By Zhang Fenying

A Homecoming Meal

By Zhang Fenying

My son decided to fly back homefromAustraliaand take a one-month vacation. One week before my son’s departure,I asked him whether he wanted to eat any particular food so that I could prepare in advance.He said that he just wanted to have some homegrown bok choi.

On the farmland to the south of my home,I always grow bok choi in the late summer and autumn.I use farmyard manure to fertilize the soil.Pesticides?Not an option for me.My method is to keep growing one batch of greens after another until the bok choi exceeds the appetite of the worms,or to wait until the bok choi-eating worms enter hibernation as the temperature drops.On winter mornings,eachofthebokchoiis capped with white frost too delicate to handletheslightesttouch,whileat noon,against the gentle caressing of the warm sun shine,the greens reappear briskly in high spirits.The mature bok choi are shoveled out at dusk before the second frost gets to them and stir-fried with cooking oil and salt only.Such a dish surpasses even the most luxurious delicacies and is our favorite at home.

Australia is now having its winter.Formy son,he may come to miss bok choi back home every day at the very thought of bok choi,jade green and sweet from memories.But at the moment,it is summer in China-where could I find such a winter crop for him?Then he mentioned the scarcity of vegetables in the Australian markets.Only with the mere strokeofluckcouldyoufindthe so-called“Chinese Greens”that bear a degree of resemblance to the family-favorite,but still taste world’s away.The Australian bok choi,for example,however cooked,tastes bitter.My son suspected that the differences lie in the vegetable seeds.Although never been to Australia,I attribute the disappointment to the features of soil:plants adapt to the soil that nurture them.One case in point is the tangerine,which tastes sweet and delicious when planted south of the Huai River,while it is a completely different story if transplanted to the north of the River.Plants can taste so different just a matter of miles apart,let alone when grown on different continents.

It does not surprise me that my son would fly all the way home for a dish of bok choi.One’s stomach grows homesick before the person realizes—an experience those who have never left home would not understand.Upon graduation, I was assigned to work in a place 50 kilometers away from home.There,local residents had rice soup(paofan), steamed stuffed buns(baozi),and fried bread sticks(youtiao)for breakfast, which I found ill-suited to my stomach. The rice soup tasted bland and insipid with excessive water.For me,a routine breakfast must contain Shenzi porridge (a kind of porridge made of ground grains).We would have corn Shenzi porridge in the winters and wheat Shenzi porridge in summers.The porridge bears a creamy,milky thickness,yet tastes refreshing,withadelicatescent.My hometownfeatureshighfarmlands, yielding only a small amount of rice. Therefore,sweet-smelling rice is hard to find.When I was admitted into university,the family congratulated me on finally being able to have rice as a staple food.Back then,admission into a university meant students would receive a state Hukou(a certificate of registered residence),and furthermore receive an allowance of 16 kilograms of rice on monthly basis.However,I could not help longing for Shenzi porridge from home when dining on rice for three meals.I once wrote a letter to my mother,which informed her of this particular food desire.To my surprise,my mother went so far as to send me a sack of ground corn,though the postage itselfturned out to be equivalent to the cost of a whole sack of rice.Mother said she hated to waste money,but she hated to see me unhappy even more.Therefore, she would have sent it,no matter what the cost.

At this time of the year,the sweet and tender winter bok choi that my son covets are nowhere to be found.I decided to use my motherly ways to soothe his homesickness as best I could by growing a patch of bok choi.I dug outthepotatoes fromthevegetable garden and exposed the soil tothescorching sunforagood two days so as to kill the worm eggs. The next day,I lifted some of the fermented manure from the sty and spread it onto the dried-up soil and sowed seeds in the evening.

With heavenly blessings,the summer had witnessed abundant rainfall,and the worms,battered by winds and drenched by rains,left the bok choi alone.They grew lushly.Twenty days after my son’s return,the bok choi were good enough for soup-making.I cut them off and placed a large bowl of bok choi soup with shredded meat before my son,saying“Bok choi from the summer season does not taste good if stir-fried,and soup is the best one can do with them.You can have it all to yourself,for we have had enough.”My son ate up the bok choi and left the shredded meat.“Mum, if only I could come back,just for such a bowl of bok choi soup.”

Overseas immigrants are more often than not labeled assuccessfuland glamorous,but,as my son confessed, many others have no idea how they haveweathered through the lonely days.He describe how deep into the night,a mere thought of homegrown bok choi coming from nowhere would pierce his heart so hard that he almost wished he could book a ticket online back home immediately.

“Son,your mother will always keep a patch of bok choi for your return,no matter what time of year.”I replied.

(FromYangtse Evening Post.Translation:Dong Xiaolu.Illustration:Sveta.)