this story is about my mother and the roast chicken.
but first, poverty.
in beijing we had dinner with one of my mom’s good friends. he’s a japanese man who is now general manager of nippon steel trading in beijing. when he was an undergraduate in nanyang u, my mother used to take him shopping for clothes and bring him home for meals. (this is also the strawberry fellow, for those of you who know that story.) over our duck’s heart and abalone we talked about unusual delicacies, and he said that his favourite dish was whale meat. when he was young, his family was poorer than churchmice generally go, and couldn’t afford fish, except for whale, which was the cheapest kind available. “in the past, i was too poor to afford anything else but whale meat. now that i have the money to eat any fish i please, whale meat is banned, and would be unaffordable if we could get it.” also eggs, which were expensive, and the only time he got any was when he was sick, then his mother would go out and buy one egg for him. this means that sometimes you guiltily look forward to getting sick.
my mother recalls another friend, a professor from hongkong, whose family was abjectly poor in those days, that they never had extra dishes at mealtimes, only rice. they didn’t have their own place either, and rented a room in a bigger house, so people passed outside their room a dozen times a day. they had no wish to be looked down on for being poor, and so, whenever the family sat down to dinner, they placed a bowl at the centre of the table. this was an empty bowl, but it was a deep bowl, so one couldn’t look into it from a distance. when people walked past their room, they reached their chopsticks into the bowl, so that people would think they had enough to eat, and could afford vegetables.
this reminded my mother too of lin qingxuan, the famous taiwanese writer. he wrote in an essay on his youth, that they were miserably poor, and he’s always dreamt of having soft drinks, which his family could not possibly have afforded. one day, a cousin of his got married, and at the wedding there were bottles of the fizzies. the temptation overcame him. he ferreted away two bottles, and locked himself in the bathroom, and gulped everything. that image of a boy hiding in a dark bathroom guzzling bottles of soft drink in greedy desperation to fulfill his longing is one that i find slightly repugnant, yet am highly sympathetic towards. japan, hongkong, taiwan…it didn’t really matter where you were from. so many people were poor in the old days, and people reacted to their poverty through food.
the soft drink story has something to do with this story about my mother and the chicken. my mother’s family could never afford soft drinks either, and only had it during very special occasions for guests. at times like that, the younger ones got a little sometimes, and the older ones were lucky to get a sip or two, though even that was unlikely. once, after she had started working, my mother gave her youngest sister $10 for her birthday (she earned $100 then) to buy herself a book of piano exercises, but her sister came home with five cans of coca-cola. It was a new thing then, to get your coca-cola in aluminium cans and not glass bottles. my mom was shocked - a tenth of my hard-earned paycheque squandered on softdrinks! my aunt drank her coca-cola. she washed the cans carefully and dried them, and kept them in her room to look at for a long time to come. five cans of coca cola to yourself! what a precious and unforgettable prize! then my dad came along. the first time my mother visited my dad’s house, he said, want something to drink? and opened the fridge, quite unaware of the effect it would have on my mother. my mother was stupefied. there were rows of soft drink bottles inside. when she got home, she couldn’t help but tell her wide-eyed sisters about her colleague: “you just won’t believe what i saw today!” by the time my father first came to visit, he was quite a legend — everyone was so curious about the man who lived in a house with a fridge full of coca-cola.
my father’s family was considered well-to-do. my grandfather was a businessman, so a fridge full of coca-cola was nothing. and besides, my dad was an only child. my mother, eight child in a brood of fourteen, simply didn’t have that kind of money. there was often fish on the table, (her father was in the fish trade) but they rarely had chicken. when they did have chicken, there was the problem of fourteen children, because a chicken only had two legs. the chicken went round and round on the lazy susan. chopsticks reached out and brought pieces of meat back to the rice bowls, but no one dared touch the best part — the drumsticks. only the two youngest children got them of course, but until my grandfather reached out with his chopsticks and placed one drumstick each in their bowls, no one could breathe easy: no one dared to take them, but their presence was oppressive.
my mother swore that when she grew up and earned money of her own, she would get herself an entire chicken. in the meantime, what she liked was watching westerns, where the cowboys often roasted whole chickens in the open, and carelessly pulled off wings and legs to chew on. however, the chicken-eating scene is inevitably interrupted by some chase scene, where the fellow promptly discards the chicken and jumps onto a horse. this drove her absolutely crazy. the fellow had a chicken, and he threw it away! when finally she began bringing home a paycheque, she had a problem. even though she could now afford to buy a chicken for herself, where could she eat it alone? in a family of fourteen, children are sharers, not hoarders. it is unthinkable for her to bring home an entire chicken and eat it all by herself. she explained her dilemma to my dad. one day, when she stepped into my dad’s house, he said, secretively, shh, come into my room. he shut the door and fished out a dish. he’d got her a roast chicken. “you can eat it here, i won’t tell anyone.” so she did, in front of the mirror, so she could pretend she was one of those characters in a western.
she always said afterwards that she married him for the chicken.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird