One of my father’s signature dishes is onion fried pork. It’s soft and sweet with a story to tell.

2020’s quarantine provided me opportunities to explore and expand on my father’s signature dish, onion fried meat, far away from my hometown Zigong.

In early Spring, while COVID-19 was very scary and full of unknowns, one of my daughter’s friends who does not eat pork visited us on short notice and I invited her to have dinner with us. In a hurry, I cooked a onion and tomato fried egg dish for her. She liked it.

From then on, I often cooked the onion and tomato fried egg when that young girl has dinner with us. Because I enjoy cooking guests’ favorite dishes very much.

After seeing I repeatedly present the same onion and tomato fried egg dish, my daughter commented: ”Mommy, onion and tomato fried egg doesn’t have meat, it’s probably short of protein.”

Because the guest doesn’t eat pork, I added fried ground beef to the onion and tomato fried egg dish. This new onion dish eliminated my daughter’s concerns also fit the guest’s taste.

Bright colored onion and tomato with fried egg and ground beef dish became one of my signature dishes in 2020. Quite a surprising achievement during stay-at-home quarantine time.

The plain and boring life of staying at home promoted my signature dish HuiGuoRou to more guests. In the meantime, I got lot of feedback about my HuiGuoRou: such as it is very greasy. In response, I remembered my father’s signature dish of onion fried pork and I started to add onions to HuiGuoRou for my guests, because onion absorbs oil well. Then I was told: “The onion inside HuiGuoRou is so delicious.” (soft and sweat onion filled with the special flavor of HuiGuoRou).

In 2020, I often cooked onions with meat. The high frequency let me realize that my cutting of the onions into half rings is different from the traditional Chinese cutting method, because I happened to see the traditional onion cutting style from my classmate’s photos.

Because of my father’s signature dish of onion fried pork, I am very good at making onion fried HuiGuoRou, a family dish that has been enhanced across the world. I was happy to see that I adapted and mastered a family dish unexpectedly in 2020’s long quarantine period.

I felt the core of family dishes is using common supplies to cook delicious food with touching stories. My onion fried HuiGuoRou is my family dish.

BTW, The famous French onion soup is never my dish, because I felt the onion lost the texture, the softness, and the sweetness I enjoy.

Chinese Version

Today, Professor Ye, one of my college classmates, said that my father’s articles exhibited “a strong writing style like that of floating clouds and flowing water.”

Actually, my father possesses not only a “strong writing style like that of floating clouds and flowing water”, but he also has a good mindset about turning big troubles into little ones, and little ones into nothing. I have a personal story about this.

While living at the LouWan Compound during the Cultural Revolution, we shared a public kitchen with a few neighbors. We also shared a big dining table in the kitchen.

When eggs were in season, Yeyi, our nanny, would hide a cooked egg under the hot porridge as our breakfast. She then left the bowl on the dining table in the public kitchen. After getting up in the morning, we would go to the kitchen eat the cooled porridge along with the egg.

One day, I got up earlier than my brother so I went to kitchen alone. I ate my porridge and my egg, then I secretly dug out the egg from my brother’s bowl and ate it too.

After breakfast, my brother told Yeyi that there was no egg inside his porridge.

Yeyi was very angry and immediately went to question the neighbors who shared the kitchen with us: “Who stole our egg this morning?”

As all of our neighbors said they did not, Yeyi got even angrier. At the end, most of the neighbors knew that the egg which was hidden in my brother’s porridge had been stolen that morning.

Finally, I could not stand up to the pressure and admitted that I was the one who stole the egg.

That I was the one who stole the egg became a well-known story among our neighbors, a story which made me feel very ashamed.

Right after the egg episode, my father came home from the army. He told me that other girls also ate stolen egg with a story:

Once upon a time, a little girl quickly ate a stolen egg by swallowing the egg whole. She was choked to death. A thief dug through her grave right after she was buried in the ground. The thief was scared the corpse was still alive so after he opened the coffin, he hit the girl’s chest three times to check whether she was alive. After being hit on the chest, the whole egg went down to her stomach and the girl returned to life.

I was scared by the story for a long time. Recalling this story now, it seems my father made this story for me and to let me know eating a stolen egg could be life threatening.

Nowadays, when I tell my children the story of my stealing Jiujiu’s egg, I no longer feel ashamed, but feel childish joy. As we age, our cognition is altered.

However, when I was little, steeling that egg was a huge scandal in my mind. Big troubles inside an innocent mind require a wiser person to diminish the troubles, so that the innocent mind won’t be silently tortured for a long time.

Today’s big thing will be tomorrow’s little thing.
This life’s big thing will be next life’s nothing.