the fish epic

They kept chickens on their rooftop balcony, inside cages. Grandpa bought gai yeung (chicken-seedlings) to start and at the height of their “business” they raised near a hundred hens and roosters at a time.

“Definitely not free-range,” says Uncle B. “They’d get sick and start nodding their heads, and we’d kill them to eat. What! It’s true. Gai wun… is real. (Chicken pandemic, maybe something like avian flu now or perhaps not as serious.) They say jung wun gai (nodding-pandemic-chicken, usually refers to a person who bumps into other people while walking, either due to carelessness or franticness). But we ate them, and look at us!” Secretly I can only think of his recent seizure, but he smirks like he meant it anyway.

Did you sell the surplus eggs? “Yes, and we slaughtered and ate or sold the ones that came of age.”

I asked about the story of my papa, as a kid, going up to the rooftop to fetch a chicken. He caught one (remarkable considering how feisty they can be, but if it’s a wun gai then it’s probably easier…), carried it down by the feet. By the time it got to grandma the chicken was dead from being hung upside down. Probably induced a stroke in the poor gal.

“Our first fridge, what d’you think we put in it? Only water! You open the fridge and it’s filled with rows of water bottles,” says Uncle B, his face red and taut with mirth.

“And Vitasoy,” adds my papa.

“Bottles and bottles of vitasoy. Back then, sold in glass bottles. In the summer, it’s the best. Oh! What did you think we put our water in?” For some reason the image in my head was Dasani, blue and cool, but Dasani didn’t exist then. I shake my head. “Johnny Walker bottles! The blocky square-square bottles were great for stacking…”

“I don’t know where they found them, they found so many,” says grandma.

“We could get cold Vitasoy from the store. The stores were so clever then. In the same icebox they serve cold Vitasoy in the summer, and warm soy in the winter…”

“Leh, like those glass fridges now…”

“Only with a block of ice inside! People back then were so clever…”

“We were so poor, but so happy,” says grandma. “We were poor but had everything we needed. Clothes were easy! Your grandpa gets a free uniform tailored for him every year. What would we do with that many uniforms! So every other year” — she points to dad and Uncle B — “their school uniforms got made instead. What a great employer! No such go zai cheung now.” (No little-song-to-sing; the whole phrase can be translated as “these [good] things don’t exist anymore” or sometimes “this is why we can’t have good things”.)

“It’s true, employers were nicer, more compassionate.” Uncle B gestures at Aunt M with his chopsticks. “Her father, working hard, working hard, so hard he had a stroke… they paid his salary for years and years, while he rested at home, until he said to them, ‘it’s OK, all my kids have gone to school now, there is no need…’”

I announced to Grandma I’m going completely vegetarian, so she had to rethink the week’s meals. She said she had a side of a pumpkin, which was intended for some pork soup, but I persuaded her to do a stirfry instead.

“When the Japanese were here, this is what we ate,” she said, glancing at me sideways as if to ascertain whether I actually like eating pumpkin. “Garlic and black bean paste. We wouldn’t even use oil, oil was so scarce.”

It was quite delicious, though I asked her to put in more black bean paste next time. “Next time? No next time. Your dad doesn’t like pumpkin.” I marvelled on cue at how well she remembers all our favourite foods. There is a running joke that my all-time favourite food and everyone else’s all-time least favourite food is chicken wings, because grandma made it so often that everyone got so sick of it. “You were such a picky eater. Once we found the jackpot food, of course I made loads of it to make sure you would eat!”

A few weeks ago I went on a quinoa binge and tried to get my mum to eat some as well. I gave her a little jar of it. Grandma took a look at that and exclaimed, “That’s the crap rice that no one used to want!”

They called it ‘wild rice,’ though of course unrelated to this wild rice as we know it, and though possibly related to quinoa, not likely the same species. It was a weedy stuff that grew in rice paddies, which gets picked out and discarded. “There was an old woman, poor woman, she made a living patching clothing. But who didn’t patch their own clothing during the war? She made a few pennies a day, and she’d spend it all on a small slice of fatty pork. But she’d pick this weedy stuff from the side of farm roads, and eat it like rice.” I told her quinoa is now considered pretty nutritious stuff. “Hah! And we thought it’s junk. Would explain why she was so healthy!”

She went on to give some tips on cooking rice. “If you grind up the rice into rice flour, it cooks faster and is more filling. It’s how we saved on both rice and fuel.” Of course, nutritionally it probably made little difference; the ‘more filling’ part was likely just bloat from more water. But then I thought, if all I had was two kilograms of rice, per month, and I had to feed a family of seven, I couldn’t really care less if it was water or unicorn feces I was eating, so long as I wasn’t going hungry.

OK so clearly the “next” indicators don’t work very well. I’ll just, um, say that there is more.

I meant to prod my grandma for the details about her and grandpa, but the flow of the conversation turned to this and I clarified a bunch of things about her early life — as you will see, I’d misunderstood a lot. She also talked a lot more about her parents.

As an aside: my grandma does not swear. I’ve sprinkled in some cuss words when I translated them loosely from Cantonese just because I can’t quite get the English to have the same level of disdain without the cussing.

The Yips did not have a farm, but they did have the largest house in Dongguan (東莞). That is because her grandfather was the doctor. “You get off the train and ask for the house of the Yips,” she said, “and people will lead you here.”

The pride she had in her grandfather was evident in her scathing description of her parents:

“My father was an opium addict, but that was not the worst of it. If opium was it, if that was all he did, it’d be alright since he wouldn’t have left the house, useless as he was.” She pulled on a rubber glove to do the dishes. It seemed almost like she was about to engage in a duel. Maybe she was. “But he was so filthy — he went to the brothel, a lot, and wound up with all kinds of diseases, and my mother would go and look for him there. Stupid, shameful woman!”

Her grandma urged her mother to leave, promising to care for my grandma and her sister if she does. “Grandmother even offered — she had a sister in Singapore who worked as a maid, which was a really good thing made quite a bit of money. She offered to have my mother sent there to work for her. But my mother refused. The devil knows why.

“She was very unhappy, and she would take it out on my sister and me. She’d say to us, ‘I should have remarried if it wasn’t for you scoundrels!’ but with grandmother on our side, we’d talk back. Heh heh. I would say, ‘Why don’t you? Grandmother takes care of us anyway!’ and my sister would add, ‘Yeah, if you went to Singapore you’d be sending us money. We’d all be rich already!’”

But her triumph was short-lived. Her father started pawning off their heirlooms. “We were wealthy, not by today’s standards of course, but we did have the biggest house. Our hall used to be decked with china and paintings and other wares. We had a main front door, and two back doors leading to two big gardens, where we had all kinds of fruit trees, any sort you can imagine. My father, he would take our stuff and leave by the backdoors — our house was so damn big we couldn’t guard it. So you can see why my sister and I became the butts of all manners of jokes at school.”

She went to a school nearby, started grade one when she was six. She boasted that she started a year younger than everyone else. She remembered, amusedly, that her sister was the opposite — she’d started late and then got stuck at third grade. After failing three times, and grandma was about to skip ahead of her, she refused to go to school again. Her grandfather insisted that she must have an education, so she wound up at a neighbour’s house to be home schooled. “She couldn’t do math, couldn’t learn her letters, hated the idea of going to school. But she sang very well.” She heaved a small sigh. “Today we would have sent her to a music school, but back then, what did we know?”

She was very athletic. She played every sport the school had to offer, even though her elders objected — it was considered quite unwomanly to be running and jumping around all day! Indeed, her mother dressed her as a boy until about ninth grade, since she had craved a son.

Anyway, around that time, the bombing began. Though her grandmother was deaf, she could read the fear on her family’s faces when the air strike sirens came. Grandma said that she would panic, and try to run, but on her bound feet couldn’t get very far, and she wasn’t really trying to get anywhere anyway. She just wanted to run. When she couldn’t run, she would sit by herself and cry.

She was so pitiful that they wrote letters to an uncle who worked in Guangzhou for help. He saved up some money, and bought them train tickets to get to him. The trains, grandma said, were as crazy and hectic and scary as films nowadays make them out to be. They had to run and squeeze in and it was crowded and took forever. “My grandma was very fat, which didn’t help,” she said, with just a tinge of sadness. “She probably had pretty bad hypertension. She would have fainting spells. We practically had to lift her up the steps, while she cried the whole way.”

Next: grandma’s move to Hong Kong, then Changping (常平)

I prodded my folks for some old stories over dinner. There are still missing pieces, but I’m still trying to get over being ashamed of, well, not doing this earlier.

As usual there were elements of poverty (who wasn’t poor back then, especially compared to the opulence we surround ourselves in now) but it was really more about the joy of simple living (and simply being alive, for my grandfolks who survived the war) than anything else.

Grandma came from a pretty decent family — her grandfather was a doctor and ran a pharmacy (a Chinese herbal one), so he could afford to have her and her half-brother to school. Absent from the picture were her father, an opium addict, and her mother. I have a feeling that her unwillingness to talk about them is in pretty direct relation to the magnitude of the unpleasantness they brought about to her as a child.

On the other hand, she spoke a bit more about her grandparents. The Yip household had a small farm (like everyone else) and they kept a few pigs and chickens and ducks, not unlike folks who live in the country today. Back then, white rice was considered supreme (before we figured out that it’s pretty much completely devoid of nutrients other than sugar) and the husk, along with the leaves and trunks of yam plants, is cooked and fed to pigs. Grandma says her grandma would patiently chop up the yam plants and cook the pig feed, sitting on a stool by the stove as her feet were bound.

But they left that behind when the Japanese came. “First they bombed us,” she said, the tone of her voice remarkably easy, “then they themselves came a few years later.” She was in the equivalent of grade nine at the time. “Grandmother would sit and weep all day when grandfather was off to work. My uncle wouldn’t stand by it, so they figured we had to get some place safer.”

The whole family, she and her parents and her father’s siblings and all her cousins, arrived in Canton with little more than the shirts on their backs. One of her aunts was a nurse and probably got a job fairly quickly, so they could rent a little spot to cram together to live. She said over and over that they were quite lucky; I can only guess that many of her friends were the objects of the comparison.

As it turns out, their landlord was a bloke who worked in the government (the Japanese government), in a department that dealt with rationing of food. The landlord had his own car and chauffeur; while the landlord was home the chauffeur would sit outside the building and banter with my grandma’s aunts while she hung out on the steps, reading, or cleaning. “I was pretty neurotic about cleanliness,” she said, smiling sheepishly. (She still is.) “I was either reading or wiping the floor.” “Like, mopping?” “No silly, we didn’t have mops. Just scraps of cloth.”

Perhaps due to the bantering of the chauffeur, her half-brother, barely having just finished primary school, got a job being a labourer for the docks. My grandma was asked to submit a resume as well. When the landlord saw it, he complimented her on her letters and gave her a job as a scribe. “Officials and secretaries,” she said, “had pretty messy writing. We had to copy them legibly when the documents had to be sent to other departments.” Together they earned quite the payroll for their family: in addition to their wages, they were given extra rice and oil each month.

I remembered that she had an older sister as well — I remember because the sight of my grandma crying at the news of her death is forever burnt into my mind — so I asked whether she worked as well. She said she married early, was doing pretty well, and by then has had several kids. I steered her back to the stories of Canton.

My grandma loves eating yams. It was a peasant’s food and was plentiful even during wartimes (well, as plentiful as you can get in the wartimes). When she was given rice for lunch, she would go and trade with her neighbours for yams. Later her aunt would yell at her: “Stupid girl, trading our good rice for cheap yams! At least ask for more yams!” My grandma was obviously not very shrewd at commerce.

Having work was good, but while food was not a major worry there were other things to consider. Clothing, for one. She and her half-brother had two sets of work clothes each. Which means laundry had to be done everyday. “Nothing like the luxury of washing machines,” she said. “I’m pretty happy now… don’t have to scrub shirts by hand anymore.” Makes me feel pretty bad about my own attitude toward chores, really. Damn.

Next: when grandma met grandpa.