Chinese Version
06-28-2021, Monday, Very Hot
I recently reconnected with Ru, one of my CUA alumina, after more than 20 years apart. The degree of disconnect after more than 20 years apart would be best described as: “our sons are adults now, but we have yet to see each other’s sons.”
Our memories in graduate school were deep, as we immediately recognized each other’s voice on the phone and felt very happy!
Both of us are the spoiled younger sister in a family with an older brother, which makes us childlike even after more than half a century of life experience. After we lamented the hardships we had faced together, we started to chat about the food anecdotes we had shared more than 20 years ago.
Ru said, “I still remember you said you ate rabbit skull on the streets of Chengdu. It sounded so interesting, I was drooling at that time.”
I asked, “Have you been to Chengdu yet?”
She said, “Not yet. I didn’t go that far when I went back home.”
The subject of eating rabbit skull excited me again, I elaborated to Ru: “In the 1980s, a whole rabbit skull without incision was sold on Chunxi Road in Chengdu. Although it is not a ladylike to bite the rabbit’s skull while walking in downtown Chengdu, eating rabbit’s skull requires expertise. The whole rabbit’s skull can’t be opened casually. We must base our actions on anatomical principles and open the rabbit’s skull with both hands and mouth in order to get access to the brain. Nowadays the rabbit skull sold on the streets of Chengdu is cut into two pieces, so it doesn’t have the challenge and fun like before. ”
Because Ru’s husband and I used to do experiments and research on the same floor and often stayed in the big computer room, I told Ru: “I still remember your husband describing how to steam fish in detail slowly in the big computer room on the third floor of VSL. I was very impressed when I heard such exquisite operation steps for the first time!”
Because we only had a small pot for cooking rice and a pan for frying vegetables at that time, the steamer normally used for steaming fish did not exist in our kitchen at all. The exquisite steps of steaming fish sounded so beyond my reach, like mission impossible.
Ru laughed when he heard this: “He ate lots of delicious food because of his grandfather since childhood, and he also learned lots from his grandfather.”
Then Ru asked: “Do you remember when we went fishing for crabs together?”
I said, “of course, we went to the beach and caught a lot of crabs. the crabs filled a bathtub. I remember we boiled the crabs and the boiled crabs were delicious. ”
In the summer of the early 1990s, it was a great pleasure for us graduate students at CUA to go fishing for crabs at the seaside. We went to the supermarket to buy the cheapest chicken leg and took it to the beach. We took out many long ropes prepared in advance. One end of the long rope was tied to the chicken leg which we threw it into the ocean and the other end was held in our hands. When a crab bit the chicken leg, the rope in our hands would move, and we would then quickly pull the moving rope back to the shore in order to catch the crab. While fishing for crabs, we met police officers who came to check the booty crabs and told us to throw crabs that are shorter than a can back into the ocean.
Talking about food and drink is a more interesting topic than talking about the weather.