How this group of people who shared a plantation became, like families to each other…translated…
This Sort of a Shoestring Meal, it's a Gathering for Those Who are, Connected by Fate…………
"We're having a specialty dish of Menon!" Soon as I set foot into the vegetable garden, the hoorays came from my fellow planters. Before I set foot into that semi-open vegetable farm, the specialty dish of Menon's aroma, came into my, nostrils.
This shack was originally made up of few blocks of wood, with a tarp from a sail boat, a place we kept the tools of planting, the fertilizers, earlier, there's not even the walls around the shack. But to have a space to dodge out from the scorching heat of the sun, to give a place of rest to those working in the fields, Mr. Yang from Huko and Mr. Hsieh from Miaoli, tilled up the land, paved that foundation with bricks, then the cement, built the two and a half walls up, swapped out the rotted beams, using the steel pieces, and the wooden pieces, to make into a roof. The rundown shack, in their craftmanship, became this, gathering place for us, the group of, planters, and since, we'd all gathered by the week to share a meal, even if we don't have any work in the field scheduled, we'd gotten into the habits to "take strolls to the vegetable farm", to find an excuse to gather around.
By the side of the farm, Mr. Yang made a fireplace out of the bricks, in the center of the workers' shack, there was a tea table of teak from our home, with a large iron wok right in the middle of the table, with the specialty Menon dish that Mrs. Yang had been slow cooking for hours.
this is classic Hakka cooking, photo from online
The bacons looked soft and juicy, broken into smaller slices with a spoon, and the cabbage that's soaked up in the stew were from Mrs. Yang's patch earlier this morn, the papaya without the seeds, cut in half, that's lined the inside of the wok, Mr. Hsieh explained, was from the papaya trees of the other side of the patch plucked by Blackie. Blackie, who's a Hsintien native, suffered a small stroke just last year, limped as he walked, was immobilized, and how he'd managed to get to the trees, to get the papayas down, nobody knew.
Mr. Chuang who's past eighty-five, was an agricultural scholar with a ton of respect given to him, but, he was, a bit, greenhorn on the areas of, life, and he'd used that scholarly means, told, "I'd seen the Menon-style cooking of the cabbages, the winter melons, the bitter melons too, but I'd never seen or heard of the uses of cooking on the papayas too." my eldest sister in her eighties, who'd been raised bad bred agricultural, immediately gave him the lessons, "if the flesh had turned red, but not to soft yet, the papayas ripened in that state is best to make soups with, sweet and smooth! You may have the schooling but none the common sense!"
The two elders were then, going back and forth, bickering, debating, we'd all pulled up our chairs, situated ourselves, around that huge wok of Menon cooking, the radish cakes made by Mrs. Hsieh, Mrs. Yang's homemade kumquat sauce sweet cakes, and Mr. Yang's Taiwanese Yam #57 out of his garden.
In a moment's time, it'd felt like we were gathering for the New Year's Eve meals, even though, it'd been, more than two months since the Chinese New Year's.
illustration from UDN.com...as the planters of the farms gathered in the makeshift shack to share thier meals together...
In the comings and goings of the years, some had stopped farming, some, just, vanished.
Although we were all from different origins, we may not be related by blood, but, we sat down at the same table, like it was a tradition, we'd, gathered around, and had the meals for more than a decade's time, I suppose, we'd become, an alternative sort of, family then?
And so, this is, on the connections we made in our lives, that those whom we call our "families", may or may not be related to us by blood, some people, we share our similar hobbies with, like this group of farmers, and they'd become, close like families to each other.
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