| Aunty Ye's Red Dates Soup and Andrea's Confit Duck Legs |
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| Food | |
| Wednesday, 05 December 2007 | |
 My life is good here in London. Our current show “The First Emperor” (by Yellow Earth Theatre) is running well in the British Museum. And I look forward to the next show with Theatre-Rites. So, things to do with work are going pretty well. They have been keeping me extremely busy though.It’s a nice season and I have moved again. I live in a very nice place now, so nice I often see squirrels playing in the trees in the mornings and leaves falling onto my face while walking. I can even see the stars at night time! This morning I received a parcel from Scotland. Inside the parcel, there was a package of Confit Duck Legs. This was sent by an old friend of mine - Andrea. What an amazing woman! Last time I saw her, she cooked this type of French duck for me and I expressed how much I loved it. So, here we are. Life is beautiful when you are surrounded by amazing people. I am very lucky, as wherever I go, I seem to meet very kind people. It was a morning in May, I was rushing to leave my dormitory to see Hsu Pei-hung’s photo exhibition of Bai Xianyong’s Kunqu opera Peony Pavilion in Beijing University. I was in a hurry as I needed to go and get back on time for my next dance lesson. Just a quick wash of my hand and face on my way out, and the next thing I saw was my hands covered in blood – my nose was bleeding again! Beijing’s spring was unbelievably dry. Just a gentle rub to your nose, your nose could be bleeding! The same thing happened the previous day when I was washing my face too. I quickly ran back to the dormitory and was looking for some tissue to stuff up my nostril. “Your nose is bleeding again!” all the girls in the dormitory started to give me their best instructions about how to stop a nose bleeding. I didn’t quite know who to listen to and what to listen at. Back to the sink, I tried what FangFang told me to do but it wasn’t working at all. Back to the dorm again to get more tissues and that’s when I heard everyone screaming – “Heaven! … Look! … Aunty Ye, MeiMei’s nose is bleeding, it’s scary, we couldn’t stop it, it’s like tap water!” Aunty Ye was my sub-landlady when I lived in the Beijing Dance Academy this spring. Lots of the flats in the Beijing Dance Academy that belong to the staff were rented to people like Aunty Ye. She rented the whole flat and kept one bedroom for her and her daughter who is a student at the academy and let the spare room out to students like me who were there for a short course. Aunty Ye came out from her bedroom. In comparison to the girls’ loud screaming, she was speaking very gently. In Chinese, we would describe that volume as “the sound of a mosquito”, but I clearly heard all her words – “Come here,” she led me to the sink, “face me and squat down… look up, lean back and rest your neck on the edge of the sink…” I was then facing the ceiling. Aunty Ye’s fingers were stroking cold water onto my fore head and very gently along the bridge of my nose while quietly speaking to me – “Don’t worry, it’ll stop very soon. Beijing’s spring is very dry, isn’t it?! We all have to get used to it. This happens to my daughter very often. Sometimes, I have to run to the dance studios to help her with this during her dance lessons…next time this happens, make sure you don’t touch the bridge of your nose while you are trying to stop the bleeding.” A few minutes later the bleeding stopped, so I thought “good, I can go to the Beijing University now!” but what I didn’t expect, was that Aunty Ye told me to lie on her bed and hung my head slightly on the edge of her bed and don’t move for thirty minutes. She didn’t ask if I would like to, she just “told” me to. I couldn’t really say no as she just did me a favour and stopped my bleeding, but I did ask if that was really necessary, she said yes. While lying on Aunty Ye’s bed, I couldn’t help to think – will any of my British friends believe this? My sub-land lady just told me to lie here and don’t move for thirty minutes even though I told her that I really need to get to Beijing University asap? The bleeding had already stopped, why do I have to lie here not moving just because she told me to? But, at the same time, I was telling myself “do what she said MeiMei, this is the Chinese way of caring and loving, she is doing what any ‘aunty’ would do, she just wants to make sure I recover properly and my nose won’t bleed again like this. You are now back in China, you have to learn to get used to it, respect it and protect it.” So I did lie there for thirty minutes and didn’t move at all. And half way through those thirty minutes, she put some cream onto a cotton bud, and gently rubbed it onto the skin inside of my nostril; she said that the cream would help the veins heal properly. I kept checking the clock, thirty minutes passed and when that was finally over, I was told to go to the kitchen. I thought “what is going on here, didn’t I tell you I was in a rush? Why do you not stop telling me to do things without asking me?” But I was speechless when I got to the kitchen… Aunty Ye was dishing out the red dates soup that she had made for me, the soup came out in the colour of dark red, and it was stewed from lots of red dates as I could see in the wok! Every Chinese knows that hong zao bu xie, literally means “red dates replenish blood”. That was why she kept going in and out the kitchen while I was lying there. She made quite a lot of soup, I only finished half of it before I went to the Beijing University. Later on that day when I returned to the dormitory after finished all the dance lessons, a roommate told me “MeiMei, Aunty Ye said to remind you to drink the soup. She pointed to the table where I saw the soup which was ready for me to drink. It was warm and sweet. MeiMei www.meimei.co.uk Image courtesy Swan Ee. |
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