Happy Holiday Dinner! Chinese History Lesson included

I took Jesse and my mom out for a nice peking duck dinner at the Golden Dragon in Byron.   It’s worth the drive for the duck alone. We even saw a one month old baby – where they roasted a whole baby pig in celebration. 

 

I asked my mom about my family history. It was interesting. I learned a few things: 

 

My dad’s side of the family all illustrate (at least all the boys) for a living.  That’s where my brother gets his artsy streak. I inherited my dad’s communist/socialist values, and I didn’t learn anything from my mother’s successful business relatives.

 

My mom’s side of the family stemmed from the wealthy upper class.  They were all scholars, and it was relatively rare for females to be educated, but yet my great-aunt on my mother’s father’s side was a teacher.  My grandfather’s family on my mother’s side were all scholars in the imperial court (I think this is why I’m such an academic).  My great-grandmother had her feet bound (which was limited to upper class families with lots of servants).  They made their fortune in the grocery market business during wartime, catering to the foreigners (who had all the money). I never inherited that business gene, although my uncle Tony did.

 

My grandmother on my mother’s side has an interesting story of her own. Coming from the village of Chuen Wan (which is now a huge city), she was the eldest of two children. This meant that she was assigned all the house work (the cooking, cleaning, maintaining the farm, etc… she cooks a mean soup, and can raise chickens and pigs). Sadly, she was too busy to get an education, even though her mother was the village teacher and storyteller (i.e. she was the only literate citizen in her village).  There were books in their house and the villagers would gather round every night, listening my great grandmother tell stories from those books. For some reason, my grandmother also had an innate ability to calculate (or learned at a very early age).  Because none of the farmers or store front owners knew how to calculate, my grandma (then age 7 or 8) would run around helping the salespeople with their accounting (for e.g., it costs $1.50 for a pound of rice, how much does 0.75 pounds cost?).  In return she got food.  So, she got fat, much fatter than all the other villagers.  Then wartime came.  The Japanese invaded, and food supply became low. The entire village started to starve.  As her mother and younger brother lay on their death beds (and she being a bit chubbier, could survive a little longer) she knew she had to search for food.  So, she hid in a garbage bin at the back entrance of a kitchen in a Japanese barracks. She listened in on the soldiers, and that’s how she learned to speak Japanese.  Then one day, she walked into the kitchen, and stated in her broken Japanese: "I know Japanese, and I know how to cook." They hired her to slice fish for sushi and sashimi because she had very dexterous hands (which is probably where I get my arts and crafts ability).  From then on, she brought back the fish heads and fish tails for her family, and they survived the war.  The Japanese were cruel to the chinese citizens, but because my grandmother was able to cater to them, her family was left alone.

 

It was a nice dinner that I had with my mom, and I learned a lot.  It’s nice to learn a little bit of your own history to get insight into yourself.

 

Anyways, I hope your holidays are as happy as mine started (I like learning new things). Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas. Happy Festivus for the rest-of-us as well!