know your vegetables
Growing up, my family always ate dinner together. Most of the time we
ate Chinese food, and often our meals would feature vegetables grown
from our backyard. When my Dad was at the Pennsylvania State
University, he received his PhD in Soil Physics; needless to say, I
don't know anyone else with this distinction. But it transformed my
Dad into an expert, lawful horticulturist, and thus every dinner we
enjoyed whatever was in stock. Because my Dad never used
insecticides, I would only have to wash the vegetables once to get rid
of the dirt. The rule of thumb passed down to me was that, for
vegetables grown thyself, wash once, and anything from a store, wash
thrice.
On average, we had at least two dishes with my Dad's plants. It used
to be that, before eating, my Dad would give a brief introduction
about the vegetable, particularly how he took care of it, what kind of
insects he had to ward off, the exceptional harvest, etc. It was like
sitting down with a wine connoiseur, except the information was
largely uninteresting.
It didn't get worse until one day my Dad took it a step further and
started quizzing me and my sister. I would literally sit down with my
chopsticks and my Dad would put his hand over the dishes to block me,
and like some sort of toll-bridge troll from Three Billy Goats Gruff,
I was allowed to eat if I answered the questions successfully. The
main rule was that I had to answer in Chinese, I could not use
English.
Here is an example interchange:
my dad: '等等等!'
( '等' pronounced 'dun3', equivalent to saying, in rapid fire, 'wait wait wait')
me: what.
my dad (points to dish #1): '這什麼菜?'
(pronounced 'zhe4 sheh3 muh2 tsai4', for 'what vegetable is this?')
me: uh. 菠菜.
(pronounced 'buo1 tsai4' , for 'spinach')
my dad: 菠菜, 你的頭. (points to dish #2)
('Spinach, my ass'; please refer to a previous post for the origin of 你的頭)
me: hmm, 莧菜?
(pronounced xian4 tsai4, which is this vegetable with red coloring, an amaranth)
my dad: 錯. 不行吃.
(pronounced 'tsuo4. bu4 shing2 chi1.' for 'wrong. you cannot eat')
Its important to note that this example is not fixed day to day. My
Dad would often change it up, make it so that it wasn't predictable
and easy. On some nights, I only got one try to get each dish right.
Sometimes, I was required to get them all right before I could eat any
of them, the all-or-nothing model. Sometimes, I could eat the ones I
got right only. Sometimes we would play 'hot potato', and on the ones
where I wasn't sure, I was allowed to 'pass' to my sister, and if she
got it wrong she wasn't allowed to eat, but I was. Then when that got
old, my Dad changed it from competitive to cooperative mode, so now my
sister and I had to work together, otherwise we both couldn't eat.
Sometimes, we had to determine if the vegetable was actually grown in
the backyard or bought from the store. My Dad would also preemptively
draw the curtains so we couldn't look outside for a hint.
As if it weren't already hard enough to get kids to eat vegetables, I
had to know them before I was allowed to eat them. Does that even make
sense?
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