The food of the hometown crosses the mountains and seas, like a magical bond, guiding people to intersect lightly or darkly.
Text | Zhang Xiaobai
Not just a bowl of rice tofu
Song Zhiji's small shop opened on a newly built pedestrian street in Tongren Jiangkou County, Guizhou, specializing in rice tofu, a special snack in Jiangkou. The shop was transformed from the rice tofu stall that my aunt originally placed in the district house lane, which was more than twenty years ago. For his own signboard, Song Zhiji has a simple pride, he said that there were only eight rice tofu stalls in the county at the earliest, and now there are only thirteen rice tofu shops, as if the thirteen juyi in the rice and tofu industry, his family is one of them.
Making rice and tofu is time-consuming and laborious, and Song Zhiji's daily life generally starts at four o'clock in the morning. Thirty pounds of gong rice have been soaked in a large basin one night, and now the rice grains are swollen, like small pearls, fished out and beaten into rice milk, which used to be stone scooped, and it is much more convenient after having a machine. Then the milky rice milk is poured into a large iron pot, boiled on the wood stove, and then added natural alkali made of grain grass ash, at this time the rice milk will slowly condense, and the cooked rice balls will be kneaded into a ball or strip while hot, and after cooling, it will be rice tofu.
One rice tofu, the size of a girl's fist, two is a bowl, the locals make more breakfast, and some people eat it at noon. The tender yellow rice tofu, with ingredients such as oil chili peppers, is refreshing and delicious, and the aftertaste is long.
Eguchi rice tofu
After the meal, the store was deserted, it used to be dry sitting, and now occasionally the mobile phone jingles, and Song Zhiji has to get up and busy for a while, because someone has just placed an order in his Taobao store.
Song Zhiji's online shop specializes in Jiangkou specialty food, including rice and tofu. At first, he just wanted to give it a try, because not everyone in all places regards rice tofu as much as the people of Jiangkou, especially the alkali flavor, which many people are not used to eating. In the face of the fairy mixture of rice tofu, the folded ear root, a tourist from the northwest once asked him doubtfully: This is what we use to feed pigs, and you even eat it?
But slowly, Song Zhiji's Taobao shop also has a lot of fans and old customers, he sells ten rice tofu, some people will buy three or four in a row, these rice tofu sent to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, Hangzhou... Heaven and sea, large and small cities. Song Zhiji thought to himself, it turns out that foreigners also have so many love to eat? It wasn't until I saw the evaluation that I understood it.
In Nanjing, I finally found an authentic rice tofu shop.
This is the one in District House Lane! Taste as a child!
It's too good to eat!
Dialects have come out, and it turns out that most of these buyers are Jiangkou compatriots.
On the Internet, fellow citizens are only literal netizens. He remembered a buyer named Crisp Noodles on Taobao, who had been buying in his store for several years, and every time he did not ask anything and placed an order directly, so that he also took the initiative to leave a message in the summer to persuade Him not to buy so much: the road is far, the temperature is high, and the food is fragile.
Between comings and goings, I simply opened the conversation box. She told Song Zhiji that she was also from Jiangkou, had been away from home for seven years, and now worked in Hangzhou, and the most beautiful memory of her childhood was passing through the district government alley when she went to school, a narrow alley, on both sides of which were rice tofu stalls, and she could eat from the alley to the end of the alley. Simply noodles said that she is familiar with the three ways to eat rice tofu, one is to eat hot when it comes out of the pot, one is to eat it with folded ear roots, and the other is to directly pour the oil pepper into the rice tofu tic-tac-toe opening, simple and rough aftertaste endlessly. Not only does she love to eat, but sometimes she is also responsible for packing a few copies for teachers and classmates to take to school. She said that different rice and tofu stalls have different flavors, some are spicy, some are more fragrant, some are like jelly, some will be more powerful... She must have eaten more than once or twice at the stall of Boss Song's aunt, but now that she has grown up and left home, she has turned to the Internet to look for the taste of her childhood.
District House Lane has been demolished. Song Zhiji told her across the screen of her mobile phone. He thought that in fact, it was not how delicious his rice and tofu were, these jiangkou people who traveled far away ate nostalgia.
Food is a memory
Mr. Song said the farthest deal in Taobao was sending rapeseed oil and bacon to Singapore. From Jiangkou to Shenzhen, and then from Shenzhen to Nanyang by boat, it will take more than twenty days on the road alone, he had to put several large ice packs in the incubator, even so, he was still a little worried, afraid that things on the road would deteriorate, but the buyer told him it didn't matter, broken will not find him trouble. It was a Jiangkou fellow who had settled in Singapore, and the villager told Song Zhiji that after eating the things in his hometown, he felt that he was still in his hometown.
Song Zhiji respects and cherishes the buyer's strong homesickness, and is also very grateful to his fellow villagers for their trust in him. He made his own rice tofu and dried tofu, and his wife kang bacon at home, and when he met a buyer who wanted to buy folded ear roots and winter shoots, he returned to the village to ask Aunt Li and Grandma Zhang to go up the mountain to dig it. For the ingredients of his hometown, he is happy and misses people, he said that Eguchi's dried tofu and rice tofu are the same, and the production of dried tofu in other places must add oil to the tofu, but the dried tofu in Jiangkou is not used, and after drying, it will automatically produce oil, he is also strange.
Dietary anthropologists have studied people's attachment to food from their homeland, which is a memory of food. There is not only a unique taste in the food, but also a unique hometown, childhood, family and friends, and even a small or deep life event together. There is not only the smell of food, but also the sound, the picture, and even the joy and sorrow. Nostalgia is one of the motifs of human emotions, and sometimes people just ignore that there is always a taste of food in it. As Proust wrote in "Remembrance like a year of flowing water", because he tasted the taste of little Madeleine's dim sum, he recalled the memories of the streets of Cambrai.
Such a memory, Song Zhiji also has. He remembered that when he was five or six years old, he was not yet high on the stove, and his grandmother was steaming rice, and he helped throw firewood, which he went to the mountains and forests to collect. The flames steamed, and the dustpan containing rice was covered with a layer of white gauze, and slowly a strange smell of rice came out. He still remembers that when he was a child, his sick and weak mother would make bracken rice dumplings, wrapped in white sugar, wrapped in leaves and steamed, steamed and reluctant to eat, and put in the cabinet to produce insects, but still reluctant to throw, because even if it is broken, there is still a sweet taste when eating.
There are also rice tofu, oil chili peppers, sauerkraut, dried tofu, bacon with orange peel kang, button meat... Later, these became nostalgia, entangled in Song Zhiji's fifteen years of away from home. So now he says that he can understand the hometown-loving fellow villagers in his Taobao store, he has returned to his hometown, and they have not yet, and he feels the same feeling.
At the age of 17, Song Zhiji left home and went to Wenzhou to work. At that time, it was necessary to take twenty or thirty hours of green-skinned trains from Jiangkou in Guizhou to Zhejiang, and he was not tall, and the luggage on his back was hanging down to his knee socket. His mother specially poured him a few bottles of Jiangkou sauerkraut, marinated with large-leaf greens and peppers, and wild grass heads dug in the mountains, filled with several jars, and packed them into a backpack with a bundle of rope, and he carried them from Guizhou to Zhejiang. Because the distance was too far, the pickles swelled on the way, the juice spilled out of the jar, and when he reached the factory, opened the luggage, and all the clothes were dyed green.
The name Song Zhiji was taken by Grandpa. Grandpa was a high-achieving student at Sichuan University during the Republic of China, but in Song Zhiji's generation, he said that he was already a second generation farmer, guarding two acres of land to live. The so-called crepe, although the crepe is crepe, is also appropriate.
In 1998, Song Zhiji, who had excellent results in the middle school entrance examination, gave up his studies because of his family's poverty and went out to work with his fellow villagers, which was also a microcosm of the fate of a generation of Chinese. His first job was as a small worker in a shoe factory in Wenzhou, learning to glue the soles of shoes, and the hot rubber soles were taken out of the oven and quickly fitted to the soles, and he had to repeat this action hundreds of times a day, and soon ten fingers blistered, and he was in pain. The only consolation was to take a bite of the sauerkraut he had brought from home, stir-fry it and lay a layer on top of the white rice, so that he could eat two large bowls in a row. He is not used to eating the dishes in the factory canteen, Jiangsu and Zhejiang are sweet, he loves spicy, this is the first time Song Zhiji feels the nostalgia born of the burst of taste buds.
I was particularly homesick and wanted to make bacon made by my mother. Nowadays, Song Zhiji said that it still gives people a feeling of raw food at the bottom of the tongue, after the pot, put on the pepper, and the stinky tempeh, a stew, especially fragrant.
But the reality needs the young Song Zhiji to stay in his hometown, first in Wenzhou, and then in Shenzhen into an electronics factory, the sea of people drifting involuntarily, he occasionally goes home, always leaves, gets married in other places, and leaves the children in his hometown... Time has passed, the youth has stood in the blink of an eye, and he still can't find a home in a different place.
They all say that I can't follow the customs, but I can't seem to follow the customs. Song Zhiji said that looking at the traffic in the big city, he had the idea of going home, coupled with the elderly and sick parents, the children stayed in their hometowns, and education will become a problem in the future.
In 2013, Song Zhiji returned to his hometown, while planting land while selling rice and tofu, Taobao shops also groped open in this year, he sold rice tofu on it, but also sold oil chili peppers, dried tofu, noodle meat, slag noodles, plate powder, folded ear roots, oil dumplings, artemisia... There are four kinds of rice dumplings alone, and it seems that the entire unique cuisine of Jiangkou has been transferred to his online store.
Fanjing Mountain, Jiangkou County
A taste of hometown through the mountains and seas
In the past, authentic flavors could only be enjoyed in their hometown. When Song Zhiji was young, every time they rushed to the scene, the Hanmin, Miaomin, Dongmin, and Tujia in the eight townships of the ten miles gathered from the mountain passes with strange names such as Ant Mountain, Wuyun Mountain, and Rock Eagle Nest, gathered in front of their aunt's stalls, stood or sat in addition to the market, held a bowl of fresh and spicy rice and tofu, ate until the stomach was full, and the tense faces of strangers would also become relaxed and kind, smiling at each other and talking warmly. It is in a physical sense, where the distance between people decreases by co-eating, and even becomes close.
Today, food from home can be easily transported thousands of miles away, and virtual co-eating can achieve intimacy between people, even if they have never met each other. After opening a Taobao shop, slowly, Song Zhiji met many Jiangkou fellows in other places, including college students who studied in other places, and there were also people who worked outside the home like him a few years ago, some of them were hungry in their hometowns, and some of them were bought for the elders who moved to other places at home. As soon as he came and went, Song Zhiji became acquainted with many old customers, and he would inform them of the changes in Jiangkou, listen to their stories from the outside, and exchange memories of their hometown.
They are both acquaintances and fellow countrymen who have become friends, and trading has achieved a rare love. Food can actually bring people closer together, Song Zhiji said, this feeling is very wonderful, but there is also a trick - be kind, exchange heart for heart. When customers place orders, he usually gives away some seasonal ingredients, such as peanuts, sweet potatoes, potatoes, Song Zhiji said, these are not worth much, they are grown by their own families to eat, the right is a little heart from the old family.
He understands the difficulty of being in a foreign land, and in addition to sending authentic hometown flavors, he sometimes wants to do more. When a jiangkou fellow who was a civil servant in Tacheng, Xinjiang, placed an order at Song Zhiji's Taobao shop, he talked to him during small talk that Xinjiang is wide and wide, and there is often a sense of loneliness. Song Zhiji remembered that there was also a buyer in the Taobao store on the tacheng side, and four months ago Song Zhiji had just sent him a few pounds of sauerkraut, and this buyer was also from Jiangkou. Song Zhiji asked in the chat box: "Or shall I introduce you to each other?" When you go out, there is also a care between your fellow villagers. In this way, the two Jiangkou people in Xinjiang got in touch and had already made an appointment to have a big drink together.
The food of the hometown crosses the mountains and seas, like a magical bond, guiding people to intersect lightly or darkly. Such a thing also happened to Song Zhiji himself. One year, his Taobao store has one more customer, placed several orders, bought rice tofu, sauerkraut and other authentic Jiangkou food, Song Zhiji looked at the delivery address is Guangzhou, the buyer's name is very familiar, is a junior high school classmate in his mind, since graduating from middle school he broke off contact with this classmate, it has been more than twenty years. Did he think it would be that classmate? But if it is not her, the same name and surname will still buy Jiangkou food, who can it be? He hesitated or called the other party to ask abruptly. When the phone was connected, and there was fluent Cantonese from the other side, he thought, broken, mistaken, but when he reported his name, the other party changed into a stumbling Eguchi dialect. It turned out to be his classmate! In Song Zhiji's memory, the other party is still a girl who will put on bucket shoes and run to school on a rainy day, but now, the same window that he has not met for a long time says that he has been married to Guangzhou for many years, and the children are fifteen years old. The passage of time makes people sigh, only the memories of many years ago and the taste of hometown food are fresh as ever.
But sometimes, the food of the hometown brings not comfort, but fear. Song Zhiji received several special messages from a Jiangkou woman who had married far away in Chengdu, where she had bought rice and tofu in her Taobao shop a few days earlier.
Boss, your rice tofu this alkali taste... The other party said in the message dialog.
Doesn't taste right? Song Zhiji asked.
The taste is authentic. The woman said, but I couldn't get used to it.
It was I who had been away from Jiangkou for too long. She then added.
Song Zhiji couldn't see the mood of the other party when they typed these words, he thought, she might be a little lost.
It is not because I did not eat the delicious food and lost, but I originally wanted to alleviate my homesickness through the food of my hometown, but suddenly found that my taste has changed since then. Just like those who are far away from their homeland and take a foreign land as their hometown, they can't go back, it's the same.
An old lady in Shijiazhuang once let her son buy bacon several times in Song Zhiji's Taobao shop, the old man has left Jiangkou County for nearly forty years, since his parents passed away more than twenty years ago, he has not returned, and now that he is old and has no heart to come back, he simply hides his hometown in his dreams and pins his thoughts on this mouthful of food from his hometown.
Deep in the taste buds, it is home
Their stories, happiness or sighs, are all soothing in daily life for Song Zhiji, and they also allow him to find a special sense of existence. He made the decision to return to his hometown, mainly because of his elderly parents and young children, his mother had epilepsy for many years and could not do farm work since he was young, and his father was too old to get out of the land. As an only son, Song Zhiji returned to his hometown and first took over the hoe in his father's hand, but the soil in Guizhou could not hold water, there was little land suitable for cultivation, the grain could not be sold for a price, and the daily cultivation of land was only enough for the whole family's rations. So he sold rice and tofu with his aunt in the county town and opened a Taobao shop, all to subsidize the family. Now that the children are getting older, the mother is getting worse and sicker all year round, in order to make the family more comfortable, this year he found a job as a delivery driver, pulling bamboo chopsticks and pine cutting boards produced by factories near his home to send to various markets, although it is a few days of odd jobs, but it is better than nothing.
Back in his hometown, Song Zhiji said that although he did not earn much, he was very at ease, and the family lived together, ate around the table, and sat idly, all of which were ordinary and romantic things. However, his hometown is not a peach blossom garden, and the 39-year-old Song Zhiji has three jobs at the same time, and the pressure is so great that he sometimes can't breathe. He said that for a while he was depressed, he did not tell his wife, because she was afraid that she was worried, naturally he would not tell the old customers in the Taobao store, in their eyes, Song Zhiji has always been the enthusiastic and thoughtful, willing to listen to the Song boss.
Song Zhiji said, it doesn't matter, smile, life is hard and tired, carry it yourself, it will be good in the past. In the packaging and delivery again and again, in one story after another, Song Zhiji can always quickly find happiness.
It was a kind of pride that he had done something meaningful, he sent food to his hometown for his fellow villagers in different places, and the buyers who received the goods were happy, and he also felt good. Moreover, perhaps more importantly, every story of being in a different place is both a wandering and a struggle, and every existence of every effort to live a better life is also a special encouragement for Song Zhiji.
People are nostalgic for their homeland because of nostalgia, and they leave in order to break into new worlds, which was once the case with Song Zhiji, and so were many of his buyers. Among Song Zhiji's old customers, she has just graduated from college for three years, and since college, she has been shopping for hometown food online in Song Zhiji's Taobao store, and she is so passionate about her hometown's rice tofu, dried tofu, bacon, and spicy chicken, and she directly ate twelve pounds when she came home last year. After returning to Hangzhou, he is still unfinished, and occasionally he will fly back to eat a bowl of roll powder from his hometown.
The crisp noodles will be ordered once a month to buy rice tofu
To put it bluntly, she cherishes the taste of her hometown, she often thinks of when she was a child, her grandmother cooked and cooked for her, and she made food for her one by one, the so-called hometown food, is at home, someone is willing to turn their time and energy into delicious food for you.
However, today's uprooting is simply a serious decision on their own. Before graduating from college, she also struggled with whether to return to her hometown or stay in Hangzhou, she studied film and television editing and directing, the night before graduation, she and her classmates met to see literary and art movies, on the way back they were enthusiastically discussed and passionate, that is the atmosphere that will not be in the hometown, so an idea suddenly flashed: I probably will not go back to my hometown. Even if she stays nostalgic, she will start her own adventure in a different place.
That's it, some people choose to come back, people keep leaving, fortunately, on the way to the sea of stars, we can always feel the deep attachment hidden in the depths of the taste buds and the hometown.