Beijing Drifters Who Cannot Go Home Moved Their Soured-Cabbage Crocks to Beijing
It is only recently that I have come to see this. For years, fermentation was nothing more than a peculiar scientific term floating in my mind. Later I grasped, in broad strokes, that the everyday customs I had loved as a child—making fermented soybean paste, pickling sour cabbage, wrapping sticky bean buns—all belonged to the tradition of fermentation culture.
Soured cabbage is my absolute favourite food, bar none. Yet it was not until last winter that I began pickling my first barrel of sour cabbage. The change had been brewing for a long time, and the book Fermented Food set it in motion.
I had meant to write a proper book review about it, but then it struck me that its greatest significance for me lay in confirming that my own state of life was indeed bound up with fermentation. Afraid that my honest feelings would be buried beneath sweeping histories and academic jargon, I confessed a small personal story within its pages.
I. A Place I Can No Longer Return To
For the people of this place, the metaphor of the ‘Mother River of the Northeast’ falls short of capturing all they feel and know of the Songhua. On a cloudless day, standing atop the great embankment and looking out over the river, one will see a ribbon of gold in summer and a ribbon of silver in winter. So fine a view lifts the spirit; the tongue is generous with its praise. But let heavy black clouds roll in during the rainy season, and one will feel the river’s fury: a surging flood that swallows everything—maize, soya beans, chickens and ducks, cattle and sheep, and the lives of the soldiers who came to hold the waters back. The great embankment that wraps around the dozens of houses and garden plots was built to hold the flood at bay, and it has been raised and reinforced year by year since 1998.
One curious virtue of the landscape is that it etches itself into a visitor’s memory, for to enter the village one must descend the embankment along a steep track, jolting and swaying with the dread of tipping over at any moment. Whether on foot or by vehicle, that slope is the only way in and out. In the early years of the new century, the soya beans and maize the village grew brought in little money—ruined by floods one year, or sold at a loss the next when the harvest was good. In those years, that steep slope welcomed a handful of far-travelled strangers, but more often it saw the children of this place set off into the world.
It was on an afternoon last autumn that a car crept down the slope and edged towards the stone pillar at the village’s eastern end. The pillar, standing there for decades, had once been a gathering point: on evenings after work in the fields or early mornings before setting out, it was never short of voices raised in laughter, men and women, old and young. The village had once held more than fifty households; now only seven or eight remained, scattered across the land.
The car glided on, and the pitted dirt road the village once knew had been paved with concrete. My mother, seated inside, felt the change at first with fresh interest. But as the car moved down the empty street and she caught sight of the big iron gate at her own doorstep—overgrown with weeds, streaked with rust—her chest tightened. A swell of emotion, excited and wounded at once, rose in her throat, and she felt a dull ache behind the lump in her throat.
Pushing open the gate, she stepped into the yard. The old house, uninhabited for over a decade, let in a dim and desolate light through its collapsed back wall. My mother leaned against the window, peering in as though the place were still whole, as though a family still lived here, cooking three meals a day and going about their lives, and she were merely a traveller passing through time. Only when she saw the blue dish shelf she knew so well—the cupboard—along with the water well and the soured-cabbage crock beside it, did tears come, and only then did the tightness in her throat begin to ease.
What followed was a hollow sense of loss. She realised she could no longer spend a night under the sky she had grown up beneath. The familiar relatives and neighbours had moved away just as she had—to Harbin, to Daqing, to Beijing; a little further south, to Hubei, Guangzhou, Shenzhen. In short, they were no longer here. During all those years of striving in the great cities, the fear of never being able to come home had lurked at the edges of their minds, half-seen, half-ignored. Now their generation of wanderers could no longer pretend not to see that the village was fading.
II. A Soured-Cabbage Crock You Can Take With You
Some things, in truth, have never properly disappeared. Take that soured-cabbage crock in the old house—it is something one can “carry away”. Whether in my own home, or in my grandmother’s, my third aunt’s, or my second aunt’s, though each lives in a different city, every household has a crock. It is as though winter awakens some gene buried in these elders’ bodies, compelling them to pickle cabbage the moment the season turns. Even after they moved into apartment blocks—buildings far less suited to the task—crocks sprang up nonetheless, as naturally as mushrooms after rain.
The reasons are many, large and small. A friend once complained to me that in a city as tidy and spotless as Beijing, finding a good-sized stone to press down the cabbage is an absolute quest. As for me, I find the smell of pickling overwhelming, and city flats are hardly as open and airy as a rural house with a courtyard.
Besides, for a long stretch of time I could barely manage to feed myself without ordering takeaways—so why would I saddle myself with the bother of pickling cabbage?
A more important reason, perhaps, is that in the fast-paced, high-pressure rhythm of urban life, work drains so much of my energy and vitality that I lean far too heavily on commercial goods to meet my daily needs, rather than meeting them through household labour, the way the older generation used to.
Ever since I graduated and started working three years ago, my life has gradually reduced to a duet of work and consumption, and that state of affairs has cost me some basic capacity for material awareness and practical management. What I lost alongside it was my ability to bear the weight of life. All I want now is to focus on the few things I genuinely wish to do, yet the ‘interruptions’ from family and friends—which in truth carry so much positive emotional exchange—have become, for me, a kind of burden. In certain moments of this existence, the suppressed, tense feeling makes me feel I am on the verge of collapse.
III. A Book on the History of Fermentation
But at that point I had not yet regarded fermentation as any sort of vital ingredient in my life—not until I read Baumgartner’s Fermented Food. If Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation attends more to fermentation and its techniques themselves, then this book attends instead to the cultural and technical history of fermented foods.
From this book one discovers that humanity possesses many traditional methods of preparing food, yet the relationship between fermentation and the modern food system may well be the most contradictory and complex of them all.
When I was small, I was always convinced that the soybean paste crock in the garden and the soured-cabbage crock in the kitchen concealed a mysterious world inside, because they were nothing like ordinary lifeless objects—their surfaces were forever bubbling and gurgling. I could hold my breath and stare at them for ages, until my grandmother called out from not far away: ‘Careful now, don’t you go falling in!’—and I would bolt.
Now we know that those bubbles are carbon dioxide released during the early stages of fermentation, when yeasts and other microorganisms are carrying out aerobic respiration; only afterwards can the principal agents of fermentation, the lactic acid bacteria, proceed with their “anaerobic metabolism”.
Humans turned fermentation from a natural phenomenon into a craft they could master a very long time ago, but prior to the nineteenth century, the biological mechanism behind it remained a mystery. Many people were inclined to interpret a frothing barrel of beer or a batch of souring vegetables as products of decay, bearing the connotation of “death”. Even the chemist Liebig held that fermentation was merely a chemical reaction, not a living process.
It was not until the 1860s that, in search of the reason why some fermented wines still spoiled, the scientist Pasteur ultimately revealed that beneath the surface of everyday life lay a pervasive world of microorganisms.
Not long ago, when the cabbage crock in my room suddenly let out a sound, I—someone with rather poor sensitivity to nature and the material world—was genuinely startled: ‘How did the lactic acid bacteria just appear there? Microorganisms really are everywhere!’ Each little gurgle was like a fragment of memory, like a poem connecting past and present, filling me—who was working from home alone—with an inexplicable sense of delight and steadiness. In that moment, scientific knowledge did not suppress but rather sharpened my perception of the natural world, fermentation being an interface through which one can interact with invisible microorganisms.
Every modern person who has received a public-health education knows that bacteria exist. Tracing the thread back, bacteriology spread into the minds of the majority of humanity from the late-nineteenth-century public-health revolution in Europe and the United States. Hygiene measures against bacteria and viruses, together with the development of related vaccines, gave humans a means of combating diseases such as rabies, anthrax, tuberculosis, and typhoid.
This was undeniably a great social advance. But there are other facts worth remembering:
- Our bodies are home to thirty-nine trillion microorganisms; many of them strengthen the immune system, regulate blood sugar, aid digestion, and perform other beneficial functions, contributing to our health and well-being.
- Bacteria have always existed, but the complex conditions of the industrial food system—cramped, filthy cattle pens, meat-processing plants, cold-chain transport systems—have promoted the breeding and spread of pathogenic bacteria such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Escherichia coli, and Listeria.
- Another application of germ theory, “pasteurisation”, reduced the risk of microbial contamination during complex processing and transport stages, thereby cementing the industrial food system’s position in human society—yet new foodborne pathogens continue to emerge.
We cannot say that the triumph of the industrial food system was decided by bacteria and hygiene issues—the actual history is far more complex—but the germ theory born from fermented foods, together with its applications, undeniably played a pivotal role in the industrial food system’s erosion of the home fermentation tradition.
IV. A Graspable Life
Picture this: what if, when humanity mastered microbial science, the countryside had not been in decline, people had possessed ample time and enthusiasm for cooking, and there had been no need to rely on packaged food to save time or for convenience? How might people have treated fermentation? Would we have enjoyed more varieties of soured cabbage, fermented rice, sour bamboo shoots, bread, and cheese? Would life have been warmer, more creative? Perhaps that is a question for a work of science fiction to answer.
I also often wonder: where exactly do I stand in history right now? These various changes on the material and sensory planes—where are they leading me?
I am certain of one thing: although, during the rapid urbanisation of the late 1990s and early 2000s, my family members moved from the countryside to the cities one after another, the elders still had their own land, and so the bonds between us remained remarkably tight. Just last National Day holiday, I tasted maize and fresh vegetables for dipping that my eldest aunt had carried across hundreds of kilometres to bring to me, and the soured-cabbage dumplings my grandmother wrapped during the New Year celebrations.
These are all positive, beautiful things, and must be remembered. Yet I must also concede that in my generation, that sense of repression and alienation bred by life in the big cities has truly set in. Adrift in the metropolis, I lead a contradictory life—sometimes brimming with the vitality that movement brings, sometimes weighed down by the desolation that solitude brings.
When my mother said “everything is an illusion” on her return home, she was not only mourning the past but also lamenting that life had become less dependable, less trustworthy, less knowable, less graspable—and that the me of her past was among those elusive elements.
For her, the past was worth longing for because the embankment at home, the mulberry tree, the old house, the dish shelf, the soured-cabbage crock, and all the people and emotions that had grown around these material things—these were once things she could be one hundred per cent certain she owned and belonged to, the surest evidence in all the world that she had existed, uniquely, and no one could ever snatch them away or buy them off.
Even when she reads Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers, it is the detailed descriptions of English countryside landscapes and cultural customs, rather than the central plot, that most genuinely delight her.
I have come to sense, however faintly, that whether she can rebuild a life that feels within grasp depends not only on dependable, trustworthy affection but also on material things, on the natural world. Before I started pickling cabbage, I asked my grandmother about the fine points of fermentation, and later this sparked a discussion in our family group chat about why the cabbage in Beijing always turned out so watery. These idle chats between us are a new shared language, a new shared life. The exchange of feeling is threaded through with material things and the natural world, like a little hearth fire—and I sit nearby, basking in its warmth.
Whether joy invites grief, I cannot say. The trip home over the New Year was thoroughly happy, yet within two weeks of coming back, the first barrel of cabbage I had ever pickled went mouldy—the sight rivalled a jar of gu. It broke my heart. Whenever I had a spare moment, I would stare at the mouldy crock and sigh. A friend skilled in fermentation says it is because the plastic crock I used harboured grime that bred mould; I think instead that the cabbage was not pressed down properly, and the part left above the waterline became a breeding ground for mould.
But I have dutifully switched to a ceramic crock now. Spring has come to Beijing, and cabbage-pickling is off the table for the season; I plan to put the crock to some other use first. When winter arrives this year, I shall find a more suitable stone in Beijing.
