The Piece of Pork

The Piece of Pork

I would like to begin by telling you something about myself and how I was brought up. Then perhaps you will understand why, of all the stories I know, I have chosen to tell the one called ‘The Piece of Pork.’

            When I was small, my family was poor. My father died when I was only three, leaving my mother to support me and my one year old sister. To make matters worse, Mum was pregnant when Dad died and you can imagine how hard it must have been for her, trying to earn a living as best she could, and grieving all the time that the new baby would be born fatherless.

Mum went to work as a small trader, walking from house to house selling cloth. Fortunately, my father’s aunt lived with us and she was able to look after my sister and me while Mum was out. No matter how she tried Mum couldn’t earn enough to keep us properly. A few months after our new sister was born, my mother had to give her to relatives to bring up as their own. This meant that the baby would have a good home while we would have a better chance in life with one less mouth to feed. Mum could see her child often although the little girl grew up thinking of her as an aunt and not as her mother.

My parents emigrated to Cambodia from China hoping to better themselves in a new country but in fact it was a struggle just to live. If it had not been for the Chinese family system we would not have survived. It is a Chinese custom for relatives to help each other in time of need and in our case, my mother’s second brother paid for our food and her first uncle gave us rooms to live in, in a building he owned in the Chinese section of Phnom Penh. The little money that my mother earned could then be spent on clothing and education.

When I was growing up I knew that we weren’t well off but I didn’t ever think of myself as poor. Certainly life was never dull. The Chinese quarter of Phnom Penh was a busy commercial district and full of life. We lived in a four storey building which had a factory on the ground floor and rooms and apartments for families to rent upstairs. I played with the other children who lived in the building – in the corridors, up and down the stairs and sometimes even on the flat roof top. We never played in the streets- they were too narrow and too crowded with hawkers, streetsellers and passerbys. If we got tired of playing we could look down on the ever changing street scenes from the balconies of our apartments.

Although I passed my days happily enough I realise now that my mother and my great aunt, who helped to bring us up, must often have worried about what might become of us. Aunty must have been particularly concerned to prepare us for a future that might not be easy because she told my sister and me the story ‘The Piece of Pork’ over and over again. Hardly a day passed without us hearing this tale from her and because it was such a constant part of my childhood I will tell it here

Once upon a time, in a very poor village in China, there lived a very poor family of just two people – a grandfather and his grandson. The old man and the boy, who lived together in a cramped hut, were all that were left of a large family. The rest had passed away from hunger and disease. Because the grandfather was old and h=not very well he could no longer work hard in the fields and had to earn his living by doing odd jobs. He could earn only a little now and again so he and his grandson were among the worst off people in the village, living on rice gruel and adding vegetables whenever they could afford them. Sometimes the y went hungry for days at a time.

One day the boy saw his grandfather come home from the market with a big piece of pork. He was amazed because they only ate meat once or twice a year on special occasions and then only in very small quantities ‘Are we going to celebrate something, Grandad?’ he asked. But the old man only replied, ‘Maybe.’

Before lunch, the grandfather began to prepare the meat. But instead of slicing it for frying or steaming in the usual way, he covered the whole piece with salt as though he wanted to preserve it. Then he suspended it from the ceiling of the hut so that it hung directly over the table. Having done that, he cooked some rice and, when it was ready, he put bowls and chopsticks on the table and called his grandson to eat.

The boy took a mouthful of the plain, boiled rice, then looked up at the meat hanging out of reach above the table. His grandfather watched him, then said, ‘Go on, have another piece. Doesn’t it taste salty?’ The poor boy looked at him in amazement. ‘Go on eat it,’ said the grandfather again. ‘Taste the salt.’ ‘How can I taste the salt when you don’t even give me a small piece to eat, Grandfather?’ asked the boy. ‘If you think about it long enough, you will taste the salt,’ replied the grandfather calmly as he finished his rice.

I was eight when Aunty first told me that story and I heard it hundreds of times without knowing what it meant. It was a strange story – the meat hanging there and the boy unable to tough it. It made you think. After a long, long time when I was about ten, I finally asked, ‘Aunty, what is that story all about? Why couldn’t the poor boy have some meat? And she explained to me. ‘You’re a child, but you must start to think about your future and what you are going to do in life. You must decide what you would like and work to get it. But if you can’t get what you want, well then, you’ll just have to dream about it.’ And of course, that’s what the child in thee story was doing, eating rice but dreaming about the meat. He was learning to live with what was difficult to bear. He was learning to endure.

My great aunt brought that story with her from China to Cambodia. And a few years ago before Cambodia fell, my uncle told me he had learnt the very same story from his grandfather in China. When I was in Thailand recently, I saw a Thai film and the story, ‘The Piece of Pork’, was told in it, so what was originally a Chinese folk-tale has taken root in Cambodia and Thailand.

Although I was brought up speaking Teichu, I cannot read or write Chinese. I was educated in the Cambodian language at a Cambodian school. A Chinese education was very expensive – the schools were private, fees were high, the uniforms and books were far from cheap. The Cambodian schools were government supported. All you needed were your pens and books and your mother could easily make the shorts and shirt that made up the simple uniform. You didn’t even have to wear shoes. Besides, if yu wanted to work outside the Chinese community, you needed Cambodian or another language like French or English.

When people ask me, ‘What are you?’ I always answer, ‘I’m a Chinese, born in Cambodia.’ I feel Cambodia is my country, my motherland, but culturally, I’m a Chinese And that is why I have told a Chinese story here.

The story ‘The Piece of Pork’ teaches that people have to learn to live without things they would dearly like to have. Many of us from Cambodia have had to live with the almost impossible – the loss of family, dear friends, home, country. I hope that in Australia, no-one will ever have to experience the extremes that our parents and we have lived through.

Told by

Mr. Tan