GRASS SOUP (8 september 2005)
You may be familiar with a situation like this: when you're dining with other people, there are a number of different desserts. But of the dessert that everybody likes best there happens to be just one helping . What to do?
In the the family of five where I come from, this situation was not uncommon. In such cases my mother had a simple solution: omstaan, which literally translated means "stand around".
One of the children had to stand in the corner with his face turned to the wall. One by one, my mother pointed at each of the desserts and would ask "Who is this for?". The one who "stood around" had to call a random name of a family member that would get this dessert.
I never heard that this custom was practised anywhere else .... until I read a book by the Chinese writer Zhang Xiangliang, which in its English translation is called Grass Soup.
The book is about the kind of labour camps where in the maoist period the Chinese tried to re-educate many intellectual compatriots. Food in these camps was scarce -- even more so than in the rest of China. That's why the prisoners sometimes divided the food using the method of "standing around".
From 1958 on, the writer spent as many as 22 years in such a camp. The detachment and humour with which he describes the horrors of the camp make his account into one of the most impressive books I've ever read,
A passage which particularly appealed to me was where the writer is confronted with the advances of an actress who was emprisoned in the same camp, which were clearly of an erotic nature. It's funny that the writer, inexperienced as he is, initially fails to recognize their erotic nature, but initially associates the memory with food. It will be much later when the erotic significance will become clear to him and from then on it will be one of the most important erotic memories of his life.
Another thing that struck me was the fact that Xianliang is not trying to embellish his own rôle. When he plays a less favourable part towards a fellow prisoner who will die the following day, he confesses to feel sorry, but does not try to make his part prettier than it was.
The ending of the book is quite surprising, but of course, I'm not going to reveal it here.
Needless to say I strongly recommend this book.
