Jiaozi (Part Two)
War, exile, emigration; eggs and rice, eggs and rice, eggs and rice
(If you haven’t read Part One, you can find it HERE)
My father and his family left China in 1949, during the Communist Revolution. His father, Ken-shen, had been born in Luo Feng, but moved away to pursue a career in civil service, working for the Kuomintang as a diplomat. When the Communists overthrew the Kuomintang, it was re-education, prison or worse for him, had he stayed. He and his family, including my dad, went into exile, eventually ending up in the US. It wasn’t until the late 80s that my father returned to China, forty years later.
But at that point, he didn’t know about the booklet, or Luo Feng. That surfaced another decade after. So much water had passed under our family bridge. WWII; revolution; exile; emigration and naturalization in the US; American kids born and grown; another generation begun. Luo Feng might as well have been a myth. It’s safe to say that none of us, to a person, thought that we would be even recognized when we showed up there. We had been living for three generations as only semi-visible entities – exiles, immigrants and, for me, the kid with the strange last name and dark skin who nobody remembered because he wasn’t around for very long. And he ate weird food.
“Wait, this is for us?”
“Oh. My. God.”
As strange as it seems, we were basically a group of nomads, who had accepted this as our reality. This outpouring of celebration - the marching band, the fireworks, the crowd all cheering and waving - wasn’t just surprising; it was unrecognizable. They weren’t just welcoming us. They were welcoming us home.
The other significant element of a jiaozi is the skin. Jiaozi skin is a very basic dough – flour, salt, and water. But anyone who has eaten potstickers at more than one Chinese restaurant can understand that the quality of the skin is highly variable. Of course, the quality of the flour has an impact, but more than this, it is the feel that the maker has. You have to know what you are looking for in the dough to determine how much water to add, how long to knead it, how long to let it rest. There is art to it.
So, in a bowl, you mix flour and a little salt. You add hot water (as hot as comes from the tap) until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl, and then a little more, so that it’s sticky enough to cling to your fingers. You turn it out onto a kneading surface, and using some extra flour to keep it from adhering, knead it until it is smooth and still soft. You then cover it with a dampened towel for a half-hour or so, to allow the gluten to activate. A good dough will roll out very thin, but elastic, and strong, so you can fit plenty of filling in it, pleat it properly, and have it cook without breaking. Thin, so it doesn’t obscure the flavor of the filling; strong, so it stays intact. If done right, the skin balances the richness of the filling in the way that pasta balances sauce, the way that canvas balances paint, bland to flavorful, blank to color (unless you’re Agnes Martin). The better the skin, the better the dish
The visit itself to Luo Feng was pretty short – we were there for a couple of hours, maybe three. After almost a hundred years, we dropped by for a chat. But this was all that was possible, and for a few reasons. First, it had taken us a few hours to get there from Gu Tien, the nearest small city (just a million or so), where our hotel was. Did I mention the middle of nowhere? And the roads we were on were tiny – like, white-knuckling the armrest and praying for the first time since I was a little kid tiny. There was no way we were going to let our driver navigate them after dark. Which brings up another thing – after dark. Where we were, and where we had been driving for the last few hours, after dark was really after dark. There were no street lights. There were no lights in the houses. There were no lights other than the ones that had been there all along – ie, the sun and, depending on the time of month, the moon. And the stars, which we would have needed to navigate, had we stayed for too long.
But that’s not the real reason we didn’t stay. The real reason was that Luo Feng didn’t have anywhere for us to stay. No hotel. Like, not even the dream of a hotel. This wasn’t a rural Iowa small town where there’s only a Motel 6 near the interstate. This was rural Iowa a hundred and fifty years ago, where there wouldn’t be an interstate, or a Motel 6, for another hundred or more years. It was like Brigadoon. You can visit, but you can’t stay.
When we got off the bus, we stepped down into a little space, politely if raucously held for us by the crowd, in which also stood the mayor and his wife. My dad, as the eldest, was asked for, and the mayor addressed a short, very formal greeting to him, along the lines of, “Welcome back to your home.”
He then invited us to take a tour of our village – and he kept referring to it as such. Our, as in, all of us. We went first to our family’s old home, which was a four-sided structure in traditional style, raised rooms built around a courtyard. It wasn’t clear if it was still inhabited (it was dilapidated, but everything was). We saw some old photos of my grandfather, and his parents and siblings, up on one wall. We then went up the hill to where the school, church and clinic that my great grandfather had founded still stood. They were still being used, though the clinic only every now and then, when traveling medical staff would come through. But the church was quite clean and maintained. They sang some hymns for us. And the school was obviously used as well. We played a little basketball in the courtyard with a couple of the kids. They were super sweet, really warm. And all named Wei, which was mind-blowing.
Things that you see but don’t see until later: no windows, just empty openings; no vehicles – not a single one other than the proverbial horse (minibus) we’d ridden in on; roads are all dirt; everything is old, but clean, maybe for us, maybe because that’s the way it’s kept; no straightened teeth; no blond hair or pink skin (except for our spouses, who were examined closely); no brands; no screens; only some shoes.
No reserve. It’s hard to make this understood, but from the moment that the mayor and his wife stepped forward to welcome us, we were claimed. The mayor himself commandeered my father, put his arm around his shoulder and led the tour (which, by the way, was undertaken not just of, but by, the entire village – like a couple hundred people); his wife took my mom’s arm and didn’t let go. A couple of kids attached themselves to me and Caroline, smiling and sometimes holding our hands. Everyone was warm, and close.
Everyone was a Wei. Family. Ancient family.
The majority of the booklet that we had discovered at my grandmother’s had been an origin story – how Luo Feng came to be. Apparently, the Wei’s had originally lived somewhere to the north, where we had occupied a place in the regional government of some status. At some point, one of our relatives had gotten in some trouble with the governor, and a price had been put on his head. Fearing for the lives of her family, the wife had taken her two young children and precipitously fled, heading south, deep into the countryside, until, after several months, she had come to this spot in the lush hills of central Fujin. She and her kids had been Weis, and they’d started a new life here, beyond the reach of the governor who had wished them dead.
Eight hundred years ago. To us, living in the West, the last seventy years had been definitive. Our story began with WWII, the Japanese Occupation, displacement, the Revolution, exile and so on. Nope. Turns out that that was just a few scenes from a chapter that began a few decades before. And it was one of dozens of chapters. We didn’t know any of the other chapters, but the folks who were shepherding us around this tiny hamlet tucked away out of eye, ear, and arrow shot of the governor of the northern provinces did.
heirloom tomato torte
seared scallops
ragu of cucumber, chili, tomatoes
french silk pie
This is where the things you see but don’t really see until later is so mind-blowing. The story of a woman exiled through the associations of her husband was actually, bizarrely enough, almost the exact same story my father had of fleeing during WWII. My grandfather, the diplomat, had been relocated from Shanghai to Chungking in the late 1930s, along with the provisional government, to safeguard him and it from the encroaching Japanese forces. Thinking that the invasion would be unsuccessful, or at worst temporary, he and his wife, my grandmother, Mama, had elected not to disrupt the family. They – Mama, my dad, and his sister – stayed in Shanghai.
What has since come to be known as the Japanese Occupation has gone down as one of the most brutal passages of WWII, with the Japanese forces pressuring the Chinese government through embargoes on food, fuel, medicine, and other essentials, and terrorizing its citizens with daily, public brutality. At some point several months into this campaign, Mama decided she could no longer keep her children safe in Shanghai, so the three of them, my father eight and my aunt three, packed everything they could carry on their bodies and fled. By horse cart, a few train rides, but mostly on their own power, they crossed a thousand miles of Japanese held China – a woman and two young children – keeping their identities a secret, to Free China, and eventually to Chungking. It took them three, four, maybe five months.
We don’t actually know how long. We don’t know because Mama is dead, and didn’t like to talk about it. “You’re here now. You don’t want to know about such things.” Genevieve, who was still very young, is understandably vague on details. But my dad, he was eight. At eight, you have a much greater capacity, developmentally, for forming lifelong memories. I remember little league baseball games, roller-skating parties, playing marbles, getting sick at school, fishing at the pond at the bottom of the hill from our house in Ohio. I have, without much effort, a world of memories from when I was eight.
Not my dad. Even the fragments he recollects, “I remember one night we were in a train – in a boxcar – and in the distance we could hear bombs going off;” or, “One day, when we had joined a merchant caravan, the cart with Genevieve in it took off! Just zoomed out ahead and disappeared down the road. But we caught up later, and there she was safe and sound.”
Even these, he delivers with a caveat. “I actually don’t know if these are my memories, or if they were told to me after. I might have just heard about it from Mama, and conjured it up, you know?”
But there is one. It’s not a story. He never “tells,” it. It will happen at family gatherings every now and then, in a corner of the room where, through natural magnetics, he and Genevieve and Bill, the youngest who wasn’t alive yet when they’d fled, have gathered, sharing a couch, joking with each other, razzing everyone else. Dad will lean over to Genevieve. “Do you remember eating eggs and rice? Eggs and rice, eggs and rice – so much eggs and rice. Day after day. For so long.”
I have worked with veterans for more than a decade now, interviewing them, working with them to shape narratives, to be able to tell their stories. The most important experiences for most of them, the ones that carry the most visceral weight, are physical: a smell, or an image; a sound; a particular quality of light, or humidity, or temperature. Something held in the body, that puts them back in the desert, the mountains, the jungle; at basic training; at home even. A person will carry the weight of an entire war in a single sensation; a trigger. Perhaps a crack is more appropriate; a place where the reality of the present opens to the reality of the past.
eggs and rice
eggs and rice
eggs and rice
My brothers and I take food very seriously. The houses we own are centered, as far as we are concerned, around the kitchen, in my case literally, the stove is the fulcrum of the living space. My younger brother celebrates Thanksgiving not with turkey, but with duckless duck lasagna, a dish that requires two full days of preparation, from rendering a whole duck to less than a quart of sauce, to rolling out twenty paper thin sheets of fresh pasta, pre-cooking them, layering them with the sauce, baking in the oven. My older brother went to Umbria for his sixtieth birthday last year, a pilgrimage: truffle hunting; cheese making; wine tasting, eating, eating, eating.
Somehow our family came through war, revolution, and exile to be here, in this kitchen, making these dumplings. We don’t know what happened on that journey. We all wonder. We all turn toward it, ponder it, put our hands on my father’s shoulder, put our arms around Genevieve. Sometimes we’ll ask a question or two, but we know all of the answers they will give. They’ve given them before. They don’t know any more.
What was it like, a boy of eight, a girl of three, a young mother, to run through the night with the sound of warplanes overhead, the presence of watchful soldiers nearby; to sleep by day in abandoned buildings; to decide whether this farmer or that one is the one who will turn them in to the Japanese?
What was it like, for a mother and two children, eight hundred years ago, hearing rumor of the governor’s guards, or soldiers, or bounty hunters, or thugs, coming for them, so they sneak away in the dead of night, heading south, through the forests and fields, the wilderness, until the sound of the wind, the smell of the earth, no longer carries these rumors?
Pork, cabbage, red onion, garlic, ginger; soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil; sugar, salt, flour, water.
War, displacement, exile, emigration.
Fear, despair, rage, anxiety.
Relief, love, joy.
Hunger.
eggs and rice
eggs and rice
eggs and rice
We bind them with what binds us. Bone, blood, breath; a laugh, a smell, a taste. Which we call love. We’re here now, in this new land. We don’t know for how long. We don’t know what our next journey will be. But for now we have each other, gathered around a table, pink to brown, a magic combination of simple ingredients.
Jiaozi – pronounced jowd-zuh. The name comes from jiao-er – tender ears, pleated curls lined up in the pans, all turned in the same direction, waiting to hear.