Mushroom Campaigns in Melbourne

by Changming Yuan

Speaking little English, Hua found her new life in Australia increasingly unbearable. She remembered that it was not until after years of persuasion that she had finally agreed to leave China with Ping, her ever-beloved husband, for reunification with their only son in Melbourne. But, since their landing, she had been tied up from dawn to dusk with all kinds of domestic details, preparing meals, cleaning rooms, washing clothes, gardening in the yards, looking after pets, reading Chinese stories to her two grandchildren.

While her son and daughter-in-law were busy taking care of their family business all day long, her husband remained as lazy as “a hibernating snake” that he had always been since childhood. Back in Zhuhai, where she had worked as a sound engineer for decades before retirement, she would enjoy socializing with her friends, former colleagues and relatives, practicing color painting, and performing folk dances every day but, for the past half a year, she had never had a chance even to talk to anyone other than her handsome couch potato, a man of few words by birth.

It was a quite wet weekend in late summer. On their field trip to a local farm owned by a Chinese friend, Hua was hesitating if she should bring up the topic of returning to Zhuhai or, rather, her old lifestyle once and for all, but she decided to postpone the matter when she happened to spot several clusters of saffron milk caps in a pine grove.

This little discovery sent her to a literary cloud nine, as it not only reminded her of her young and happy days at Mayuhe Youth Station it also functioned to spice up her insipid life with something solidly tasty.

Her son Frank asked, “What are ya gonna do with them, Mom?”

“Cook and eat them,” Hua blurted out.

“Aren’t dey poisonous, Nainai?” Emily, her 12-year young granddaughter asked in broken Chinese.

“Cuz not!” Hua joked, imitating Emily’s speech.

“How can you be so sure, Mother?” her daughter-in-law asked in a suspicious tone.

To make her whole family rest assured, Hua recalled the way she had joined other sent-down comrades to collect the red caps after a rain on the forest farm where she worked as a “re-educated youth.” In a voice carrying as much excitement as nostalgia, she elaborated on how they had brought to the station a lot of eye-catching but poisonous mushrooms the first time they went collecting them, how the local workers taught them how to tell toxic mushrooms from edible ones, and how they had used to eat them as a “hun dish” (meat) since they had only vegetables or preserved mustard greens for every meal at that time.

Once back home, she was happy to cook and present fresh red caps in every possible way, thus giving her family a rich yanlaijun dinner. To everyone’s surprise, all the dishes, especially her signature one called “the chicken stir-fried with hot pepper and mushroom,” were more scrumptious than they had ever expected.

On the following weekend, Frank insisted on having a special family excursion to the pine grove close to their residence, knowing by now that the red caps were both perfectly safe and particularly nutritious.

“Why in such a hurry?” Hua wondered.

“Afraid other Chinese immigrants might discover them.”

“Don’t worry. Few others can recognize them, since Mayuehe is the only place known for this kind of mushroom,” Hua replied in a proud manner. “I learned about this fact from an online article back in Zhuhai.”

By the time they returned home in the evening, they had gathered nearly 100 kilos of caps. During the next couple of weeks, Hua took all the time she needed to process them by cooking most of them into junyou (mushrooms fried and dehydrated in oil).

“How do we eat it, Mom?” Frank asked, feeling quite overwhelmed with so many bottles and containers full of darkened mushrooms.

“Just mix a spoonful of it with noodles,” Hua said. “Or you can add some to soup. I promise it will be most mouthwatering!”

With so much of it to spare, Frank went out of his way and gave a well-packaged bottle of junyou to each of his clients who came to contract his company to install a big solar energy device. At first, every one of them made light of the stuff, shrugging it off as a cheap homemade condiment, but they soon began to return to him, telling him how their families, their children in particular, loved the taste, and how they all appreciated it as a rare and valuable gift. Probably because many of them tried to show their deep appreciation by referring new clients to him, Frank found his business booming as it expanded into the whole Chinese community in a matter of half a year.

In the meantime, there was not a single red cap that could be found anywhere in the city, nor any other kinds of edible mushrooms.

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Author’s note: This story is based on the true experience of — and is thus dedicated to — Qi Hong.