Overseas Chinese in Norway, Marxism–Leninism —— Great changes in China on the tip of the tongue.

Mary, a Norwegian overseas Chinese who is over 70 years old, has been engaged in the catering industry for nearly 50 years, and is a "hangzhou dishes" cooking master with exquisite cooking skills.

Marxism-Leninism has been dealing with food all his life. When it comes to the great changes on the tip of China people's tongue, he is deeply touched.

The following is his self-report.

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Recently, I revisited some classic red movies telling the story of China's development and growth. Some of the shots and stories touched me deeply: on the way to the Long March of the Red Army, when the CPC Central Committee was discussing at the dinner table, there were only one or two sweet potatoes or corn in front of several people, and food was very scarce; During the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression period, the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region was blocked, and the anti-Japanese soldiers and civilians represented by the 359th Brigade of the Eighth Route Army launched a large-scale production movement. Through self-reliance and hard struggle, the desolate Nanniwan was turned into a great south of the Yangtze River where crops and cattle and sheep were everywhere.

From not having enough to eat and not being warm to not having to eat and not having to wear, the people of China bid farewell to hunger and lived a good life of ample food and clothing. The most important thing to thank is China.

I was born before the founding of New China, and I also experienced the hardships of lack of clothes and food. When I was a child, what impressed me the most was that every day after school, my mother would let me pick up some cabbage leaves from the market near my home and go home to cook. At that time, five of our brothers and sisters lived with their parents at the "Big Wall Gate" in Hangzhou. A yard is crowded with more than a dozen families, all of whom are ordinary people and eat very little.

When I was in junior high school, I caught up with difficult times. Buying food, meat and oil depends on food stamps, meat stamps and oil stamps. I still remember that the food stamps I brought back were not all rice, but also miscellaneous grains powder and corn flour. Many neighbors in the yard don't know what to do. I went to Xinhua Bookstore to find a book to teach how to make snacks, and learned to make various snacks with a small amount of flour and miscellaneous grains powder. Neighbors think it's delicious and come to learn from me.

From then on, I had an idea in my heart-to go to a professional school to learn cooking. Later, I became a chef and became a national senior cooking technician, and gradually became famous in the catering industry in Hangzhou.

In the early days of reform and opening up, the party and the government attached great importance to the problem of "eating" while developing production. In the early 1980s, cadres from the Living Department of Hangzhou Federation of Trade Unions came to me, hoping to organize a chef training center to train chefs in batches from industrial and mining enterprises, neighboring troops and schools in Hangzhou, so as to improve the quality of the dishes in the canteens of these units.

Several other chefs and I attach great importance to this work and think a lot of ideas. For example, at first, in some canteens, 20 cents can only buy a small piece of braised pork. I suggest changing it to one meat and one dish, adding tofu, diced lotus root and other ingredients into the meat stuffing to make lion's head, and adding a fried green vegetable, which will be richer in taste and nutrition.

From 1982 to 1989, we trained more than 4,000 chefs, and also held a cooking contest on local TV stations to encourage chefs from all units to share cooking skills and make as many patterns as possible with limited ingredients, so that employees can not only eat well, but also eat well.

Chinese restaurant adds "Chinese flavor"

From 65438 to 0990, I was invited by a friend to go abroad to develop and become a chef of an international catering company in Norway. Not long after I arrived, I received an important task-to go to the Norwegian Prime Minister's Office and cook a table of Chinese food for the then Prime Minister and his relatives and friends. Song Sao Zi Tang, fried spring rolls, kung pao chicken ... the traditional and authentic "Chinese flavor" made the Prime Minister full of praise.

Four years later, I opened the first Chinese restaurant in Oslo, Norway. Although there were many Chinese restaurants overseas at that time, the dishes were generally simple. Like Norway where I live, most Chinese restaurants mainly cook five kinds of dishes: spring rolls, fried rice, fried noodles, kung pao chicken and goo goo meat. Some overseas Chinese told me that they used to be sailors on ocean-going freighters. After living in Norway, they rented houses, hung red lanterns and opened Chinese restaurants to make a living. As for how many years these five dishes have been sold, they can't remember.

But after I went abroad, the situation was very different. With the deepening of reform and opening-up, overseas Chinese have gradually increased their awareness of spreading China's food culture, and a large number of professional chefs like me have gone abroad and brought authentic Chinese food practices overseas. 2 1 century, cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries became more and more frequent, more and more delegations from all over China went abroad, and more and more Chinese and foreign friends came to Chinese restaurants to eat, which further promoted the development of Chinese food overseas. Foreign friends often sigh to me after eating: "There are so many delicious and artistic dishes in Chinese restaurants, so come here often in the future!"

In recent years, we overseas Chinese chefs who "go out" have "come back" again. With the continuous improvement of China's comprehensive national strength and international influence, the country pays more and more attention to the overseas spread of Chinese culture such as Chinese food culture. In recent years, Zhejiang Province has held many overseas Chinese cooking skills training courses, inviting overseas Chinese chefs from all over the world to "forge" to improve Chinese cooking skills and enterprise management capabilities, and better promote the overseas Chinese food industry to be passed down from generation to generation.

I went back to Hangzhou to visit relatives in the past two years and caught up with several training courses. At that time, many overseas Chinese who participated in the training course told me excitedly that all the lecturers were "hangzhou dishes", and the courses included lectures on nutrition, health and cooking practices, which were very rich and benefited them a lot.

Nowadays, not only overseas Chinese restaurants are developing better and better, but also the "Chinese flavor" on the table of ordinary overseas Chinese is getting stronger and stronger. I once asked some old overseas Chinese, "How did you spend the New Year overseas in your early years?" They say that most of them are just simply frying two dishes, and there is no sense of ceremony. Unlike now, every family will arrange a big table of delicious food during the Spring Festival, and sometimes they will invite foreign neighbors to taste China food to celebrate the Year of China.

Small noodle restaurant turned into an "online celebrity shop"

In those years when I first went overseas for development, I was busy making a living and returned to China less often. Every time I go back to Hangzhou, I have dinner at home with my parents, brothers and sisters.

Gradually, I came back more often, but I had less time to eat at home, because everyone always made an appointment to eat at a restaurant. With the development of the country, the living standards of the people in China have improved significantly, and they eat more carefully.

When I returned to China one year, my family told me that a noodle restaurant, which used to be unremarkable, appeared on a popular food documentary program in China, and turned out to be an "online celebrity shop", with long queues at the door every day! I listened to the curiosity and tasted it specially. The familiar noodle soup added a lot of ingredients, which added a lot of freshness and was better than the impression! The boss told me that we should make this bowl of noodles well, make features and spread the food culture well.

Before going abroad, I could basically count the famous restaurants in Hangzhou. Now, I dare not boast. In Hangzhou, there are many kinds of delicious food all over the country, and new restaurants bloom everywhere every year. Ordinary people not only have more choices, but also pay more attention to healthy eating. Some of my old classmates became grandparents and often asked me how to make more nutritious breakfast for my grandson, instead of simply eating a fried dough stick and drinking a bowl of soybean milk as we used to.

Change doesn't just happen at home. China is strong and the people are rich, and our overseas Chinese are more confident and emboldened overseas. I will not only capture "foreign stomach" with "Chinese flavor", but also tell foreign friends the story of China at the dinner table.

On the eve of G20 Hangzhou Summit in 20 16, I planned and produced a booklet. Four poems per page, one paragraph and one picture, tell the human geography and food culture of Hangzhou: Dongpo Meat records Su Dongpo's love for the people when he built the Su Causeway in Hangzhou; "Sweet-scented osmanthus chestnuts" comes from the beautiful legend of enjoying the lakes and mountains on Mid-Autumn Festival night. "Song Sao Fish Soup" is about an encounter when Song Gaozu visited the West Lake ... I wrote more than 150 stories and translated them into English in the booklet. Foreign readers can read them at a glance and learn more about China.

Talking about culture and development. The fish head soup in Qiandao Lake, Hangzhou is very famous. In fact, in the early years, life there was very poor. Later, people nearby used their brains to raise fish in Qiandao Lake, and the fish they raised were particularly large, so they innovated the dish "Qiandao Lake Fish Head Soup". Nowadays, ordinary people's lives are full of flavor! I have told many such stories to foreign friends.

China's culture is profound, and China's development is changing with each passing day. The great change on the tip of the tongue is a vivid example.