Fiction: Group 3
Popo laughed. “I remember you did the same thing!
You were just as naughty as your daughter.”
We all laughed as Ma’s face turned red as a beetroot.
“I would be clearing the dishes after dinner and your Ma would still be sitting there eating her rice!
I had to
leave her to clear her own dishes because I had to leave for my night shift work .”
We all laughed again.
“This is supposed to be about wasting food, not about me!” Ma complained.
“If we run out of food we can buy more at the supermarket!” argued Yin.
Popo’s eyes darkened and we shrunk back into our seats as Popo shared her experience with us.
“Having food is a blessing and we should be thankful.
Don’t take things for granted.
I had never been to or
seen a supermarket when I was a child.
When I was your age everybody in our village was
malnourished.
Famine had hit China.
My Third Brother had died of starvation when he was eight years
old, and my Eldest Brother got very sick from eating tree bark and raw leaves because there wasn’t anything
else to eat.
We were lucky if we could find sweet potatoes and yam leaves to eat.
We had no food.
Our
kitchen only had a stone fire pit for cooking, a broom, and a wok hanging on the wall.”
“But why didn’t you eat the food you harvested?
Your Ba was a farmer!”
“It is true that we harvested crops, but the crops were given to the government and to get rice, we had to
collect our rations from the communal kitchen. That’s how it goes in Communist China.
We didn’t have
enough food to eat and we didn’t get new clothes to wear.
During that time we needed coupons to get
cloth, oil, and salt.
One cloth coupon would only be enough to mend our Ba’s pants for work.”
“Why didn’t you go buy clothes from the department store?” I asked.
Popo chuckled and replied, “There were no department stores in my village.”
“Oh.
I’m glad Hong Kong was never like that.”
“Actually, there were many starving people in Hong Kong during that time as well,” Ma said. “Many
villages in the Pearl River Delta, including Hong Kong, were farmland because it is the most fertile part of
China.
The soil is rich because it contains silt that has washed up from the large river network around the
coast, making it the perfect farmland.”
I laughed. “It is ironic that people in the fertile land of the Pearl River Delta had undergone famine.”
Popo nodded. “During the Great Leap Forward people were forced to increase steel production, so fewer
people farmed.
Nowadays most of the land has been turned into big cities, so there are less farmlands
around.”
I giggled. “That’s silly.”
Popo frowned. “This is not a laughing matter.
Back in my day people starved to death.
Did we think it
was funny?
I think not.”
We became still and quiet after hearing that.
So many lives gone, and so many could have been
saved with the amount of food we waste every day.
After I thought about it for a while, I decided that
maybe I could improve my eating habits.
Perhaps I could even support a charity that feeds the hungry.
“I think you should go finish your meal now Mei,” Ma resumed.
Yin and Yu laughed and rolled on the carpet. “Too late!” Yu hooted. “We fed it to Ah-Wang!”
Ma, Popo, and I swirled around to see that our puppy has licked all of our bowls until they were spotless.
“Well,” Ma chortles, “Ah-Wang won’t get a spotty faced husband!”
