Chinese Dissidents Seek to Undermine the Regime With Egg Fried Rice Recipes
Nov. 25, 1950. Morning has come, the sun has risen well above the rim of the world, and Secretary Liu is still sound asleep. Serving as a Russian translator and aide-de-camp to General Peng Dehuai of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (PVA), Liu had worked late into the previous night, and is presently indulging in the rare wartime luxury of a lie-in. Liu’s fellow officers, on the other hand, have all been awake for hours, anxiously scanning the horizon. An American twin-engine fighter, a Northrop P-61 Black Widow to be precise, was recently spotted flying reconnaissance over the PVA headquarters here in North Korea’s northeastern Tongchang County, an ominous sign indeed. Vigilance will be the order of the day. Secretary Liu remains in his bed.
The aide-de-camp finally rouses himself around 9 a.m., at which time he asks two of his fellow staff officers, Cheng Pu and Gao Ruixun, to assist him in preparing a restorative breakfast of dan chao fan, or egg fried rice. After gathering together rice, oil, and a few precious eggs — another rarity on the frontline — the three officers leave their post, located inside an abandoned gold mine, and make their way above ground and into a building containing General Peng’s office, where they set to cooking Secretary Liu’s mid-morning repast. Another Chinese general, Yang Di, who will later recount these events, sees smoke rising from the structure, and orders Liu, Cheng, and Gao to put out the fire as soon as they are done frying up their meal, but by then it is already too late.
Four Douglas A-26 Invader light bombers slice through the Korean sky, heading directly toward the PVA headquarters. Napalm bombs tumble out of the Invaders’ bay doors, spreading hundreds of gallons of jellied gasoline over the Chinese base, which is instantly engulfed in flames burning at a temperature of some 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Yang Di survives the bombing raid, as does Cheng Pu, but Gao Ruixun perishes in the conflagration, alongside Secretary Liu, whose remains will need to be identified not by facial features or distinguishing marks, all replaced with shriveled, calcined flesh, but by the molten Soviet-manufactured timepiece still affixed to what is left of his wrist. General Peng is appalled at the events of this morning, burdened as he is with the knowledge of Secretary Liu’s true identity. The 28-year-old soldier whose burnt, contorted remains lie before him is no mere functionary. He is Mao Anying, the eldest son and presumptive heir of China’s supreme leader, Mao Zedong.
Mao Anying, who had adopted a nom-de-guerre to avoid preferential treatment while in the field, would be laid to rest in the patch of planted death known as the PVA Cemetery of Martyrs, yet fully two months would pass before Chairman Mao was informed by the Politburo of his son’s immolation and inhumation. His reaction was stoic, if not unfeeling: “In a war, how can there be no deaths?” Anying’s widow, Liu Siqi, would not learn of her husband’s fate until another two and a half agonizing years of uncertainty had passed. According to Mao’s biographer, Jung Chang, when Anying had proposed to Siqi in 1949, Mao Zedong had flown “into a ferocious rage and bellowed at [Anying] so terrifyingly that Anying fainted, his hands going so cold they did not react even to a boiling hot water bottle, which left two big blisters. Mao’s furious reaction suggests sexual jealousy (the beautiful and elegant Siqi had been around Mao for much of her teens).” It is not without reason that psychoanalysts have posited that the grandiose violence that marked Mao Zedong’s private and public life was the result of a combination of rampant egocentrism and dispositional schadenfreude.
Chairman Mao’s cold-blooded response to his son’s death inevitably gave rise to rumors. Liu Siqi suspected that Mao’s fourth wife, the cunning actress-turned-revolutionary Jiang Qin, had somehow orchestrated Anying’s downfall. Or perhaps other political factions had maneuvered Mao’s son into harm’s way, and invented the egg fried rice tale to cover their tracks. The Chinese Academy of History, citing unreleased and highly classified sources, maintains that Anying’s death was the result of intercepted Chinese radio transmissions, and not conspicuous smoke from an ill-timed breakfast. In any event, the napalm bombs dropped by the American bombers that fateful day in late November 1950 definitively put an end to the Mao dynasty, since the chairman’s only other surviving son, Mao Anqing, was a schizophrenic who spent the better part of his adult life in psychiatric institutions. And so it was that a bowl of egg fried rice, or a well-timed radio signal interception, meant that Communist China would not go the way of North Korea with its Mount Paektu bloodline and freakish Kim-centered cult of personality.
Due to China’s all-encompassing media and internet censorship apparatus, criticism of the regime tends to be subtle and oblique. As Xiao Qiang demonstrated in his marvelous compendium of “China’s Lexicon of Digital Resistance,” an excerpt of which was featured in China Books Review last March, Chinese “netizens actively oppose censorship and propaganda through strategic, well-timed actions focused on specific issues and tactical opportunities,” employing allusions, puns, catchwords, slogans, and hashtags that can, for a time at least, circumvent official censorship.
Critics of the communist regime will, for example, refer to “your party” (guidang, 贵党) instead of “our party,” “my party,” or “the party,” an ironically honorific turn of phrase that also happens to mean “expensive country.” When Lin Jiaxiang, the former party secretary of the Shenzhen Maritime Administration, was caught harassing a young girl back in 2008, he responded to the entirely warranted criticism by ranting “So what if I pinched a little child’s neck? You people are worth less than a fart to me! How dare you mess with me? Just see how I deal with you.” Ever since, the Chinese populace has archly been referred to as the “fart people” (pimin, 屁民), hence that timeless political maxim, which may suffer a bit in translation: “The system errs, the fart people suffer” (体亏屁思).” And during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the melancholy phrase zuihouyidai (最后一代), or “the last generation,” went viral despite the best efforts of social media censors, after a Shanghai citizen was caught on film vocally opposing mandatory quarantine measures, and was threatened with a punishment that “will influence your next three generations.” His response, as he closed the door on his tormentors, was memorable: “We’re the last generation, thank you.” Zhang Xuezhong, a human rights lawyer, described the phrase as “an expression of the deepest form of despair. The speaker declared a decision of a biological nature: we will not reproduce. This decision is underpinned by a psychological and existential judgment: a future worth striving for has been taken from us. It is, perhaps, the strongest indictment a young person can make of the era to which they belong.” Censors were obliged to work overtime keeping the haunting phrase zuihouyidai out of posts, usernames, and bios on social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo.
Another subtle way in which Chinese dissidents have sought to undermine the regime is through the sharing of egg fried rice recipes on two annual occasions: Mao Anying’s birthday (Oct. 24) and the anniversary of his untimely demise (Nov. 25). Although there is nothing inherently seditious about a recipe for the culinary staple of dan chao fan, the timing of these egg fried rice protests means that they run afoul of China’s “Law on Protection of Heroes and Martyrs,” promulgated on April 27, 2018, which makes it “forbidden to distort, smear, desecrate, or deny the deeds and spirit of heroes and martyrs” like Mao Anying. Online accounts have been suspended, and Chinese citizens have been imprisoned, for posting egg fried rice recipes in October and November. One individual was arrested by the authorities in Nanchang after arguing on the Weibo microblogging platform that “the greatest result of the Korean War was egg fried rice: thank you, egg fried rice! Without egg fried rice, we would be no different from North Korea. Sadly, there’s not that big a difference nowadays.” A renowned chef and food blogger, Wang Gang, was accused of engaging in “malicious political innuendo” after uploading an egg fried rice preparation video in the autumn of 2020, and was again made to apologize when it was accidentally reuploaded late last year, prompting Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu to boast in an X post that in his democratic country “we savor #FreedomFriedRice whenever the mood strikes … No apologies needed.”
What began as a possibly apocryphal story about the death of Mao’s heir apparent in the Korean War has become a source of protest and even an international flashpoint. I flatter myself that I am a consummate humanitarian, and am not here to take any particular pleasure in the gruesome death of Mao Anying, who by all accounts did not inherit his father’s monstrously genocidal impulses. And although it is not a terribly grand gesture — the spectator.org domain is blocked by the Chinese National Public Security Work Informational Project’s infamous Great Firewall — I would like to add a egg fried rice recipe of my own, in solidarity with those who have been imprisoned and deprived of their civil liberties for something so innocuous as posting cooking directions for a rice dish.
My own egg fried rice recipe is admittedly less like dan chao fan (蛋炒飯), and more like a Japanese yakimeshi (やきめし), particularly with its use of short-grain as opposed to long-grain rice, and the introduction of the egg after rather than before the rice during the cooking process, but I prefer a chewier, sticker fried rice to one that is drier and firmer. And we just filled our kiribako paulownia wood rice box with the contents of a rather large bag of Shinmei Niigata Koshihikari rice from the Uonuma area of Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, and we need to make use of it.
So, you will first prepare two cups or so of rice, and set the cooked rice aside for a few hours — fresh, warm rice will struggle to hold its texture. Then, you will stir fry a couple of finely chopped carrots, leeks, and spring onions, and some minced garlic, in butter or lard (not seed oils, obviously) in a wok, which will provide the flavor and aroma evocatively known in China as wok hei (鑊氣), or “the breath of the wok.” Then comes the cold rice, which is cooked and stirred around in the wok for a few minutes, at which point it is time to add the two or three large scrambled eggs that put the dan in dan chao fan. Ideally you would use locally-sourced or mobile pasture-raised eggs, and not eggs from concentrated animal feeding operations that practice forced molting, live-shackle slaughter, the shredding of live baby chicks in high-speed grinders, and all those other horrors that, incidentally, result in eggs lamentably deficient in vitamins A, E, D, and K2, but to each his own.
Push the rice to one side of the wok, and add the scrambled eggs, whisking them constantly and gradually folding them into the rice-vegetable admixture. Then add one or two tablespoons of soy sauce (Shibanuma in Ibaraki, Japan makes a good artisanal, barrel-aged, unpasteurized, umami-rich shoyu), and add salt, white pepper, and Japanese pepper (Zanthoxylum piperitum, or sanshō) to taste, using your wok spatula to stir and flip all the while.
Your egg fried rice is now ready to plate; hopefully you have not given your position away to enemy forces. And even if you do not choose to fry up a bowl of dan chao fan according to this or any other recipe, do spare a thought, on Oct. 24 or Nov. 25, not for Mao Anying and the lineage his death brought to a dynastic dead-end, but for those Chinese men and women who languish in prison for their political beliefs, for their religious faith, and even just for sharing an egg fried rice recipe at the wrong time of year. Chī hǎo hē hǎo!
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