This time, writing about Mitsuru, it was the same, and I realized that Mitsuru in the kitchen was really her happy time.
Sansao said, "The breeze and the moon should all be a person's business, but it's the meal, it's more flavorful with more people."
San Mao does not like to do housework. It seems that many female writers do not like to do housework, before, I wrote a biography of Lin Huiyin, she also abhorred doing housework, she felt that the time spent on housework can create more value, and did not want to waste her time on it. I don't think I've ever heard of a writer who likes to do housework, but I've only heard some of my writer and screenwriter friends say that they only keep cleaning the corners of their rooms when they can't write anything, and then finally, when they really don't have anything else to do, they have to sit down in front of their computers and start writing (I, on the other hand, don't even want to clean when I can't write, but just sit there awkwardly staring at my computer).
Of all the chores, Sansome was only interested in cooking. As a child, Sansao watched her mother cook in the kitchen, where she could make a plate of delicious food out of a few slices of onion and pieces of meat. Standing on the sidelines watching, Sansao felt that it was really a wonderful art.
When Sanmao lived alone, she ate very simply, and she hated to spend money on food. When she was studying abroad as a poor student, she often used only a piece of bread and a bottle of water to get through the day. Sometimes, the elders traveled to Spain, invited her to eat a luxurious meal to treat her in a foreign country to study hard, she felt that so much money spent on "food" is too wasteful, she would secretly tell her mother, a certain uncle if you can spend the money spent on food directly to her would be better, she would like to spend the money on other areas, at that time, she was most willing to spend money on place was to buy books.
Mitsuru was ahead of her time in many of her behaviors, but inside she had a lot of classical, traditional aspects. When she decided to marry Jose, she wanted to do it a little later in time, because she wanted to have more than enough time before the wedding to be able to travel deep into the desert alone and experience the life of the Sahrawis. She felt that after marriage, she could not run around like before, and had to take care of José, or at least take care of Mr.'s food - a kind of "willing to be a woman" mentality of a small woman.
SANMAO really rolled up her sleeves to cook from the Sahara began, although in the Sahara before, SANMAO also cooked Chinese food for Jose to eat, but at that time, they live in the big city, ingredients, seasonings are relatively easy to buy, but in the Sahara, all of this has to be prepared from scratch. Her first meals often failed, she wrote in a letter to her mother:
The day before yesterday, I tried to make lamb, fish boiled garlic and onions, not edible. But in Africa only lamb (fish Jose went to the beach to catch, are a person high fish), the Chinese word "fresh" is lamb and fish cooked together. God, I'm going to throw up.
It looks like she used all the good ingredients, probably because of the lack of seasoning and experience led to failure. Later, Sanmao's mother then sent her a lot of Chinese food and seasonings, vermicelli, purple cabbage, mushrooms, raw power noodles, dried pork and other easy-to-preserve Chinese dry goods were packed into one air parcel and flown to the Sahara. Sansao's role as a housewife became more and more comfortable, and she put a lot of thought into the kitchen. At that time, SANMO made different Chinese dishes for Jose for several days in a row, just one kind of vermicelli, SANMO made them into "Chicken Soup Boiled Vermicelli", "Ants on the Tree", "Vermicelli Box Cake", and so on. Three kinds of dishes. Jose, who knew nothing about Chinese food, had to ask what it was every time he ate it. SAN MAO saw that he was so ignorant of Chinese food, so he teased him: chicken soup was boiled to a soft fan, SAN MAO told him that it was the spring rain - "is the first rain in the spring, down in the mountains, was a one by one frozen, the mountain compatriots tied up a good back to the mountains down! "; "ants on the tree" inside the fried fans, SANMao told him that it was fishing line ...... When Jose ate the "fan box cake" in the When José ate "fan box cake" in the "mixed in the meat filling was cut into a small section of a small section of the fan, thought he ate is the shark's fin, he excitedly said to Sanshou: "In the future, this very expensive fish wings, please mother do not buy, I want to go to the letter to thank mom." Sanmao heard and laughed so much that he lay on the ground.
It didn't take long for José, a Spaniard, to develop a Chinese stomach by Sanmao. He not only loves to eat Chinese food, but also knows how to appreciate Chinese food, and then, the sticky Chinese food made in European restaurants can no longer fool him. When he had eaten almost all of the Chinese food and started to eat Western-style steak and bread, José felt very lost and uncomfortable. Even when he ate the expensive beef in the desert, he always looked forward to another "spring rain" to quench his thirst.
Sansao not only cooks Chinese food, but also makes Japanese-style sushi rolls. When Jose first ate a sushi roll, he thought that the nori on the outside of the breaded rice was carbon copy paper and refused to eat it. Sansao saw how stupid he was, so she couldn't help but tease him again and said to him in a serious manner, "That's the reverse side of the copy paper, it won't stain your mouth." While saying so, he provocatively ate one after another, until Jose couldn't help but pick up one too and bite down, only to realize that he had been tricked again ......
The kitchen of Sanmao and Jose was always full of joy. Living in the desert, one has to be well-fed to have the strength to fight the realities of the environment. While in the Sahara, she even tried to make cakes a couple of times, and that was just a touch of romance in the midst of a hard life.
Sansao's kitchen is not only Jose the diner, they often invite Jose's single colleagues to come to the house for dinner. Sanmao once said, "the breeze and the moon should be a person's thing, but it is the meal, it is more people more flavorful." Inviting friends for a meal seems like a trivial matter nowadays. In China these years, materials are getting richer and richer, and the cost of a meal accounts for a smaller and smaller percentage of one's income, so not only can one treat a guest to Chinese food, but almost all kinds of food from around the world are not hard to find in larger cities. However, that was in the desert in the 1970s, where supplies were scarce and even basic food was not plentiful. The daily life of the Sahrawis was rough, vegetables were scarce, and for a while Sanyo relied on nibbling carrots for vitamins. Sahrawi people most often eat is camel meat, Sansao and José do not eat camel meat, camel is the transportation of the desert, the mood of eating camel meat is similar to us eat dog meat. Beef, in the desert is extremely expensive, but also less eaten. Except for that expensive national hotel, not many people here put their heart into cooking.
Many of her behaviors are very international, but when it comes to hospitality, she is very "Chinese". Chinese people invite people to dinner, always worried about their own preparation is too little, worried about the guests do not eat enough, not only to eat, but also to eat lively, must be feasted, sensational. This is the case with Sanmao, in the words of Jose, "Sanmao is like this, a big deal, every time you get food, you always get a pit full of people to fill up." Coupled with the fact that Chinese food is inherently more enjoyable to eat than Western food, so friends love to go to her house as a guest, and Sansao has never let their stomachs down.
Sansao's good cooking was widely spread among Jose's coworkers, and the word got around, surprisingly, to Jose's big boss. One day, he approached Jose and said, "All the colleagues in the company have been to your house for dinner, and I was waiting to be invited, but I never waited." The reason why they only invite their colleagues to dinner, because colleagues are equal in rank, if they invite the big boss to dinner, there will always be some "flattering" meaning, SANMAO think it is too spineless to do so. This big boss also has a naive side, he not only found Jose said he wanted to be invited to dinner, but also named "fried mushrooms with bamboo shoots". Having come to this point, José could only ask Sanmao to put her "backbone" aside and invite the big boss and his wife to dinner. However, by then, the bamboo shoots sent from Taiwan had already been eaten, but Sanshao didn't show her face. On the night of the invitation, she carefully set up the table - laying a white tablecloth on it and lighting white candles. In addition to the "Fried Mushroom with Sliced Bamboo Shoots" ordered by the Big Boss, she also made a few other Chinese dishes on the table. After Sansao finished her work, she changed out of her apron and put on a long skirt, looking elegant in the flickering white candlelight. The four of them mingled over a table of Chinese food, making the guests forget for a moment that they were in the desert. At the end of the meal, before leaving, the big boss shook Sanmao's hand and told her that this was the best "stir-fried mushrooms with sliced bamboo shoots" he had ever eaten in his life, and added that he hoped that Sanmao would join him if there were any vacancies in the company. After sending off the big boss and his wife, José also praised the "Fried Mushroom with Sliced Bamboo Shoots" as being really delicious. At that moment, Sanshou said to Jose mischievously, "Oh, you mean the cucumber fried mushrooms?"
Cooking a good meal for her friends is one of the ways she expresses her feelings, because she says, "I don't love it when you go hungry". Wherever Sansao and Jose live, they make a large group of friends, and their circle of friends grows bigger and bigger like a snowball. The guests that Sanyo invited home were not only Jose's coworkers and her girlfriends, but also some people she met by accident, but they were very close to each other.
While living in Tenerife, Mitsuru met a Japanese craftsman who set up a stall on the island and became friends with him because of their affinity for each other. He was far away from home, living alone on the island with no fixed place to stay and no fixed meals. Sanmao often invited him to his home, make a table of good food and meat, and watched him and José sitting by the window to eat up a bowl of rice, a big piece of meat.
In fact, before getting married, Sanmao was also a woman who couldn't even tell pork from beef. After she got married, she fumbled around in the kitchen and penetrated most of the art of cooking. Later, Sanmao, who is of southern origin, also learned to make dumplings. Before that, Sanmao had taken José to her Chinese friend's house, and on two or three occasions, they were served with dumplings, which didn't interest José much at the time. Later, when she was in Tenerife, one time, Sanmao's cousin's husband's trading ship docked on the island, and he invited Sanmao and José to be his guests on the ship, and said he would treat them to dumplings. Jose, who had seen a lot of things, had already eaten dumplings twice, so he was a bit nonplussed by them. At this point, Sanmao thinks that Jose really knows too little about Chinese culture, he does not know, a small dumpling, in fact, can be a thousand variations, different fillings, the taste will be very different, and even the same filling, different people to seasoning, the taste will also be very different.
However, the dumplings on the table, three hair was Jose's eating stunned, "table, but only to see him buried in hard work, a mouthful of one, and because of the diving skills, can not often breathe, others change the air, he has eaten more than thirty-fifty ......". Completely forgetting his own unimpressed attitude towards dumplings a few hours earlier. After coming down from the ship, Jose was still obsessed with that dumpling, clamoring for dumplings and not Western food. However, at that time, Sanmao didn't know how to make dumplings, and she didn't even know how to mix noodles. Seeing that Jose was so obsessed with dumplings, she resolved to study how they were made. Because she had eaten delicious dumplings on the ship, ordinary dumplings could not move his stomach, so after Sanmao finished making dumplings for the first time, she called Josie and her girlfriend to come and eat them, and both of them politely said to her, "The one who cooks does the most credit, so you should eat more," and so on after they tasted the dumplings. Refusing to give in, Sanmao secretly resolved not only to know how to make dumplings, but also to become the "king of dumplings". During that time, she tried to make dumplings many times, improving everything from the skin to the filling. Sanmao is quite talented in cooking, and when it was served again, Jose regained her ability to eat dumplings on the ship, and swept away dozens of dumplings. And she has practiced her dumpling-making speed so fast that she can make 100 dumplings in an hour, so much so that she is so confident that she wants to open a store on the island to sell dumplings. However, she also knows that neither she nor Jose are business material, and it's just a thought.
Mitsuru's prowess as a dumpling maker has finally been given a bigger stage to showcase. She worked as a secretary at an embassy while living in Gran Canaria, but because her personality was not suited to such delicate, procedural work, she went on the lam after a few months, though she kept in touch with her previous female boss. Once, the female supervisor wanted to take the embassy's big boss and colleagues to Tenerife to play, she knew that Sansao was living on the island at that time, so she asked Sansao to recommend a restaurant with high style and good taste for them. Sansao thought, why not entertain them with dumplings in her own home? As mentioned at the beginning, Sanmao's hospitality was always generous and full of flavor. On that day, she mixed different fillings, including beef, pork, fish, shrimp, and even bean paste, and she wrapped the different fillings into different shapes. When the female superior brought her embassy colleagues to her house and saw "a long table with a door panel on the balcony covered with flowers, a tablecloth with a wide beige lace hand-embroidered in light orange on the door, a bottle of Bird of Paradise in bloom on the table, and a small dove-like dumpling sleeping quietly under the Bird of Paradise," she said emotionally, "I'm not sure what to say to you, but I'm sure that you will find it very interesting. She said emotionally, "Sanmao, what you did for me today, I will remember all my life."
Dumplings are more ceremonial than any other Chinese dish, representing a reunion and a reminder of the passage of time, and are essential to all Chinese festivals. When the family sits around eating dumplings on New Year's Eve, it reminds you that the year has passed and you need to cherish the time you still have. The process of making dumplings is quieter and requires family assistance than the noisy, bombastic process of stir-frying. And two people, you roll out the skin, I make the filling, and then sit together to make dumplings, watching the fireworks going off outside the window, is the easiest way to give birth to a feeling of life and death. In the Tenerife life of that period of time, SANMao addicted to dumplings, José after work will be in the side of the hand, he pinched the dumplings into a piggy, little mouse appearance, that is the most stable, cozy time of the two people, when they live in abundance, and has a childlike naivety and exploration heart.
Sansao's writing is always full of joy in the cooking part, whether in the Sahara, or in Gran Canaria. At that time, her lover was either beside her or on his way back. In the kitchen, she is relaxed, stable and full of anticipation. Whether she was cooking a Chinese meal or baking a cake, her heart was filled with the anticipation of waiting for someone to come home for dinner. Generally speaking, when a person is in a good state, he or she will have the mood and inspiration to cook, and if a person is willing to spend his or her mind in the kitchen, it means that that time should be a good time in his or her life.
After José's death, it was rare to see her write about cooking again, only remembering that in one text she wrote: "I just sometimes get a stomach ache and get a little bit of an appetite when I'm eating alone." And all those good times in the kitchen cooking for her loved ones are gone. When she returned to live in Taiwan, she often forgot to eat and needed to be reminded by her mother to remember. The greatest joy of a cook is to watch her beloved eat all the rice she cooks, and one person cooking and one person eating will feel lonely after all, right?
--From the biography of San Mao: You let go of my hand, and I fall into the vast universe Cheng Bi