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Ah Fen's family lived in the Gwangtong countryside, in a village a little distance from Canton.
Her father died when she was two and she was ___1___ by her widowed mother who worked
for a farmer. They lived in the farmer's house, waking up at dawn every morning to the sound of
___2___ cough. That cough was their alarm clock. Her mother would climb out from under the
mosquito net that covered the wooden bed she and Ah Fen shared and hurry to the kitchen to start
___3___ some water.
The kitchen was a lean-to structure with a straw roof, made of earth bricks, hard and black with
age, which had been tacked on to the house many years earlier by the farmer's grandfather. Against
the outer wall, in a pen, was the farmer's ox, his most precious possession. Hearing Ah
Fen's
mother in the kitchen, the ox would ___4___ and grunt and thump against the wall, scratching
his side.
It was Ah Fen's job to put just the right amount of water from a
___5___ vessel into an iron
pot and then get kindling from the heap of grass and sticks in a corner so that her mother could
start the fire in the rough earthen stove, under the iron pot. She lit the fire by
___6___ a flint
stone against a piece of iron until she got a spark.
When the water boiled, it was poured into a bowl and a dozen or so curled, dry
___7___
were carefully taken from a container on the edge of the stove and scattered on the surface. Once,
when she was five or six, Ah Fen whispered to her mother that she would like to have some, but
her mother whispered back, "We cannot be wasteful. ___8___ is like drinking silver." Then her
mother would take the bowl of steaming tea to her mistress, whose racking cough never stopped
until she drank it. The farmer had a bowl of plain hot water, saying that as he had no cough he did
not need tea, which he thought should be for ___9___ occasions only.
After breakfast -- rice and a little vegetable -- the farmer and Ah
Fen's mother and some
neighboring workmen all went out to work in the paddy fields, taking the ox along to pull the
plow when it was ___10___ . At noon they all came back for a meal, prepared by Ah
Fen as soon
as she was old enough to do it. |
