Remember eating gao liang and lu dou for breakfast in Kitchen 1? Jun 11, PDT. Order it through pan- bookwright. Order it through Pam- hendersonhouse. Can you believe I've found lu dou here in a health food store? S" we called it: Same Old Stew. I remember one day when the menu board listed T. Soup for lunch. TT Soup turned out to be turnip top soup. My stomach was much too shrunk for fancy food.
Cooks in Kitchen 1 saved the sugar -- I think it was for Christmas -- and created pudding for a holiday treat. When my tummy rebelled at anything so rich, I took the pudding back to our Lower School Dormitory LSD in the hospital and put it on a shelf.
The pudding died there on the shelf. When it gathered dust, I threw it out. When our Taylor family took a nostalgia trip to Weihsien several years ago, I made my daughter take a snapshot of me standing with my tongue out by the door of our dormitory in Block That's where our teachers made us stand while they spooned powdered egg shells onto our tongues. I remember gagging and coughing and trying to wheeze the grit out.
Oh, horrors! Prisoner doctors made everyone save egg shells from eggs bartered through the black market and grind the shells up for us children to eat as pure calcium. I was weeding my garden today, pulling up pig weed. Pig weed always makes me think of Weihsien. Late in the war, our Chefoo Schools teachers taught us to identify and pick pigweed and burdock.
We ate it boiled -- sort of like spinach. It has a very iron-y taste. We were weed eaters! No matter what, our Chefoo Schools teachers insisted on good manners. There is no such thing, they said, as one set of manners for people in the outside world and another set for the concentration camp. You could be eating the most awful-looking glop out of a tin can or a soap dish, but you were to be as refined as the two princesses in Buckingham Palace.
