshed the grease down my throat and began, “How are you doing?”

Bà Ba seemed to age within the wool red and black checkered shirt Mā Ma bought before I was born.

“When they dig my mom's grave, I think that it might be a good thing if they cover up Mā Ma and Jon-Jon’s tombstones.” Bà Ba had slimmed down over the years, maybe for his young wife, whom he’d started dating not more than a few months after we buried Mā Ma. I could see the hard lines of his bones.

“I think that would be disrespectful. We should make sure that the gravediggers don't do that. For some of our relatives, it will be the first time they have ever visited Mā Ma and Jon-Jon's resting place."

Bà Ba finished his Sao Bien You Tiao sandwich before explaining to me something that I never understood and still don’t. Bà Ba had asked me years ago not to tell his son, my half brother, about Mā Ma and Jon-Jon. Now, he admitted that this had always been his wife’s request. He felt that obscuring Mā Ma and Jon-Jon’s tombstones might not be such a bad idea, for her sake.

Photo credit: http://thehealthygourmet.wordpress.com

I balanced my You Tiao on my plate, deliberately wiped my mouth, folded the napkin neatly on my lap, and told him calmly that last year his son asked me whether we shared the same mother, and I couldn’t lie.

Bà Ba swore at me. And I swore back. Our meal ended in a torrent of words we will try hard to forget. I had always thought You Tiaos were comfort food, meant to be shared with a loved one. Recently, I discovered that they originated from a legend about a corrupt official and his wife, and that some Chinese folks believe You Tiaos represent a tool in expressing contempt.

Over the years, I’m learning there’s an art to understanding Bà Ba. I saw a man who grieved in a way that insulted me. In refusing to tell my half-brother about Mā Ma and Jon-Jon, I felt he preferred if I disappeared too. But maybe, our grief stemmed from the same source. One person found it too painful to see them as part of his life. The other found it equally agonizing not to see them as part of her life.

Adapted from "Love Food,” originally published in Rosebud Magazine, Spring 2009, and soon to appear in the Tao of Parenthood anthology.

Horse Horse, Tiger Tiger―A Menagerie of Chinese Sayings

By Beth Green

When I moved to China, I half expected my English students to come out with proverbs as soon as they opened their mouths.

After all, China’s rich literary heritage goes back thousands of years―while we in English-speaking countries dabble with our Beowulf, marveling at the ‘old’ English that was spoken in 700 CE, we should remember that Chinese scholars have been compiling their own literary classics since around 700 BCE.

Seeing though, that I would at first be teaching six-year-olds, I quickly realized that I’d have to look elsewhere for my pearls of wisdom (even if they were strewn before swine such as I). But, still I had grand expectations of one day luxuriating in normal things spoken cryptically―grains of wisdom in everyday conversations.

Image by Ian Lamont from  harvardextended.blogspot.com

I waited, and waited, and finally came to the realization that, unlike in many films, Chinese people don’t go around translating their own language’s proverbs into their second language and using them. This may have something to do with the way most Chinese students learn English―rote memorization of set phrases. Instead, my English-speaking Chinese friends were asking me about how hard it would have to rain before it would be considered ‘cats and dogs,’ and wondering why a ‘stitch in time’ didn’t save ten, only nine.

In fact, I didn’t have much exposure to Chinese proverbs at all until my second year in China, when my school assigned me a new Mandarin teacher. (One of the perks of teaching abroad is that often you can work free language classes into your employment package.)

Serena and I eventually became very good friends, but in the beginning our Chinese lessons were rough going. We’d sit in a deserted classroom, two plastic kid-sized desks edged next to each other, going over Chinese character stroke order, drilling pin yin (pronunciation) and working our way through tedious, canned dialogues from my textbook―which usually revolved around landmarks in Beijing. Now, I do find the capital of China an interesting place, but it was about 1,000 miles away, and the lessons on subway systems, tourist attractions and big-city problems were hardly relevant in the small town I did live in.

After a few weeks of boring ourselves to death, Serena came to class with a thick, dusty, red-covered book she said her father had recommended. It was a book she’d learned from too, when she was a student― a dictionary of sayings, or cheng yu, 成语, many of which were only four characters long.

I was at once both pleased and terrified―finally I was ready to learn something that was more fun than functional―but at the same time, if it was still proving difficult to go to the post office in Mandarin, how was I going to get my tongue (and my memory) around these, more poetical, set phrases?

Chinese speakers have used cheng yu (which are best described as idioms rather than proverbs, though they often impart wisdom as would a proverb) for thousands of years. Some dictionaries have about 20,000 of these linguistic gems, but Wikipedia estimates that only about 5,000 of them are in popular use.

The first saying I learned (and probably the first idiom most Mandarin students learn) was ma ma hu hu (马马虎虎),or literally, “horse horse, tiger tiger.”

Image by Andrew Scott

The meaning however, is closer to English’s wishy-washy “so-so.” How did the phrase come to mean this? A story I’ve heard is that in a bad (or so-so) painting you may come across something that’s not quite a horse, and not quite a tiger.

From this I went on to learn more sayings made up of easy words. I was thrilled the first time I found one of the sayings in real life and not in the textbook. It is a typical phrase well-wishers say at a wedding: Bai nian hao he (百年好合), meaning ‘may you live a hundred years together.’ I discovered some of the ornamental chopsticks I’d purchased for my apartment were engraved with this saying―unknowingly I’d picked up a wedding set!

I dearly love Chinese sayings with animals in them. One that a friend told me recently is this Animal Farm-esque proverb, “Kill the monkey to scare the chickens” or sha ji gei hou kan (杀鸡给猴看). It means to punish someone as a warning to others.

Another saying featuring monkeys is this one that immediately conjures a comical mental image: “a monkey wearing a hat,” or mu hou er guan (沐猴而冠). This has a more serious meaning than I first guessed though―it connotes a bad or worthless person who hides behind their good, or imposing, looks. 

 

Image by Ganesh Rao

My love of crime fiction probably explains why I also delight in the next two sayings, which have a sinister tone. My all-time favorite of these proverbs describes backstabbers: “Honey mouth, sword belly,” or kou mi fu jian (口蜜腹剑). Another good one is xiao li cang dao (笑里藏刀), meaning, “a dagger concealed in a smile.”

As much as I love reading about and learning these expressions, I admit that I’ve never used anything other than ma ma hu hu in an actual conversation. My Chinese has never improved to the point that I could imperil my already fragile and haphazard syntax by throwing in an aphorism.

In fact, you could say that, as far as my Mandarin language skills go, “the rice has already cooked,” sheng mi zhu cheng shu fan (生米煮成熟饭).