And we stopped there only because one must not go on forever.
The gala days were the days when we were invited to wedding and birthday feasts, and then the menu included a score and more of different dishes, each perfected by centuries of gourmets. For Chinese are always gourmets. The appearance of a dish, its texture and its flavor, are subjects for endless talk and comparison. A rich man will pay his cook a prince’s salary, and yet he will humbly heed the criticisms of his friends concerning a dish set before them, for in China cooking is pure art in its most fundamental and satisfying form, and when a dish is criticized by those who know all that it should be, none can take offense, since there is nothing personal in criticizing an art.
One item of significance — the best dishes were always seasonal as well as local. I am a great believer in the seasons. Even here in my own world, I have no relish for sweet corn in January or strawberries in November. Such seasonal monstrosities are repulsive to me. I want my corn in August, young and green, and I do not want it for a longer time than it should continue, because other vegetables must in justice have their turn. Freezing is inevitable in this day and age and I have the implements, but I am lackadaisical about the whole affair, and had I my will, I would never eat a dish out of season. Turkey should appear at Thanksgiving and at Christmas, and for me the bird does not exist at other times.
So in my earliest world I ate rice flour cakes at New Year’s but never thought of them at other times, and in the spring I ate glutinous rice wrapped in green leaves from the river reeds and steamed, and with it hard-boiled duck eggs, salted and sliced, or if I longed for sweet, then with red sugar, which I know now is full of vitamins, but which I ate then merely because it was delicious. And in the summer we ate crabs with hot wine, but not in the autumn when they were dangerous, and the only delicacy we children ate at any time of the year was the barley taffy, covered with sesame seed, which the travelling taffy vendor sold as he wandered along the narrow earthen roads of our hills and valleys. Whatever I was doing, intent at my books or playing games in the long grass outside the gate, when I heard the tinkle of his small bronze gong, struck with a minute wooden hammer, which he did while holding the gong and hammer in one hand, I gathered a few copper cash from my store and ran to beckon to him. The taffy, dusted with flour to keep it from being sticky, lay in a big round slab on the lid of one of the baskets he carried suspended on a bamboo pole across his shoulder. When we had argued over the size of the piece I could buy with my coins, each of which was worth the tenth of a penny, he took his sharp chisel and chipped off a portion. It was a delicious sweet, congealing the jaws, long lasting and very healthy, since it contained no white cane sugar.
One of the benefits of sharing the food of the poor, and how generous they always were, was that I ate brown rice and brown flour and brown sugar. Yet the strange human passion for whiteness possessed the Chinese, too, and when a poor man became rich, which he did as often as among other men, immediately he took to eating white polished rice and flour and white imported cane sugar and wondered why he did not feel as well as he used to feel in his days of poverty. And though I was pitied for my blue eyes and yellow hair, my white skin was always praised, and it was counted a misfortune if a daughter in a Chinese family was born with brown skin instead of with a skin of light cream color. The northern Chinese are tall and fair in comparison to the dark short brown people of the South, and so the women of the North are much admired, although Soochow has its share of beautiful girls and must always have had, since old Chinese books are full of their praises. I find this same desire for whiteness here in my present world, where a darker Negro will try to marry a fairer one, and where I am told that gentlemen naturally prefer blondes. A friend explained it the other day by saying that the desire of all people is toward the brightness of the sun and their fear is toward the night and darkness. I doubt it is a matter of such profound anthropological meaning, but it may be.
Throughout those long and glorious days of my early childhood there was always something to see and to do. Behind our compound walls, whose gates were never locked except at night, a warm and changeful life went on. My father was often travelling, but my mother did not leave her children and when she had to go we went with her. This meant, too, that many visitors came to see her, Chinese ladies who were curious to meet a foreigner and see a foreign house, and these my mother led gravely through our simple home where there was actually nothing more wonderful than a sewing machine but where, everything seemed strange and therefore wonderful to eyes that had seen only the age-long furnishings of the usual Chinese house. My own friends came and went, and our favorite playing place was the hillside in front of the gate, where the pampas grass grew tall above our heads. Here in the green shadows we pretended jungles one day and housekeeping the next. Or we played in the wheat straw in the little stable where my father kept his white horse. In a sunny corner of the south veranda I spent many winter afternoons reading alone, and in that spot I read and re-read our set of Charles Dickens, refreshing myself meanwhile with oranges or peanuts. Here let me say that to my taste we Americans ruin our peanuts with over-roasting. Peanuts are not meant to be brown but creamy white, roasted barely enough to take away the raw edge of heir earthy flavor, and not until they look like coffee beans.
For change and excitement we went on rare occasions to the hills for picnics or to see Golden Island, where a giant lived, who froze my heart when I looked into his fat bland face. He was in an inner room of the vast and famous Buddhist monastery, an immense figure in the grey robes of a priest, eight and a half feet tall, and broad in proportion. He sat with huge hands placed on his knees, and he would not get up unless he were paid to do so. Even then he would not always get up to show us how tall he was, for he was often in a surly mood and kept the money anyhow. If I had nightmares, it was about that hideous gigantic priest.
Golden Island is one of the famous spots of Chinese history and it was visited by Marco Polo. Long ago it ceased to be an island for the river moved its bed and left it standing in dry land, and the historic temples and monasteries, once the possession of emperors, in my time tad only remnants left of the imperial green and yellow porcelain tiles of the Ming dynasty. The pagoda still stood, however, elegant and graceful against the sky.
In the river was the bigger but less famous Silver Island, and a picnic there was an expedition requiring the hiring of a boat to carry us to and fro, and we had to spend a day for the trip. It was a fascinating one, however, for the narrow pathway clung to the steep rocky cliffs and when I had climbed to the top and looked down upon the yellow whirlpools of the river, here as wide as a sea, I was pleasantly terrified.
The Chinese moon year was rich with treasures, too, of feast days, each with its particular dainty to be made and eaten, and each with its special toys and delightful occupations. Thus at the Feast of Lanterns our faithful servants bought us paper rabbits pulled upon little wheels and lit within by candles, or lotus flowers and butterflies or even horses, split in two, one half of which I carried on my front and the other strapped upon my back, so that I looked like a horse walking in the dark, to my great joy. And in the spring there were kites made in every imaginable shape, and sometimes we made them ourselves of split reeds and rice paste and thin red paper, and we spent our days upon the hills, watching the huge and intricate kites that even grown men flew, a mighty dragon or a thirty foot centipede or a pagoda that needed a dozen men to get it aloft. We played with birds in cages and birds, that could talk if we taught them carefully enough, black macaws and white-vested magpies, or we had nightingales for music. We listened to the wandering storytellers who beat their little gongs upon the country roads or stopped at villages at night and gathered their crowds upon a threshing floor. We went to see the troupes of travelling actors who performed their plays in front of the temples far or near, and thus I early learned my Chinese history and became familiar with the heroes of the ages. The Chinese New Year was of course the crown of all the year’s joys, and on that day my two childhood worlds came near to meeting, for we exchanged gifts with our Chinese friends and received calls and went calling, dressed in our best and bowing and wishing “Happy New Year and Riches” everywhere we went. Such occupations and pleasures belonged to my Chinese world into which my parents seldom entered with me, for they remained foreign, whereas I was not really a foreigner, either in my own opinion or in the feelings of my Chinese friends.