Today was family dinner at Goldie’s house, as we do every Sunday. On the way to Happy Valley, we trudged through the rain (yes, still raining) to pick up some goose intestines and swamp vegetables with thousand year old eggs. Goldie’s mom was worried she hadn’t cooked enough so she had asked us to get a little extra from the Chiu Chau restaurant near our house.
Over dinner, as usual, we watched food programs. When I first started visting Goldie’s mom house for dinner a couple years ago, it seemed a little odd to me to watch a food program while eating food. But I’ve gotten used to it now. It does keeps everyone entertained between the quiet parts of the dinner conversation. Tonight, one of the shows was an non-local one on cable: Bizarre Food. The topic was Spanish food and, in particular, roast suckling pig and baby eels. Neither dish seems very “bizarre” by Chinese standards. But strange enough to me, Goldie and her sister both recoiled in horror over the man eating the head of the suckling pig. I don’t really understand it since Chinese cuisine has the exact same dish, and dishes for nearly every part of the pig imaginable (including yummy pig’s ears).
But somehow we all got on the conversation of eating rodents. I guess it started because of some anecdote that I mentioned about Dustin killing a prairie dog and making plans to eat it. But Grandpa convinced him not to with the logic, “I never heard of the Indians eating the prairie dogs, and I bet you there is a good reason why they don’t.”
When Goldie’s father heard the story, he smiled, “Rat is the most delicious thing I ever ate.” Everyone laughed as if he was trying to make a joke. He continued, “Really! When I was young, we didn’t have anything to eat. My friend gave me a piece of rat leg to eat. That was the most delicious thing I ever ate. I was seven years and I still remember it today. And after that, you know what I did? I tried to make a rat trap to catch one for myself, but I never caught one sadly.”
I had to ask, “Did it taste like chicken?” “No. It’s different.”
Even though everyone had a chuckle over it, there was a moment in the room where it was clear that the memory for Goldie’s father was lot more significant than any one of us could appreciate. We could only imagine that rat really must taste awful, except when you’re starving. But in Goldie’s father eyes, it seemed that it really was the best thing he ever ate. The only bitterness that he could remember was the anger over the poverty of his family.
After dinner, Goldie and I headed home, stopping at Starbucks on the way. While sipping a green tea latte with soya milk, I ran across an interesting article in the South China Morning Post. A Chinese author, Yang Jisheng, recently published a book Tombstone about the Great Famine in China. An estimated 30 million people died. According to the official government position it was due to the unlucky combination of several “natural disasters.” But in fact, it is acknowledged by most others that it was fundamentally a man-made disaster. In some cases, people died while ample grain supplies sat in warehouses waiting for export. The famine was during 1959-1961, the same time Goldie’s father would have been seven years old.
Goldie asked me tonight, “Do you think someday in our life we will have no food to eat?” For a brief moment I tried to imagine it as I savored the last drop of my green tea latte. How could I possibly imagine it? Indeed, I do wonder about the threat of climate change. How bad will it be? Will my generation be witness to such horrible atrocities like the Great Famine? How does one cope in such a cruel world? When I imagine it, I can’t help but think that human life would be relatively meaningless in such a situation. Well, to be more precise, perhaps the human life that I know of now would be meaningless.
