February 15, 2012
132/365 Mushroom Dumplings on Flickr.
Via Flickr:
What does an anti-Valentine’s Day couple do on Valentine’s Day?
Nothing.
But I made mushroom dumplings. There’s a significance in it, I promise.
When I was little, I watched an adorable Chinese movie starring a young Zhang Ziyi called The Road Home. It was one of those heart-wrenching Nicholas Sparks-styled love stories about a girl in a village and a city boy who fall in love with each other during the Cultural Revolution in China. The boy works in the village as a school teacher… and the girl kind of creeps around admiring him. Finally, they meet, discover they like each other, and the girl finds out that the boy has an affinity for mushroom dumplings! So she goes ahead and makes some mushroom dumplings for the boy’s lunch, only for her to find out he’s been called back to city indefinitely. She wraps up the dumplings and chases after his carriage. But then she trips and falls, her bowl breaks and the dumplings scatter all over the place. She sits there and cries woefully, and it’s super sad… and I cried.
I watched that movie when I was about 12, and for some odd reason that scene always stood out for me. I didn’t understand the full story, just that the boy and the girl liked each other, and she wasn’t able to give him the mushroom dumplings. This past weekend, I found it on Netflix. I cried again when she fell and dropped all the dumplings. Then I cried at the end when I found out just why the girl (now a widow) was so adamant about carrying her late husband’s (the boy) casket down a long road by hand.
And that’s why I made mushroom dumplings on Valentine’s Day… because behind every fleshy spore-bearing fungus, there is a cute love story.
