rss feedBean curd dispatch: Poet Nellie Wong remembers Oakland, Calif. in the 1940s
My aunt, Nellie Wong, sent this touching vignette about tofu shopping about 50 years ago in Northern California.
It was an important task at the time – their family had nine people. My grandparents and some of my aunts were from the Taishan area of Southern China.
In the United States, they all called Oakland home. These days, my aunt is a poet and writer. You can read more about her at the bottom of this post.
As a kid, we called it ‘ow fu’ in the Hoisan dialect (of Cantonese). Buying bean curd was organic, if you will. I’d take a dime, maybe a quarter, went to the store and asked for a quarter’s worth. The storeowner or clerk would slice a chunk off of a huge piece of bean cake on top of a round tree trunk.
There was no such thing as silken tofu then nor whether we’d need to ask for soft, medium or firm. We got what was there, sitting placidly (for) a food that was good for us, but when cooked up with fermented black bean, steamed or wok-tossed or putting cubes of it in a clear soup, our stomachs were in ecstasy.
I smile when I note, today, that ‘ow fu’ is rather expensive in those boxes covered with cellophane at health food stores. But there are always the local, crowded Asian markets that sell bean cake sitting in a tub of water and the price is usually one buck for six or seven squares. No company logo attached.
