fiction
Zou Jingzhi translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
GREEN VINES Because the Great Northern Waste was free of frost so little of the year, most crops wouldn’t thrive there. On the other hand, with the fertile soil and dramatic swings from hot to cold, anything that did survive would grow to be extraordinarily plump and flavorful. During the long winter (six months), our staple food (wheat flour) remained the same, and the side dishes seldom varied: potatoes and cabbages, boiled and fried, or fried and boiled. Through the entire season, the canteen menu scrawled on the chalkboard hardly ever needed to be altered. Of course, even cooked the same way, the ingredients occasionally changed. For instance, if a cow died, the vegetables would be served with beef. If a pig died – as long as it didn’t have swine pox – they would come with its rind, or fatty pork slices. But these were rare occurrences, because pigs and cows didn’t often die. Once, I ate some beef from a cow struck dead by lightning, but its flesh was tough and flavorless, meat only in name, its goodness zapped away by the electricity, like gnawing at wax. Old sows didn’t taste good either, bland and chewy as rubber. Still, it had to be eaten for the reassuring sensation of tasting meat, however loosely defined. There was that one time I got to enjoy some delicious veal. After I’d eaten, my schoolmate Lion Snout told me it was a young female, killed when a bull tried to mount her. That made me feel the cruelty behind the flavor, as if I’d been an accomplice to a crime. I cursed the blabbermouth. Why tell me something like that? Potato and cabbage were so important that, as soon as autumn arrived, we’d send teams out to quickly harvest them. Cart after cart would get unloaded into the storage cellar, and after thousands of root vegetables had gone through the narrow opening, our winter was secure. We could stay alive as long as these two staples kept appearing on our tables. The only alternative was a salty preserved vegetable known as “scare away
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