International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations under the auspices of UNESCO
Short story winner
Turn on the fire, mild and firm fire. Heat the pot, with patience. Then oil, not too much, to stay healthy. Shallot, ginger, and garlic, cut into small cubes, to spice up. Wait until you smell the pleasant taste, but don’t burn anything. Chicken pieces, previously boiled in warm water, throw them in. Then big fire. A spoonful of sugar to colour the flesh. Salt, cumin, dark soy sauce, and chili. Stir quickly before it gets sticky. Onion, pepper, potato, and mushroom. The more the merrier. White, green, red, yellow, brown. Fry until everything is covered with a mouth-watering shiny light brown, add water and more salt, and stew it. One secret is that, if, unfortunately but often, the chicken is of bad quality, a piece of dried mandarin peel would perfectly improve the flesh texture, and add fruit fragrance to the meat. Finally, potato vermicelli, or handmade broad noodles, which look like a waist belt. When it’s almost done, (sorry there’s no hard index here. It’s about experiences and observations. A wrong judgement will not kill, but it tells if one is a good cook or not), a bit of soy sauce, flow it in alongside the edge of the pot. Plus a little green coriander to make it look nicer.
Here we go. Big Plate Chicken. A classic of north-west China, widely loved, across regions. You can tell the dish is meant for sharing. Big big plate, so everyone sitting by the table could reach it. If you visit people’s houses around festival times, you will be having this dish and stretching your arm all day. When I was little, every time I visited my grandmother, I mean, mother of my mother, this dish was how she spoiled me. She would catch a cheerfully quacking chicken from the yard in advance, then an agile cut on the throat, remove the feather in boiling water, and dismantle it to eatable sizes. It sounds easy, but actually not. Local families used it as a test for their future son-in-law which my father nearly failed. Years later, when I started my bachelor’s in Beijing, I was surprised that this dish was only placed in the halal section of the student canteen, and many people thought it was a Muslim dish. But see, the Han Chinese enjoy it too.
I have never learned how to cook this dish. Or, I have never learned how to cook.
Why, Mom?
You have been worried about my eating since the first day I arrived in the Netherlands. It seemed that I could starve to death at any point. You can’t cook. You said so, trying to look loving but only putting on a face of mocking. You said. Those things from supermarkets don’t feed you, you know? There’s no nutrition in it. And you can’t learn how to cook from the Internet. From someone you are not bound with in any sense? That does not work. And where do you buy meat? Animals fed by hand, raised with touch and gentle staring, killed by a skillful craft , blood properly let out, dismantled by a proficient knife? You can’t cook, and there’s nothing you can eat. You said.
Right, I have never asked how you learned cooking from my grandmother, but surely, that teaching didn’t happen between us. You have always been proud that I was a kid raised with homemade food, which earned you respect among your friends and colleagues. Home-fed is a sign of diligent and honest people, who do not leave their own house-caring work to others, nor waste unnecessarily on restaurants. Besides, food security incidents that happened in the first decade of the century have terrified you. Homemade food has been the only way you could keep me safe from any dirty or even poisonous ingredients made by an unknown hand. You couldn’t be convinced that I somehow cooked. Even if I managed to survive, still, food without you, without blood, is not trustworthy.
But it doesn’t mean I didn’t learn. Mom. When Father was yelling from the living room, threatening to slap me to death, waving fists, telling us to fuck off and go begging on the street if food can’t be served in half an hour. When you stood there, in silence, preparing, throwing things into the trash bin from time to time. I was crying most of the time, didn’t know where to go, so hid in the kitchen, hoping that you could say something to stop this. That was when I learned. Mom. Over and over again. Day and night. Fire on and off. In heavy silence. Oil, bottle after bottle. Bags of salt, rice and flour. Through your hands, seasoned by your silence and my tears, food is chopped, frozen, heated up, thrown away and eaten, and I have grown. And I learned. For a long time, I thought if I could cook and replace you for all that labour, everything would be fine, and every problem would be solved. Would it? That’s also when I started hating cooking and that tear-seasoned food. Why it’s us, you and me? Why do I have to go through this? At some point in my 20s, I couldn’t bear sharing food with Father any more. I stole my noodles, covered with a few pieces of mushroom, and hid in my room. I ate carefully, with no sound, tears on face, pretending that I didn’t exist. And you sat at the table, eyes on the floor, leaving food untouched. Fried eggplant, tomato and pepper. That’s Father’s favourite, despite my genuine resentment. Vegetables cooled down. Noodles turned hard and sticky. Then you said, “How come I gave birth to such a disgusting thing like you”. You see. The wish to refuse the blood of food is always the most hurtful, and it brings out the strongest hurt backwards.
And this home-fed kid cannot cook. When I was living with you, you never let me make a whole meal by myself. During my bachelor time, electricity in my dormitory room couldn’t even support a water kettle, let alone cooking. However, the first day I was in full responsibility of my eating after I moved to the Netherlands, I told you that somehow I made tomato noodles, and it was actually good. Your face in the video call was shocked, and a bit hurt. Right, my food was skeptical. How could it be possible? But Mom, those techniques and knowledge were growing in me, and automatically flown out. My food tasted familiar, salted enough, sometimes excessively, because you were not there anymore, to stop me from salting things since Father didn’t like it. My food without you. I soon became a proficient cook, since my tight schedule left no room for being a raw-hand. Now I knew. Cooking is not hard to learn. Simply by being female in a family, by being expected to be a mother, by being the one to answer the question “what to eat for dinner”, one could learn. The position fosters knowledge. So it is never only about me being not able to cook. It’s about your daughter eating without you. And now, thanks to the time difference, I was the one washing, chopping, dismantling, and stirring, and you watched me through screens. Stir the egg faster. Flow it through the slotted spoon one more time. Don’t be lazy. Put dried small shrimp. It’s nutritious. A little more water, and be careful when steaming. You said I loved this steamed egg when I was little, and Father would always be the one who fed me. But like you said, I was too little to remember.
Father has his own version of fooding. He is just not tangled with it, yet. Very often, this piece of fact–that Father spent his childhood in deadly starvation and bare poverty–still smells unrealistic to me. In those winters when he had to herd the goats with half-broken shoes, and passed by the unburied corps of young-passed babies, by the snow that submerged his waist, by the graves of the deceased where he hoped to find some offering to eat, he starved. My grandfather, so father of my father, who was the captain of the production brigade of that little village in the time of collectivism, was forged as an incredibly capable man. The sparrows hiding underneath the house eave, rats giggling in the cracks of walls, leaves of radish and elm trees, and potherbs beside the water well. He found food from everywhere, turned inedible to edible, and fed his three kids. Eat. Eat it. Grow your flesh. And feed people around you. The schools charged students in grains, not in money. With bags and bags of grain, Father, Father’s older brother, finished their education, finally got rid of farming, and moved to the city, although my aunt stayed a farmer until recently. But something remained unchanged for Father. Throughout his life, one thing makes an unparalleled delicacy– a handful of highland barley, freshly cut and picked from the field, baked in the fire pond. Rub off the husks, and eat it like a snack. Eating wheat like this was him enduring, and responding, to the painful image of food. Food that fills bellies, that saves lives, and that creates love and hatred between humans regardless of their close or far connections. The village he was born and raised in is located at the foot of gigantic mountains that breed the source of the most important rivers in China. I remember white poplars alongside the roads, the far-away mountain covered with snow, bathing in blood-red sunset light. The soil was always cold, hard, in rough black. So were people’s faces. Cold and hard, in rough black, silently undertaking hard labour. The soil grows life, and the soil defines death. Until two years ago, the villagers were collectively resettled in a newly built and well-infrastructured neighbourhood. People who have struggled to live for centuries left their land, where lives were born and taken.
But Father hasn’t ended up untangled yet. He hates it when I want to try something fancy. He demanded that I should eat poorly as he did as a kid. No snacks. No soft drinks. No street food. No eating outside. Nothing with too much spice and salt. How fucking dare you ask for candy and cakes? Those fancy vanity trashes do no good to health. But he was throwing money on alcohol, cigarettes and mahjong. How does he expect me to eat? How does he expect me to live? I have never figured it out. He was lost. Lost between the brutality and bitterness of the last generation, and the material redundancy of the next generations. He wanted to retain his austerity of farmers, but also wanted to experience the magnificence of urban life. He was not sure. Things change too much, too quickly. Having spent my early years in the countryside, I had no idea what a cake was like until I was 6 years old, got to know scallops and crabs as food in primary school, and tried my first steak at 13. When KFC first expanded to the town, it was too luxurious to expect as a birthday treat. I have never gone through any structural starvation. But the remaining dust of that time already made my fooding so heavy. Don’t waste anything. Save it, because scarcity of anything is dangerous. Keep restrained. The most boiling words I have ever heard are, “Buy yourself whatever you want to eat”. And many of the people who have said this to me passed away without having whatever they want to eat ever. She said this when I talked to my grandmother for the last time, well, mother of my father. She said, you have grown up as a kid who understands the bitterness of life. Never made trouble. Always obey. Always behave well. You have borne the weight of food, but that is what your father has done wrong. He hurts your heart, but you’ve got to understand him. He fed you. He’s your father. I couldn’t answer her. I didn’t say anything. See. Our blood intersects, with each other, with food, with soil and water, with icy cold wind and the wildfire that burns the dried feather grass. Blood spreads vitality, and creates pain.
I hated cooking, but moving to the Netherlands ironically gave me no other choice, and I was made to start thinking how I wanted my fooding to be. I started to learn. Learn about it by eating. Even if people in this country don’t seem to prioritise food that much, food makes the clue alongside which I know this place. Anything I recognized, or I figured out a way to eat it, indexes some senses of reality, and also ambiguous but tangible thoughts about this country. Fruits, great. Um so many kinds of cheese? No problem, I’ll try them out. Oh, there’s crab sticks. I wasn’t expecting this. So many kinds of half-ready food. Are they struggling with cooking? One kilo of spinach? How much does one have to eat everyday before it rots? Gosh. Various kinds of salads, and none of them properly salted. No thanks. Localized Surinamese, Indian, Chinese, and Indonesian food. Huh, no comments. Spicy Chai? Smells like something that would be perfect to go into a bottle of cheap wine to make a cooking wine that kills the horrible fleshy taste of those bad-quality meat from supermarkets. Wait, what are these little white-yellow vegetables that look like a shrunk version of Chinese cabbage, with an innocent appearance but evil taste? Pitloof? Until today I still know it as its Dutch name only. Well, such a bitter name. Meat has been particularly suspicious. Where are other parts of chicken and cows, except drumstick or shoulder steak? Skin, viscera, claws, heads, blood. One chicken only has two legs right? Then if there are so many drum legs sealed in a plastic box, what happens to other parts of its body? Did they throw them away, make them into something else, or sell them to poorer people?
It took me a long time to navigate the supermarkets. My Polish roommate made a friendly joke, “Supermarkets are like a museum for you”. Surely they are. My supermarket adventures remind me of those so-called ethnological museums that present the cultures of humans. Culture of making something edible or not, fresh or canned, hot or cold, organic or vegan. If I find a spot for these items in my kitchen, then I will own some knowledge of them. Of course, there are still things I have never managed to know, as if they are a hard rock and my mind repeatedly attempted to chew it, swallow it, but never even found the right spot to bite it. Things whose edibility is unclear are incomprehensible. Parsnips. My mind prefers to see it as a piece of fossil made by dental calculus of some prehistoric colonizing creatures from Mars. I have therefore decided to exclude their existence out of my own being.
Bit by bit, bite by bite, the blood of beings is articulated, and my life turned solid, solid enough to let something grow on it. Someday I was frying some pasta, with potatoes, celery and carrots, seasoned with the sauce that makes a hot pot base (These little spicy red cubes are a necessity for Chinese students who study abroad, and also a hard currency within the student community.). Everything smelled nice. Then I got a message from Roos.
Where are you? I’m home. Cooking.
What are you making? Fried pasta [a robot face emoji].
Then came a bit of silence. Then we texted at the same time.
Can I eat at your place? Do you wanna come to my place and have dinner with me?
This conversation, as later repeated again and again, got abbreviated over time. Would you like to have dinner at mine? How about food at my place? Food at mine? Dinner?
Just like the food her country has, the way Roos fed herself also took an intellectual toll on me to understand. She appeared so homeless to me, eating no freshly made food for a whole day due to long-distance commuting between a small town and Amsterdam. Without sitting settled in front of the dining table, what she keeps in her backpack is a sandwich box filled with two pieces of bread, perhaps with peanut butter or cheese. Drifting, drifting. Hasty eating. Cold food. Swallowing ice-cold bread together with the wind blowing over the humidity of the canals. No no no, please come over. Coldness would prevent anything from being digested. Eat your food under a shelter. Stop working, take time, chew every bite, disconnect from labour. And anchor yourself where life can be restored.
In those years, I made dumplings by myself, steamed buns, and even mooncake. I also learned a little about Thai and Malaysian cuisine by shopping in hell-expensive Asian supermarkets. But Mom, you remained skeptical. I felt like you were awaiting a point when I sent myself to the hospital for food poisoning. That didn’t happen, thank god, since my poverty-stricken recipe circumstanced me in a limited and safe range of ingredients. This also somewhat comforted you. You seemed to believe that food in the Netherlands is too alien and suspicious to afford any connections, even though I talked about how I accommodate my friend group for dumplings and how that rooted my life down to earth. For you, most importantly, my cooking was domestically imparted, and Dutch food, in essence, was too light and shallow to alter me. You had a brilliant metaphor for this: it’s not nutritious. Beef was not nutritious. Shrimps were not nutritious. Eggs were not nutritious. Those animals were locked in cages. No way their flesh can be nutritious. You said. And vegetables and fruits were basically condensed water. I was speechless, and asked you in confusion, then what do you think is nutritious? You got slightly choked, then a little awkwardness. “Mom’s food is nutritious.”
Things changed in 2022. Covid-19 systematically disrupted my fieldwork plan and I unexpectedly ended up in a Tibetan village right beside my hometown. The residents were herders who were resettled from their pastureland, but their animal-centered fooding was not dissolved. Chunky yaks were slaughtered, amid fervent talking, tea drinking, gossiping, and cooperated labour of herders. Warm blood was given back to the earth, through a carefully dug hole on the ground, so it’s not messed up everywhere. Also, keep some blood with the flesh, so it stays juicy and tender. But if the yak was not wildly grazed, no butchering nor preserving skills could help with that gross taste and texture. A pair of hands, the hands that peeled the skin and removed the entrails, with dried blood on, fondly collected the fat into a plastic bag. “This is to make a hot pot for you.” Someone smelled and said to me. Those hands, with flesh and blood on, made the dough, rolled noodles, cut onions, boiled beef, passed bowls and chopsticks, and peeled a piece of garlic for me. The exuberant fire was fueled by dried cow poop, and it gives the noodles an elastic but tender texture, with a robust fragrance of wheat. At one moment, I felt like I was eating the blood of earth.
But people noticed something dubious with my eating. One day, my gatekeeper, a local cadre who was burly in appearance but considerate inside, visited me, and found moulded rice in my pot. He put back the pot lid, and looked at me, with blame. I said shamefacedly in my mind, sorry, I was too desperate about the lockdowns happening out there, to my friends, and to ordinary people who suffered. Covid had been there for three years, and back then all my sufferings peaked, and erupted. I felt no wish to thrive, or namely, to eat. After that day, I rarely turned on my fire any more. No one let me. People called, one household after another, inviting me for meals. Occasionally there was forced drinking, too much food, or too little vegetables. My stomach ached. I felt reluctant. I gained so much weight. But I also learned. I learned their way of drinking tea with the powder of dried highland barley, milk, and goji berries. This filling aliment used to be a necessity for the herders wandering around 4000 meters high mountain and grazing their cattle. Although later their herding livelihood was gone, this tea remained, as a breakfast and afternoon dessert. And it causes health problems, since without the demanding labour, such an amount of calories negatively influences cardiovascular functions. I also learned that food shall not be treated carelessly. Fooding is not always for joy and fulfilment. It’s for subsistence, tenacity and endurance of life. That’s the responsibility one carries. Only by such an unswerving determination in being serious with every meal could life find its internal impulses. Have a meal, and next meal, and next. The pumping flow of eating is directing the temporality firmly towards the future. Eat. Grow your blood and flesh. Fix your feet on the ground. Then you walk. I learned, and I was grateful, for all the care and vigour that had grown me.
But Mom was shocked, and you sensed a crisis. I noticed how you saw a competition over blood. A competition, as I have been eating too much with others, ethnic others, cultural others, blood others. What if it changes me? And it has changed me. You showed a low-key unhappiness when I said I was invited to a household for food, and was even more shocked that I picked up the habit of boiling tea leaves with milk. Before I left home for Mongolia, you put aside everything else, and got up early to buy pig hooves and chicken claws for me. You accepted me hating eggplants, and tried to stew fish in a sour flavour as I always longed for. You were finally realizing that there are too many people entangled in my eating now. Fermented chilli and tomato soup from Southwestern provinces in China, Uruguayan stew of carrots, potatoes, and pork, sugar from Belgium, Korean fried rice cake, Dutch stroopwafel that is too sweet to have more than one bag in one’s whole life, Mongolian dried milk bar and fried noodles. I am turning into someone’s friend, someone’s roommate, someone’s guest, someone’s student, and someone’s dating partner. I cook with them and eat with them. My blood has complexed, and smells like things that you don’t understand and food you don’t trust. I know that you were feeling sorry, eagerly sorry, for what I have gone through these years. But you were also proud, that your daughter has enriched her life, beyond what her mother provides. You said, you’ve been living a way too tough life these years, so just let Mom take care of you. There seems nothing else that could keep me beside you, but food.
Mom. This year I am 25, and you are 49. Let’s eat together. Big plate chicken. Let me cook it for you, in your usual way, but I would ask for more vegetables and potato vermicelli. And some early summer peaches afterwards, the kind of peach you can have a whole bucket by yourself. Our blood diversifies, deforms, and reforms, but it doesn’t turn me into another person. We have eaten together, and will eat together. So does our blood. It will surge, on and on, until tomorrow, until forever.
Author biography
Yuanhui Ding is currently working as a research assistant at International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations under the auspices of UNESCO, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Trained as an anthropologist in China and the Netherlands, she is interested in human-nonhuman relationship, sustainability, and social transformation.
