[Beloved by All] [Period Piece] [Everyday Food] [Secret Identity] [Baby Voice, Adult Words]
In 1979, the county's most dilapidated state-run cafeteria served the same four dishes all year round: cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, and cabbage.
The five old men working there were dirt poor, and each had a stranger temper than the last.
But take any one of them away, and he'd have the skills to cook at a state banquet. The head cook had once cooked for a high-ranking official. The man who chopped vegetables could slice potato into strips fine enough to thread a needle. The dough maker could knead two hundred catties with his eyes closed. The fire tender could tell how hot the stove was just by listening. And the one who sat down all day was in charge of "the old days."
Seven-year-old Diwusui thought only about food.
Her father died on the railway, and her mother didn't make it. The five old men took her in, always hiding a piece of meat under her bowl: pork rind today, brown sugar tomorrow, and sweet potato the day after.
The five old men all conspired to fool her. They each claimed they weren't hungry.
Her words, "If we don't have meat, let's raise a pig ourselves," pulled the crumbling cafeteria out of the mud.
But she didn't know that each of the five old men's "old days" was more astonishing than the last.
Why would people from the provincial capital line up to eat at the county's most run-down kitchen?
