A vignette fragment by Koon Woon

Rice Bowls: Previously Uncollected Words of Koon Woon

As Hardship Is Not Explained But Lived.

While uncles arc in leech-infested rice paddies, planting rice seedlings one by one, there was a war going on in Korea. I have just reached the age where I can understand that something is different because there were slogans on the village walls, denouncing US Imperialism. I was five years old and I lived in Nan On Village, the village in Guangdong Province where I was born and was named for “Southern Peace.”

My grandmother called me “Koonie.” My grandmother's feet had been bound. They looked like clumps of ginger roots. My Big Aunt in Bowlung Village gave me a black puppy dog and I simply named him “Blackie.” Blackie was nearsighted. He would bark at me in the village yard until I came close enough for him to see me distinctly. Then he would excitedly greet me jumping onto my legs. I loved Blackie and I warned my grandmother not to butcher Blackie when I went to school.

“I want to see Blackie when I get home,” I say to her frequently. Prosperity and hard times in the village can be measured by the number of dogs roaming around. There was even a day of the year in our part of China where dog-meat vendors sold dog meat from village to village.

One day I came home from school, Blackie was not there to greet me. I knew the worst had happened. No, we didn't lose the Korean War. The “volunteer” from our village came home from the front. He had a wife and a young daughter my age. The rest of the men were absent from the village. They had immigrated to the United States when Chinese immigration was re-opened after the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed because China was on the side of the Allies in World War II. There was one man of war age, but he had a very large family and so he stayed in the village.

Blackie was steaming on the table. I cried and accused grandmother of being heartless. There was no other meat on the table. We hadn't had meat for some time. My parents sent money home from the United States when they can. Grandmother, my adopted sister Ah Deel, and I took care of three gardens, besides our two parcels of rice paddies, with the help of our uncles and aunts. Crying did no good and finally I was hungry enough that I ate what was on the table. I heard later that grandmother had someone put Blackie into a pillow case and threw him into the village pond.

The Patched Life.

You can't just buy a new sweater. The cost is prohibitive for the average peasant. What's more, during the years in the village from 1955 to 1958 that I can remember, cloth was rationed, and the only colors it came in was either black or blue. I had my grandmother cut and sewed a Mao jacket for me. It has many pockets in front. If it was good enough for Big Chairman Mao, it was more than adequate for me.The other clothes I wore had many patches, like the work clothes of Hippies in the Sixties America. Back to the sweater, the joke was that you got to wait until your grandmother dies, then unravel her signature sweater, and reknit it for you.

Other things were patched. There was a tinker that traveled from village to village mending woks. The woks were made of pig iron and it gets worn in the middle to form holes. They were welded patched. That was the extent of our affluence and technology. I hadn't seen a bicycle until we got to Canton (Guangzhou) in 1958. When someone had told me that there was something called a radio where you can pick up a voice or music from fifty miles away, I was incredulous. That finally I saw one in operation at the charcoal bus station. Yes, the bus was run on charcoal.