Meiying - Anything men can do, women can do better

Every noon, 85-year-old Meiying takes her nap on that old broken lounge chair. While dozing, she always tilts her ear toward the outside of the house, listening for any movement. (Meiying has always believed that someone might steal her belongings—especially during the busy farming seasons, when the threshing ground in front of the house is covered with drying grain, beans, and other crops.) Even now, though her children have installed surveillance cameras outside to help her sleep peacefully, Meiying still feels that thieves will come. Her children have long since given up trying to explain otherwise.

Meiying was born in rural China in the 1940s, an era of extreme poverty, ignorance, and restless fervor. Her exceptionally harsh childhood molded her into a woman of toughness and resilience. In 1965, young Meiying married. That was the time of the production team’s collective labor, when farmers had no land of their own, no personal income, and no leisure time. Everything was organized collectively, and everyone worked for “work points” (a system that counted daily participation in labor). At year’s end, depending on the team’s total output, one could finally know how much each work point was worth. In truth, nearly every family barely scraped by; some were so poor they had to borrow grain from the production team just to eat, promising to repay it the following year.

Meiying remembers one winter evening when the production team held a meeting. They announced that the village’s oil-pressing plant needed a helper to process rapeseed cakes. Since it was not outdoor work, the job did not earn full work points. The strong young men refused to take it, while the elderly and children could not handle it. Without hesitation, Meiying encouraged her husband to sign up. She already had a plan. After her husband was accepted at the oil mill, Meiying immediately applied to withdraw from collective labor to run her own business. The deal was this: she would no longer join the team’s daily work, but at year’s end she had to pay the production team the monetary value of full work points, based on the annual calculation. In other words, she was buying back her own freedom.

Freed from the fields, Meiying turned to noodle-making, a craft she had learned from watching her father since childhood. Her father had made handmade noodles for years, and she knew every step by heart. She borrowed money to buy wheat and had it milled into fine flour. Then the hard work began: mixing dough, resting it, kneading it, rolling it, cutting it, and drying it. Why was it like “an arrow already set on the bowstring”? Because once the dough was mixed, it had to ferment naturally, and once fermentation was ready, the kneading and pressing had to begin immediately, with no room for delay, carelessness, or rest. Kneading was especially demanding: a whole tub of dough had to be worked by hand, as no machines existed. Over time, the strain dislocated and deformed the joints in Meiying’s hands. On rainy days they ached dully.

Meiying asked me to taste the freshly stir-fried lotus root.

After kneading, the dough was pressed through a wooden rack with small holes, producing strands of wet noodles. These were then dried under the sun before being sold. But if rainy weather came after the dough was prepared, the noodles spoiled. At such times, Meiying shifted her strategy—making baked flatbreads, fried dough sticks, or even fried dumplings stuffed with pork and chives. During festivals, when villagers gathered to gamble with dice, she would ramp up production of these snacks. At the gambling tables, she sold food to the hungry gamblers, or sometimes used the flatbreads and dumplings themselves as stakes. If she won, she earned cash. If she lost, it was only food she had risked—so in truth, she still profited, just a little less.

To be continued...