Country Life (1924-1936) - Vegetable Garden

Words of my uncle:

In Chinese literature, vegetable garden and rice field were often tied together, so called "The pleasure of field and garden." Another famous verse: "Weeds are taking over the field and garden, why don't you come home?" Literature is the product of the intellectuals, the upper class. For the majority of poor peasants living in the countryside, field and garden are hard work.

We owned two strips of vegetable garden in an ancestral vacant lot. When my sister was still an infant, mother carried her on her back and brought top soil to fill up the strips. One strip was about 3 x 20 feet. Top soil was built up to about six inches high. From those narrow land plots, mother raised quite a variety of vegetables. The trick was good planning and good rotation, plus timely irrigation and fertilization. It was all hard work. Mother did most of it. Garden vegetables needed water almost every day. If no rain fell, we had to bring in water.

Throughout the years, we had the following items to supplement our diet: bok toy, guy toy, Chinese broccoli, string beans, winter melon, Chinese pumpkin, silk melon, eggplant, bitter melon, green onion, garlic, taro, ginger. Sweet potato, peanut, and gut-ling potato were raised far away, halfway up the hill on sandy soil where they required less water. Tomato, corn and potato were not popular. We had no green pepper. All peppers were hot, regardless of color red or green. Cabbage and cabbage fruit were also very common. Spinach was uncommon. Hung toy was grown in the swamp, plentiful, almost wild, and cheap. We had no (European) radish, but we had white radish, shaped and grown like carrot, but white inside and outside, and bigger than sweet potato, plentiful and cheap (known as daikon). Carrot was very uncommon. We had no cucumber, no squash.

Mother did most of the garden work. Brother did most of the baby-sitting and home-watching. Once the produce was brought home, kids helped out, especially my brother who had a remarkable capacity to endure a very long night without sleep ever since he was 6 or 7 years old.

We had no electricity or refrigeration in the country. Food storage depended on past experience and innovation. Peanut was grown underground and entangled in roots and vines. Each single peanut had to be sorted out and cleaned. Then the peanut was handled in several ways: sun-dried with or without shell; roasted with or without shell; boiled and then sun-dried with or without shell. The shell was recycled as fuel and the ash as fertilizer. Peanut was an important source of fat and protein. Sweet potato must be peeled, sliced, cooked (boiled) and then sun-dried before ready for storage. Otherwise the budding would shoot out and the potato became rotten. The peeled skin was used as hog feed. Bok toy could be sun-dried. Buy toy could be salted, partially sun-dried, then shut into a jar to ferment and become "salty and sour vegetable."

There was a medical story about the fermented vegetable. It occurred in the north, in a county by the Yellow River. In the 1960's, according to the Tumor Registry, the Beijing Communist Government discovered a striking concentration of carcinoma of the esophagus in one single county, among thousands of counties throughout China. This particular form of cancer not only occurred in humans, but also in hogs and chickens. The barefoot doctors and researchers found a common denominator in all these three species was the diet - they all ate the products of one kind of fermented vegetable, which contains a carcinogen, and the formation of that carcinogen was due to lack of molybdenum (a rare metal element) and a certain vitamin in the soil if that county. The soil deficiency was properly treated and the epidemic was cured. They also applied the Pap Smear principle to detect early cases - barefoot doctors penetrated into every household of the village, had the elderly swallow a thread with a brush at the end, and brush the esophageal wall for cytology study. Such study picked up many early cases for curative surgery.

In the American surgical journal "Annal of Surgery" (the yellow journal in contrast to the Blue SGO), a 1977 or 1978 issue, the surgical treatment of esophageal carcinoma in China was reported by Dr. Yingkai Wu, a thoracic surgeon graduated from Peiping Union Medical College (PUMC) and trained at Barne Hospital of Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1930's. He reported about 800 cases, with an 80-plus percent cure rate. He happened to be the younger brother of our professor and chief of medicine Dr. C.C. Wu. When we were interned at St. Louis University from 1950-1951, every thoracic surgeon in St. Louis asked us if we knew Dr. Y. K. Wu.

Gut-ling potato was a kind of carbohydrate. It must be ground with water. The colloid was sun-dried to become flour and the residue was used as hog feed. The flour when cooked was like tapioca. Taro was also a kind of carbohydrate and could be stored as such for months. Both sweet potato and taro were eaten widely as alternatives to supplement the inadequacy of rice.