Grandpa Deng went back to Chikan last night. He’s taking a couple of days off. Here he is taking off on his blue electric bike after dinner. He looked so cool with his matching helmet… Even his shirt was blue!
So this morning, Nana and I got up early to get to the market to buy vegetables for lunch and dinner. We had breakfast at a modest little breakfast place in Tangkou. I ate 4 shrimp dumplings and 6 mantou for 2 yuan! After we came back, I had a huilongjiao, (回笼觉), which is when you go back to sleep not too long after waking up in the morning. Nana says that this is Cantonese vernacular and it does not work in Mandarin.
When Rocky came back from Hong Kong, he also brought us a Purple Clay Pot for making soup, and Nana decided to make LINGZHI soup. She is very ambitious.
I made half-caramelised onions with a green bell pepper. It was a success! These are seriously the prettiest onion caramelisations I’ve ever done in my entire life.
“Your entire life? 你一辈子？It seems a bit early for you to use such a phrase!” Nana laughed.
I have come a long way from the burned onions that I made for Beth in North Adams almost two years ago when she first taught me how to caramelise onions.
After lunch, Rocky and CJ took Tony and I to visit the World’s Granary (天下粮仓) in Tangkou, a relic from Mao’s Great Leap Forward. It was half-heartedly made into a museum. When I looked inside one of the granary thingies where they kept all the grains, it oddly reminded me of the Pantheon. But, you know, like… way different. For one, it doesn’t open up to the sky, though it was apparently painted blue.
I wonder if I had grown up here first, and then I went off to Europe to study abroad, and I saw the Pantheon, I wonder if I would have thought about how much the Pantheon reminded me of the World’s Granaries instead. And yet, I am very doubtful that I could have made it into Williams if I grew up in Kaiping. I might never have been able to see the Pantheon to compare with Mao’s Granaries anyways.
A summer in Guangdong 