THE MAN WHO EATS

 

By YIYUN LI

 

The God of Lightning does not hit the man who eats, my grandfather often said when we were young. The lesson? Eating was a virtue. Grandpa could go on for hours citing Confucius and his disciples on the merit of eating. Sometimes, to make us appreciate food more, he told my sister and me hunger stories. A poor scholar went to a banquet and saw sesame seeds scattered on the table. "Let me teach you calligraphy," the man said to the guests, after which he licked his forefinger and wrote like a master on the table, cleaning up the sesame seeds as he went. A poor man from a village visited a rich friend in the city, according to another story, and the friend invited him to a fancy restaurant, ordered a cup of tea, and asked him politely to help himself to all the good smells. Grandpa also told us tales about a famine in the fourteenth century, when neighbors traded their children so they would not have to cook their own sons and daughters. They started with the youngest in the families, Grandpa explained, because the little ones knew nothing and would not be afraid.

The last story both frightened and enchanted me. Throughout my childhood, food was always in short supply and rationing was never-ending, but famine, a word with a dangerous appeal, was a mystery. I was about four years old when my grandfather first told me the story, and, as the youngest, I imagined my parents trading me for the boy next door. He was my age but bigger and fatter--a good deal, then, for my family. Knowing that I would be the one sacrificed in a time of famine, I felt important, grown-up, and sad. I studied the tins of crackers and cookies that Grandpa kept on top of his bookcase and wondered if I deserved a treat because of what I would do for the family. Grandpa shared a bedroom with my sister and me. Our room was about a hundred square feet. It had two beds and the furniture that Grandpa had brought from his previous residence: a sturdy desk and a big wooden bookcase. If I stood on the edge of the double bed that my sister and I shared, it would take only a small hop for me to land on Grandpa's single bed; I could then climb onto the desk from his headboard, and from there it would be easy to reach the tins on the top shelf. But we were not allowed to take the hop to start the intrusion. Everything Grandpa owned was too precious for us to touch. On his desk were brushes of all sizes, an inkstone, a stack of rice paper for painting and calligraphy, a bronze paperweight and a marble one, and a lamp with a bridge and a pavilion exquisitely carved into the base; in his bookcase, the books were brittle and yellow, bound with strings that had come loose. The only unbreakable objects were the cracker tins, and the bags of gourmet pickles, also kept out of our reach, that he bought on monthly trips to an expensive store. He ate his snacks alone.

When Grandpa was in a good mood, he taught us to recite poems written during the Tang dynasty, between the seventh and the tenth century. Once in a while, he sneaked his own poems into the curriculum and gave us each an animal cracker whenever we memorized his work. My sister, who was four years older, taught me to put the cracker in a glass of water to make it grow. Together, we watched the rooster or the elephant become fat, and then we scooped it out carefully with a spoon. Sometimes we were too greedy and let the crackers stay in the water too long; at the first touch of the spoon the cracker would disappear, a phenomenon that puzzled me for the longest time during my childhood.

On Sunday afternoons, my parents often had to take part in required parades--my father, who was a physicist, with his research institute, and my mother, a teacher, with her school. It was the middle of the nineteen-seventies, toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, and it seemed that there was always a parade on Sunday in those years, to celebrate a new policy of the Party, or the recent publication of a poem of Chairman Mao's. Sometimes the call for a parade came on a weeknight, and it would last until the small hours of the morning. My parents spent little time with me during the week, and I was expected to be in bed not long after I got out of day care. On weekends, however, their absence meant that I had to stay with Grandpa. On one such afternoon, my sister and I woke from a long nap, our limbs heavy with hunger and despair: the early dusk of winter had settled in. The marching tunes from the street were loud and distant at the same time. The central heating for the apartment building wouldn't be turned on until after suppertime. Grandpa sat by the lamp and read, the shadow of his head big on the wall. My sister and I held hands under the blankets, and could not get up. Even now, the dim and useless hours before supper on winter afternoons depress me.

Eventually, Grandpa realized that my parents would not be back for some time, and we were all hungry. He went into the kitchen and after a few minutes he returned to the bedroom with a bowl of soup for himself and a bowl for us. The soup was made with a pot of boiling water, two scoops of lard, and a spoonful of soy sauce; it arrived with floating oil drops, golden with shining rims in the orange lamplight. My sister and I hurried out of bed and blew on the soup carefully to cool it. The oil drops swam in happy circles, and life, suddenly, was as good as a cracker in water, swelling with hope.

My grandfather was born in 1897, the only son of a silk and fabric merchant in a small town near Shanghai. His parents, who were relatively wealthy and very farsighted, sent him to both an old-fashioned Chinese school to learn to write poetry--the most important education for any learned man--and a Western-style middle school and high school, still a rarity in the early years of the twentieth century, and far beyond the requirements of the heir to a fabric shop. When he graduated from high school, he became one of the few intellectuals in his home town, and taught at a boys' school for a few years. When he was in his early twenties, he went to Shanghai to seek a career in publishing. He passed a series of exams to become an apprentice in the Commercial Press of Shanghai, one of the first Western-style publishing houses in China. When we were young, he liked to brag about the competitiveness of the exams. In his version of the story, one young man whom he beat was Lu Xun, who later became one of the country's most famous writers. Lu Xun had to become a writer, Grandpa claimed, because there were no other opportunities for him in publishing.

Grandpa married his first wife around the time he moved to Shanghai, but she soon died in an inexplicable manner: she hanged herself a few days after giving birth to her first child. An old acquaintance from his home town heard the news and cabled him, offering his younger sister, the most beautiful of nine siblings, as a wife. My grandfather married her, and she became my grandmother.

Of the few early pictures I have of him, the oldest is a yellowed passport photograph, taken in the nineteen-thirties. He is wearing a suit and tie, and glasses with round lenses, and he has an expression of aloofness, or perhaps of arrogance. He had ascended to an editor's position by then, and he was in the prime of his life. When I was a child, our relatives from the South described him as a man with a thin, gilded walking stick in one hand and a fedora in the other. Sometimes he spoke English to his fellow-citizens; he enrolled his younger boy in a healthy-baby contest sponsored by a company that imported expensive dairy products from Britain, and when the baby won a large picture of him was printed in the newspaper ads; he took his family to overnight mah-jongg parties and let his three sons fall asleep in a heap in the guest room, while he played rounds and won money. For a few years, he and his family lived in luxury. His parents' shop was no longer a lure for him to return to his home town.

Then his luck changed. The child who had won the healthy-baby contest died of diphtheria, and my grandmother, at the sight of her son's body, went crazy. A year later, she gave birth to her last baby--my mother--but she never regained her sanity.

Soon, the Japanese invasion drove them out of Shanghai. My grandfather joined the Kuomintang--the Nationalist People's Party--and served in the Army as an advisory staff member. He took his family with him from province to province, never settling down long enough to make a home. He sent his two sons to military academies. By the time they graduated, the Second World War was over, and the Communists were the enemy. The three of them fought in the civil war on the Kuomintang side from 1945 to 1949, and lost to Mao's army. His older son retreated with the Army to Taiwan; he and his younger son surrendered with their units.

After the Liberation, my grandfather was jobless for a few years because of the stain of being a Kuomintang officer. Finally, with the help of an old friend, he found a job at a publishing house in Beijing. He should have "tucked his tail between his legs," as the saying went for men like him, but he couldn't keep quiet. He said that Chairman Mao was the king of Hell and that the Party officials were the gate-guarding devils. That almost got him sent to prison. Instead, he ended up with an early retirement. Even more incredibly, he survived the ten years of the Cultural Revolution without once being beaten by the Red Guards. There were many sins for which he could have been tortured to death: he was an offspring of capitalists (his parents owned a fabric shop); a reactionary intellectual (he wrote poetry with traditional themes instead of praising the new proletarian regime); a counter-revolutionary remnant (he had been a Kuomintang officer); a hidden spy for the American imperialists (his oldest son was in Taiwan, an ally of America); and a blasphemer of our greatest leader, Chairman Mao. Tens of thousands of people were killed because they belonged to one of those categories, but my grandfather lived a happy and healthy life. By the time I was born, when he was in his late seventies, he had become a neighborhood legend. His hair had gone from sleek and black to almost snow white, but he went to the barber's regularly to have it trimmed; his back was straight, and even though he was only five feet two he seemed to tower over people who were much taller. He got up at five o'clock every morning and jogged for an hour; he wrote poetry and painted during the day. Instead of a gilded stick, he now carried a hand-carved wooden cane, but he rarely used it. He explained to my sister and me that once people saw an old man leaning on a cane they no longer had any interest in him. He carried the cane only to make strangers marvel at his age and his health.

Grandpa never stopped denouncing Chairman Mao. When my sister was in the second grade, she came home one day and recited a poem that she had been taught in school. It was written by Chairman Mao in response to Khrushchev's "goulash Communism." The poem's most famous line was "Stew the potatoes first; then add the beef. Don't sell your fart to us!"

My sister repeated the poem, and I giggled, saying the forbidden word too many times for my mother to remain quiet. "We know you can recite the poem," she said to my sister. "You don't have to repeat it forever."

"But you said a poem was to be recited as many times as possible," my sister said.

"A good poem, yes," my mother said.

"This is a poem by Chairman Mao."

"A bad poem by Chairman Mao," Grandpa declared, and explained, line by line, why this was a bad poem: vulgar, unpoetic, horribly rhymed. It was why we needed a good poetry education, he said, so that we would not write like this.

My mother banged the windows shut, worried that people walking by would hear Grandpa. "Can't you all shut up?" she finally said, losing her patience.

Grandpa ignored her. "Besides, beef-and-potato stew--what kind of food is that? Only a peasant could imagine putting this into poetry!" He then recited several poems for us, all with delicacies beyond Chairman Mao's peasant imagination: fugu, the fish famous for its heavenly taste despite its deadly poison, swimming in springtime, the best season because its flesh was most tender; a single fisherman's boat floating in the mist, waiting for the bass to bite; newly harvested oranges, cut open with a silver knife by the most beautiful prostitute in the Song dynasty, while the Emperor sat by the red lantern, waiting, and the prostitute's lover hid beneath the bed, listening.

Nevertheless, Grandpa would have shared Chairman Mao's love of beef-and-potato stew, if only we had had a ration of beef. We lived in the era of the planned economy. People's salaries were determined mostly by how long they had served the country. My father and my mother earned about the same as people of their age in other fields. Almost everything was rationed: flour, rice, sugar, salt, oil, tofu, eggs, meat, fish, starch. Whatever wasn't rationed became a treat. My sister drank soy sauce from the bottle; I sipped vinegar.

The only meat available on a regular basis was pork, and buying pork, like everything in our life, was a perpetual dilemma. When the sales assistants were in a mean mood, they cut a chunk of fat for the ration. If they were in a good mood, they cut out pieces with little fat and more edible meat; but this presented another problem--there wouldn't be enough lard to supplement the small and unreliable oil ration.

To solve the problem, parents sent their children to buy the twenty-fen meat, a very thin slice cut from the pig's underbelly, which did not count as part of the meat ration. Every child my age grew up with the memory of standing in front of the greasy meat counter, asking for twenty-fen meat with a trembling voice. The slice was thrown across the wide cutting board, which was at a child's eye level. My sister and I took turns buying the pork--if the sales assistants saw you more than once a week, they commented aloud on your parents' sneakiness and stinginess with the ration.

Walking home with a limp slice of pork wrapped in old newspaper, the grease seeping through and darkening the printed words, I dreamed of becoming a sales assistant in a grocery store. Back at home, my father would carefully cut off the fat, saving it for later, and cook the rest of the meat with vegetables--to give the radishes and the cabbage a taste of meat, he said. When the serving bowl was on the table, Grandpa was always the first one to pluck out the few chunks of meat. My chopsticks got in the way of each other when I tried to fight him for a piece, and he was never generous enough to let me win.

When I had trouble swallowing a radish, Grandpa said, "You don't know hunger. If only you had lived through the three years of famine!"

Those years, between 1959 and 1961, were frequently invoked to demonstrate what spoiled children we were.

"People ate tree bark and grass roots," Grandpa said. "People were murdered for a kilo of rice."

"My mother's silkworms, a full hut of them, were eaten overnight by hungry mice," my father said. He came from a peasant family in southeast China, where the soil was so barren that nothing the family planted grew well. His mother reared four children and sent two sons to college and two girls to nursing school with the money she earned from her silkworms. "Then the mice were hunted and cooked up."

My mother's tale, the saddest of all, was that her mother, Grandpa's crazy second wife, gave up eating so that she could save her ration for my mother. My grandmother died in the second year of the famine.

"The God of Lightning does not hit the man who eats," Grandpa concluded. "If you don't eat, nobody can help you."

On Sunday mornings, I went grocery shopping with my father. He placed me at the end of the longest line, always at the egg counter, and then left to search for other things. The monthly egg ration for each person was half a kilo, and, most of the time, the store did not even carry eggs. Still, every Sunday we tried our luck.

I stood in line and watched the Sunday bustle. A man walked from line to line and told people that he had lost the ration book for his entire family, but they all shook their heads and turned their backs to him. On the street outside, people waited at a bus stop for the bus, which never came on time. When it finally pulled up, an older man on the other side of the street called out, "Wait, comrade, please wait!" The conductor, a young man with a grin, stuck his head out the window and watched the man running toward the bus; just as he was about to reach the steps, the conductor shut the door. He waved goodbye as the bus pulled away.

As I watched the old man panting from his exertion, I started to weep. Two women standing behind me talked about what a softhearted kid I was. I dried my tears. When my father returned with other groceries, he took my place in the line and told me that I could wander around a little if I liked.

Instead, I pushed my way to the counter to watch the sales assistants. A female assistant weighed the eggs, and a man took the money and filled in the ration books. They stopped from time to time, exchanging jokes. "Look at you," the man said, imitating the woman's slow movement with the eggs. "You don't have to be so careful. They're not your eggs."

"Watch your filthy mouth," the woman said, and threw an egg at the man. He dodged, and the egg broke on the counter in front of me. The woman scooped up the egg and flung it into a basin on the counter. I moved closer. Six yolks floated among the egg whites in the basin, and I swallowed hard. Broken eggs were sold at a higher price than whole eggs, but they did not count toward the ration.

The line moved slowly. Flies with green heads buzzed around the basin, and I shooed them away. The flies kept coming back, and I kept shooing them away.

"Comrade, may I buy those broken eggs there?" an old man asked. My heart beat faster. Those were our eggs. I had been the one to protect them from the flies.

The female sales assistant glanced at the old man and said, "No."

"But why, comrade?"

"Because I said so," the male sales assistant said.

"Because I said so," the female sales assistant said, punching her colleague in the chest.

I wished that they would stay in the same mood if anyone ahead of us asked for the broken eggs. I wished that they would change their minds when my father reached the front. I looked at the flies crawling on the sticky counter; too many wishes had made my heart full.

There were about ten people in front of my father when the male sales assistant rejected a ration book. "Today is over. We are not selling anymore."

People gasped. "But, comrade," someone said, pointing to the eggs behind the counter. "These have not sold out yet."

The man and the woman turned and walked to the back of the store arm in arm. People lingered, and when nobody came out to start selling again the crowd dispersed. Sunday after Sunday, the same thing happened, but at times, magically, a sales assistant would return after ten or twenty minutes. Then I ran quickly to the front of the reassembling line, and, if we were lucky enough to have a good-humored sales assistant, I followed my father home and stared at the broken eggs, their beautiful yellow yolks bouncing in the plastic bag, so full and heavy. We did not have a refrigerator at home, and for dinner we would have a plate of scrambled eggs.

On those nights, with a big chunk of scrambled egg between his chopsticks, Grandpa would tell a story. "A villager went to the city and entered a restaurant," he began. "On the menu, he saw a dish called Fried Gold. This sounds good, he thought, so he ordered it. When the waiter came with a plate of scrambled eggs, he was at first enraged and then excited. He ran back home to his wife and said, 'Stop toiling, woman. We are rich now. Do you realize that our hens lay gold?' "

Grandpa told the same story over scrambled eggs again and again, until one day I was old enough to pity and despise him. From where he sat gobbling, he could make fun of people, all idiots in his eyes, and he could recite poetry and criticize Chairman Mao, but he did not understand the hardship behind even a plate of scrambled eggs. What we ate was at the mercy of other people. Eating, instead of being a pleasure, became a burden to me.

One day, I found a book in Grandpa's collection, describing different ways of meditating. The method I found most attractive was used by nuns in ancient times: by controlling their breathing, they could stop their menstruation and limit their need for food. I was eleven or twelve then, and I thought that nothing would be better than to get rid of all the troubles that weakened one's body. The nuns' meditation became my secret practice in the late afternoons, before my parents returned from work and my sister came home from middle school. Grandpa was always eating snacks while I sat cross-legged on my bed. My stomach grumbled, yearning for the share that he would never give me.

My grandfather did not lose his appetite until the very end of his life. He jogged until he was in his late eighties; once he could no longer run, he took long walks, still refusing to lean on his cane. The God of Lightning does not hit the man who eats--he was living proof of his own belief, this man with a good stomach and extraordinary luck.

It has taken me many lengthy conversations with my mother to understand how my grandfather managed to escape persecution. Once, in the nineteenthirties, a colleague asked him to help bail a leftist poet out of jail. He did, and afterward was said to have taken the poet to a fancy restaurant and treated him not only to a cup of good tea but also to a full meal. Twenty years later, the poet became a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Culture; when my grandfather made his infamous comment about Chairman Mao, the poet arranged for his early retirement.

Eating had saved him from the labor camp, but it almost derailed him, too. In 1962, after the famine finally ended, my grandfather joined a Saturday lunch club and dined there weekly with a group of retired editors. He met a woman his age, and they fell in love. When he finally brought up the topic of marriage, my mother and her siblings were scandalized. A man his age!

In the same year, my father was introduced to my mother as a possible match. The first time they met, at her house, my father--a peasant's son and a new arrival in Beijing--asked for a second bowl of noodle soup. My mother was appalled; a polite guest would rather starve than ask the host for more food. My grandfather, however, approved of the match--this was a man who ate! He also consulted a number of history books and decided that my father's family, generations of peasants as they had been, were direct descendants of the emperors of the Tang dynasty.

My grandfather's marriage never took place, because of his children's vehement opposition, but he happily married my mother off in 1966. To save on rent, or perhaps to escape heartbroken memories, my grandfather left his old house and moved in with my newly wedded parents, who were living in a highly secured complex, where my father and other young scientists worked for a research facility to develop nuclear weapons. Later that year, the Cultural Revolution began, and hundreds of old intellectuals were beaten, whipped, kicked, and killed in public by the Red Guards. My grandfather would have met the same fate if he had married and continued to live in the old neighborhood. Moving in with my parents, however, proved to be the wisest decision he had ever made: because of the importance of the research institute to the national defense system, Red Guards were never allowed to enter our complex.

My grandfather died in 1987, just as the relationship between Mainland China and Taiwan began to thaw, and soon after he received a letter from his oldest son for the first time in nearly four decades. My grandfather lived through three regimes, two world wars, two civil wars, famine, and revolution. What did not change was his faith in eating, which I never understood. An eating man, like a mindless hog, could easily be humiliated and butchered. We were all pieces of meat on other people's cutting boards.

It was not until I was in the Army that my grandfather's wisdom became clear. In 1991, I was eighteen and about to enter Peking University, one of the centers of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, two years earlier. After the bloodshed of June, 1989, the government had decided, as a precaution, to send all the university's entering students to the Army for a year of disciplining and brainwashing--"political reeducation," it was called.

Our camp was in a small city in central China. The average temperature in the winter was between thirty-five and forty-five degrees Fahrenheit; according to government policy, the weather was warm enough for heating not to be required. That winter, after a three-day blizzard, the pipes froze, and we were each given one basin of water to last until they thawed. Every morning, we had to break the ice before we could wash our faces. We had thin gruel for breakfast, and radish stew for lunch and supper. We lived in hunger, and despair.

On New Year's Eve, the nine girls in my squad, frostbitten, starved, and shivering, had a spiritual banquet. Taking turns, we talked about the best food we had ever eaten. Without giving it much thought, I offered my grandfather's lard-and-soy-sauce soup. Unlike the extravagant dishes that my squadmates described, mine was the only one that seemed possible in the camp. If we could sneak into the kitchen, start a small fire, boil a pot of water, and add spoonfuls of lard and soy sauce, we would have the soup.

We dreamed on until lights-out. None of us dared to get between the icy sheets. I realized that only someone who had known hunger and coldness could have invented the lard-and-soy-sauce soup, and, for the first time, I recalled with fondness the days when my grandfather had carefully cut expensive gourmet pickles into small pieces with a silver knife, unaware that I was hiding beneath the table, watching him.

In the darkness, one of the girls opened a bag of powdered milk. We circulated the bag and swallowed. The powder chafed our throats; the extreme sweetness became bitterness. I vowed that I would never again eat powdered milk, but I could not refuse the bag when it was handed to me the second time. What we ate was at other people's mercy, but in choosing whether to eat or not to eat we were at the mercy of ourselves.

What my grandfather taught us about hunger.