CABBAGE & BAGGAGE

As a teenager in Beijing in the late 1990s, I once asked my host mom why she never cooked cabbage. Never. Not once. It never made an appearance at our table.

I was a supremely picky eater back then and was really, truly anti-vegetable. Oddly though, I always liked the cabbage- 大白菜- that would inevitably land in front of me at a meal on one of our school excursions, or be plopped into a styrofoam container, next to some rice and tofu with brown sauce, by the vendor who set up a lunch cart in an alley off Xinjiekouwai. I loved it. Still do. I made some on Friday night, as you can see. But in my host family, 大白菜was a no-go.

During the Cultural Revolution, my host mother, like so many others from the cities, was sent off into the countryside to learn the ways of farming, hardship and, along the way, patriotism. She told me that every single day, at every single meal, for four years straight, she ate cabbage. She recalled the sound her boots made in the squishy mud of the farmland, the aches in her young joints and the hunger….that was never satisfied by cabbage. She couldn’t even stand to look at it, let alone cook it. It was a Proustian trigger for a time in her life and her country she would rather forget.

For me, it’s a different kind of trigger. It brings me back to youth and to China and to the importance of asking questions, getting to know people and learning history. It’s also just fucking delicious.