Yu Hua "Buns and Dumplings"

When I was a child, steamed buns and dumplings were luxuries, and I only wanted to eat them during the holidays. Back then, when my young father came home with a bag of flour in his hand, he used to shout, "Here comes the flour!" It's the best sound I can remember from my childhood.

Then my father washed the basin with soap, poured the flour into the basin, added water, and began to knead the flour vigorously. My job was to hold the basin hard so that it would not be overturned by my father's strength. My father was tall and strong, and he looked very powerful when he kneaded the flour, and I just used all my strength to hold down the basin, which was still beating on the table, and the table was clattering. At this time, my father would ask me, "Guess what, are we going to eat steamed buns today?" or dumplings?"

I need to be patient. I'm going to see if he adds baking powder to the flour, and if he does, he brings the basin to my bed and covers it with my quilt, and I immediately shout, "Eat the buns." "

If he had finished kneading the flour and had brought the seasoned stuffing instead of baking powder, I knew that the next thing I would have been to eat would be dumplings.

This was an important sign when I judged the difference between buns and dumplings when I was a child. The flour of the buns is fermented, and after steaming, there are many small holes in the inside, and it is very soft in the mouth. The flour for making dumplings does not need to be fermented, and we call it "dead noodles". Of course, when I put them on the table after making them, I don't need this knowledge, I can see the difference between them at a glance, the round shape must be the bun; Naturally, it is a dumpling like an ear.

When I was seven years old, my father took me to his hometown of Shandong. I remember we took a boat, then a car, then a train, then we got to Shandong, we switched to a car, and finally we went into my father's village in a horse-drawn carriage. It was winter, the fields were yellow, and my father took me to his aunt's house. My grandparents died before I was born. My father's aunt, my grandfather's sister, was sitting in front of the stove and lighting the fire, and when she saw her nephew, who had been separated for nearly 20 years, come back, she jumped up and said to my father a bunch of Shandong dialect that I didn't understand at the time. Then lift the lid and give me a bowl of steaming corn paste.

It was the first meal I had in my father's hometown. For a month in my father's hometown, I drank corn paste every day. There is a saying in that place: People who are lucky enough to open their mouths and fly into the white buns. White buns are steamed buns, or buns without filling. It means that whoever eats steamed buns will have good luck. If you have good luck, you just eat steamed buns, and if you eat dumplings or buns, you don't know what kind of good luck it is. So I was at my father's aunt's house, and I could only drink corn paste every day.

As we were about to leave, I finally had a dumpling. It was my father's cousin who came to see us, and when he came with a piece of pork in his hand, he was surrounded by a group of children as soon as he entered the village. These children, who don't see pork a few times a year, drooled and followed my father's cousin to my father's aunt's door. While my father and his aunt and cousin sat on the pit making dumplings, the children poked their heads in through the door from time to time.

When the dumplings were cooked and served steaming, I had the most unforgettable dumplings of my life. I took a bite, and the dumplings were the same as salt, and I put a dumpling in my mouth, as if I was grabbing a handful of salt in my mouth, and I was so salty that I could only drink the corn paste in large gulps to get rid of the salty taste in my mouth. Later my father told me that dumplings in his hometown were not eaten as a snack, but as a dish that made the mouth luxurious when drinking corn paste, just like the pickles we eat in the south when we drink porridge.

When I was in elementary school, I would arrange a study of engineering every semester, or study agriculture and the army. To learn to work is to let us go to the factory to work, and to learn to be a farmer is often to go to the countryside to harvest rice, and our favorite is to learn the army. Studying the army is to study the People's Liberation Army, so that our children of one grade march in a line and go to a certain destination dozens of miles away. We often leave before dawn, bring our own lunch, sit down for lunch when we arrive at our destination, and then walk back, often when we get home it is already dark.

This is also the day when I still hope to eat steamed buns in addition to the New Year's holidays. My mother would give me a dime and let me go to the street and buy two buns myself, wrap them in old newspapers and put them in my school bag, which was my lunch when I was in the army. For me, it's one of the few flavors of the year. My brother was always able to share in the delicious food at this time. I was tying my pants with a rope, I didn't have a belt, and my brother had a belt, and I really wished I could tie another belt over my clothes so that I would feel like a soldier for the rest of my life. So I used a bun to exchange belts with my brother.

On the day of my military studies, my brother and I went out before dawn, we walked to the dim sum shop on the street, I used the dime given by my mother to buy two steamed buns, which were freshly out of the cage, evaporating the heat, and came to my hands with the fragrance of wheat, I watched my brother take off his belt, he handed me the belt first, and then I handed him the buns. I put the remaining bag in my bag, tied my brother's belt around my clothes, and ran towards school. My brother walked slowly behind, with his pants that were about to slip off in one hand and a bun in the other. Then he'd go find a rope and deal with it for the day, because in the evening I'd give him the leash back.

I've lived for more than 30 years, I don't know how many buns and dumplings I've eaten, my stomach digests them, my memories digest them, I forget a lot of experiences that may be interesting, but there is one that I will never forget. It was ten years ago, a few of us went to Tianjin, and our friends in Tianjin invited us to eat at Goubuli Bun Shop.

On that day, after we sat down at the Goubuli bun shop, there were exactly ten of us. All kinds of buns were brought up one by one, with ten buns per cage, just one per person. There are more than 70 varieties of Goubuli buns in Tianjin, and the difference is all in the filling, including pork filling, beef filling, mutton filling, shrimp filling, fish filling, and various vegetable fillings; There are sweet, salty, sour and bitter, and there are dozens of categories. When we first sat down, we were very ambitious and ready to taste all the varieties, but after eating the thirty-sixth cage, none of us could eat any more, and everyone held their stomachs as thin as the skin of steamed buns, and no one dared to eat them again, and if we ate them again, their stomachs would burst, and the buns on the table were still increasing, and finally we found that it was looking at these buns that also made us feel scared, so we stood up, stood up carefully, and walked down the stairs cautiously, and cautiously came to the street.

We were a group of ten people standing by the street, and none of us dared to cross the street at once, we ate so much that it was very difficult for us to walk, and we were afraid that if we walked too slowly, we would be hit by a fast-moving car on the street.

That afternoon, we stood in the street, looking at each other and laughing, in fact, we wanted to laugh out loud, but we didn't dare, we were afraid that laughter would break our stomachs. We laughed and burped, and the burps smelled all sorts of things, and that's when we remembered the old Chinese idiom – mixed feelings.