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ARTICLES:
Eurasian Experience
Jiao
Zi's (dumplings)
By Emily Wiser Scott December 2003/January 2004 My father called long-distance to ask my grandfather for permission to marry my mother. My mother had to translate it into Chinese for my grandfather. “Never!” yelled my grandfather, long-distance from Taiwan, “Never will you marry one of those foreign devils!” “Too bad,” said my mother, “I already did.” “Aiyo!” said my grandfather, “You were always a black sheep. Black sheep daughter!” “Ok,” said my mother, “I’ll see you in about five years. Tell Mom I love her.” “What? What’s that?” my grandmother could be heard yelling in the background, “Tell her her sister, June, is coming over and that Jade is to watch out to make sure June doesn’t marry any foreign devils.” After my mother hung up the phone, my father said, “Well, did they say yes? Everything ok?” “They are all very happy,” my mother told my father, “They said they know we will have good luck.” “Well, that’s a relief,” said my father, pulling his long walrus mustache, “I wasn’t sure they would approve.” “Oh, June is coming,” my mother said carelessly. “She’s coming for the wedding? That’s great!” said my father. He stopped pulling his mustache and sat up a little straighter. “No, no,” my mother said, “She won’t be here until after the wedding.” “Oh,” my father said. He went back to pulling at his mustache. He twisted the ends between his fingers until the ends formed little points. When my grandparents came to visit my parents after the marriage, they looked at my father and my grandmother opened her eyes very wide and said, “Aiyo! Not only did you marry a foreign devil, Black Sheep, but you married a long-nosed foreign devil. Bah! Long-nosed foreign devil! Bah!” “What did she say?” my father asked. “She said you were a long-nosed foreign devil,” my mother said. To really understand my mother, you must understand the stuff that she’s made of. You must understand her stories, for it is the stories that make up her psyche. But, to really truly understand my mother, you must understand my grandmother, my mother’s mother. Because all daughters are formed by their mothers, who, in turn, were formed by their mothers. So even if you don’t know who your great-great-great grandmother was or what she was like, chances are your bad temper, or your stubborn insistence on fairness, or your predilection for eating oranges was inherited from her. Chances are that you know your great-great-great grandmother, but you just aren’t aware that you know. My grandparents lived in a cold climate in China. It was very cold there and they often had snow. My grandfather descended from a family of small landowners, and when my parents were married my grandmother had beautiful clothes. When Grandma was married she had a beautiful underdress made. A lamb with the softest wool was selected and slaughtered and the skin was made into shearling. On the inside of the shearling was sewn a lining of red silk. The soft wool side was worn against the skin, so that the red silk side was turned outward. Then many layers of dresses and robes were added over it. Grandma was very proud of that dress. When she tells me this story, she stands in front of me trailing her hands over that long-ago dress, pushing at its shoulders, rubbing the silk and the wool between her fingers, and then Grandpa steps in, still tall and strong at eight-five, and he begins the story, the story not of the dress, but of how my family came to Taiwan from China. “When it came time to leave China,” my grandfather began, “the Kuomintang gathered up its men and their families and began the exodus to Taiwan. At that time, we had succeeded in taking Taiwan away from Japan, but the war had reduced Taiwan to nothing. It was all rubble. It was a very long trip. We traveled by train, by bus, by walking, and sometimes by boat. I was wearing my heavy officer’s uniform and Grandma was wearing many layers of clothing, with her red shearling dress underneath. As we headed further and further south from Nanking, it got hotter and hotter. We were sweating and Grandma was sweating so much that she began to take the layers of her dress off, one by one.” Here Grandpa paused and began to laugh. He grinned and Grandma snorted but, really, she was smiling, and I sat in my chair and waited for Grandpa to continue. “By the time we were on the boat to Taiwan,” my grandfather crowed, rather triumphantly, “Grandma had taken off all her dresses and was wearing nothing but her underwear!” He paused again to slap his hands together, bending over slightly, and giggling. “She was standing on deck only in her underwear!” he said again, laughing. “But what happened to your red dress, Grandma?” I asked. “I lost it,” Grandma said. She glanced at Grandpa, who had turned red and was still laughing. “Oh, please, Grandpa,” she said. She left for the kitchen, pretending to scowl. “Anyways,” my grandfather continued, “the war with the Japanese had reduced everything to rubble and we had to rebuild. It was a hard and exciting time. We were rebuilding Taiwan and we also had to fight off invasions from the mainland. Sometimes we would fly missions into the mainland. I was a Colonel in the air force. I did finance. When I was promoted I had to work in Taipei, but Grandma and the children still had to stay in southern Taiwan. I traveled back home once a month.” My grandmother suddenly appeared in the kitchen doorway. I thought that she had been listening the whole while. “I have a story,” she announced. “Tell us!” I said. She stepped into the center of room, next to Grandpa, and began. “When the family still lived in southern Taiwan in military housing,” my grandmother said, “and Grandpa was still working in Taipei in the Kuomintang air force, a big typhoon came and it rained and rained. Now, this wasn’t regular rain like you see here in America. There were no individual droplets like regular rain, nor was it like a shower in the bathroom, but it was like water poured from a bucket. The rain simply poured down continuously, do you see?” She looked at me and my cousin, Matthew. “Do you see?” said June, who was also listening, to me. “Yes, I see,” I said, “It is continuous rain.” “Very good,” my grandmother said. “I had to repair all the raincoats myself because we were very poor and didn’t have enough money to buy new raincoats. It rained and rained. The stream in the back of our yard turned into a river, and then it overflowed its banks and flooded the yard. I was very worried because Grandpa was far away in Taipei, and I had to take care of seven little children all by myself. I knew that when the flood got too bad, the Kuomintang would come to evacuate their families. Only, Grandpa was far away in Taipei, and they might forget about me and Da Ah-yi, and your mother, and San Ah-yi, and Mimi-yi, and Wu Ah-yi, and Xiao Ah-yi, and Jo Jo. I wanted to tell the neighbor that, if the evacuation came, to make sure to run to my house and tell me, so we wouldn’t miss the evacuation. But I couldn’t leave the house to tell the neighbor, because I had seven little children to take care of. Meanwhile, it rained and rained and the water level rose to the level of the first floor. I was worried that the evacuation might not come in time and the whole family might have to get up on the roof of the house. But how was I to get the whole family up on the roof when I had so many little children? Finally, I went myself and waded through the deep water to the neighbor’s. The water never got high enough that we needed to get up on the roof and there was no evacuation.” Then my grandfather jumped slightly and he spoke, energized, “When I came home after the typhoon, I gathered all the children around me. Every time I came home I told a story, and this time I told a particular story. “There was once a father who had twin babies and one day there was a terrible flood. The water was rising and the father’s home was flooded so he put one baby under each arm and began to climb a ladder to the roof. When he got to the top of the ladder, he couldn’t make the last step to scramble onto the roof because he had a baby under each arm. There were people on the roof and a man said to the father, ‘You have to let go of one of your babies so I can grab your hand and pull you up to the roof.’ “The father was upset when he heard this, but he knew it was true. But he couldn’t decide which baby to drop. ‘My lovely babies,’ he said, ‘They are both beautiful and good. How will I ever decide between them?’ And it was very hard for the father to decide between the two babies, because the babies were twins. ‘But,’ the father said to himself, ‘Both babies are exactly alike, so if I lose one, it is as if I still have her in the other.’ “Then the wind roared ferociously and the rain poured down harder then ever. The man on the roof said, ‘Hurry up! Or the wind will rip both babies from you. Where will you be then?’ Then the father knew that the man was right, and he cast one baby down into the flood and he was pulled up onto the roof, and the father and the last baby were saved.” Grandpa finished the story and I was shocked. I thought that perhaps one of my aunts had died in the typhoon, and June spoke up and said, “Grandpa is saying that some children might have to be sacrificed if Grandma had to go up on the roof during the typhoon.” “And now—“ June said. “Den yi-sha, Den yi-sha,” Grandma said. “What?” said June, “Oh, hold on. Grandma wants to tell a story.” “When we still lived in Taiwan,” Grandma said, “I had a yard where I kept chickens, ducks, and turkeys. Every day I would collect eggs from my chickens, ducks, and turkeys. Then one day, all of a sudden, they stopped laying eggs. I was very puzzled about this. I said, ‘Why have those very bad chickens, ducks, and turkeys stopped laying eggs? How can this be?’ “There was a very small crack between the floor of the house and the ground. One day I saw a chicken crawl into the crack between the house and the ground. I said, ‘How strange! What a strange chicken—to crawl underneath the house!’ I would find out what it was doing there. “There was a trapdoor in the floor leading to a crawl-space under the house. I opened the door and saw that all the chickens, ducks, and turkeys were laying their eggs under the house so I couldn’t get to them! I made Jo Jo crawl under the house and collect all the eggs from the chickens, ducks, and turkeys so we could eat them.” Grandma paused and then she said, “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to make Jo Jo crawl under the house because there could have been snakes there.” Jo Jo was wearing a curious frown-smile. I imagined five-year-old Jo Jo crawling between the dirt and the house in the hot and the dark, crawling after eggs. “Well,” Grandma said, “I have a story about your mother’s brand-new dress. A very bad thing your mother did. Very bad. “In Taiwan, when your Mom was in high school, we didn’t have a TV or a telephone, so I used to spend time talking to the neighbor. That was what you did in those days before TV—you told stories. I told this story to the neighbor. “We were very poor and there was hardly any money for new clothes. Nevertheless, since your Mom was growing up and needed to look nice, I sewed all by myself a brand-new dress for your mother. It took me a very long time. On the very first day that your Mom wore that dress, she bicycled home from school. When she got home, she got off the bike but the corner of your Mom’s dress got caught on the seat. Instead of being lady-like and delicately removing the corner of her dress from the seat, your Mom grabbed her dress and, with a big yank, pulled on it and ripped the skirt in half! Your mother was always very ungraceful. Then she went to her room and took off her dress and hid it under all the other clothes in her dresser drawer until one day, when I was putting away her clothes, I opened the drawer and saw the brand-new dress, shoved all the way to the bottom, with the skirt ripped in half! Very bad, your mother was!” “Your Mom was the ugly duckling,” June said, jokingly. Grandma came over and chuckled and patted my cheek, and asked me to help her make jiao zis. As I went into the kitchen, I could hear June beginning another story. Jiao zis are small, meat-filled boiled dumplings and my favorite food as a child, but they are painstaking to make. To make jiao zis for seven people took a lot of time and I had never made them before. I held the little wrappers in the palm of my hand and dropped the meat into it. Sometimes there was too little meat and there was too much wrapping left over. Sometimes there was too much meat and the ground beef oozed out of the wrapping as I pinched the tops closed. Sometimes the jiao zis were so stuffed they burst right down the middle, like my mother’s brand-new dress. I covered up those ones with water, wetting the dough to make it stretch. I lined all the jiao zis up neatly on plates. I had made almost a hundred jiao zis, and Grandma came over to inspect them. “Aiyo!” Grandma said, leaning over the plates of jiao zis and looking at them carefully, “This one has too much meat! This one has too little! Grandpa, these jiao zis are bad!” Grandpa had been helping me. “They’re diet jiao zis, woman!” he declared to my grandmother, “I don’t like a lot of meat in them.” “Aiyo!” Grandma said, “These jiao zis have burst open! Aiyo! Foreign-devil jiao zis!” Now, my Chinese is limited but I do know the word for “foreign-devil.” It is a long-standing joke between my parents that my Dad should know whenever he is being called a long-nosed foreign-devil by my grandparents, and my grandparents not know that he knows. In fact, “long-nosed foreign-devil” are the only Chinese words my Dad knows. So, my Grandma didn’t mean to insult me—she didn’t know that I could understand her. They are, indeed, foreign-devil jiao zis made by a foreign-devil granddaughter, but they are jiao zis, and I can make them. About
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