Mama’s Soup Pot

There are too many treasures in life we take for granted, the worth of which we don’t fully realize until they’re pointed out to us in some unexpected way. So it was with Mama’s soup pot.

Mama’s soup was special because there was no recipe for it. It had been so since her girlhood in Italy, where she learned its secret from her grandma, who had inherited (继承) it from generation to generation. Also, it was a symbol of security. For our large immigrant family, Mama’s soup guaranteed we would never go hungry. And we could judge our economic conditions by its contents.

At one time, however, Mama’s soup pot became a source of embarrassment to me, for I feared it would cost me a new friend I had made at school. Sol was an unusual pal for me because his father was a doctor and they lived in the best part of our town. Often Sol invited me to his home for dinner, where I found the food was good but tasteless, lacking the heartiness of the one served from my mom’s flame-blackened pots. Moreover, the atmosphere matched the food and everything was so formal. Sol’s mother and father were polite, but the conversation around the table was not natural, which made me a little depressed. And no one hugged!

In my family, warm hugs were a constant-men, women, boys and girls-and if you didn’t kiss your mother, she demanded: “What’s the matter? You sick?” But at that time in my life, all this was an embarrassment.

I had known Sol would like to eat dinner at my house, but that was the last thing I wanted. My family was so different. No other kids had such pots on their stoves, nor did they have a mama whose first action upon seeing you enter the house was to sit you down with a spoon and bowl.

One day, Sol pointedly asked if he could come to my house. I had to say yes.

The day Sol came over I was nervous.

But Sol quickly finished his bowl and asked for one more.

Yingge Dance, a traditional folk art combining dancing, Chinese martial arts, and Chinese opera, is popular in the Chaoshan area of Guangdong province in South China. Yingge, written with the characters for “hero” and “song”,     1     (mean) heroic song in Chinese and Yingge dancers, as their name implies, are the avatars (化身) of     2     (hero). The dancers each hold a pair of short sticks and strike the sticks with force     3     (create) strong beats — an     4     (art) display of masculinity (男子气概). In 2006, the Puning Yingge Dance     5     (list) among the first batch of national intangible cultural heritages in China.

However, as young people move out of the villages, so are local folk arts     6     (gradual) disappearing all around China. In Puning, Yingge is still danced during holidays such as the Lunar New Year and its performers are generally amateurs — farmers     7     have put down their tools and put on costumes. Some of the parts are passed     8     in the family, from father to son, and so far some villages have started giving performers a basic salary.

    9     (dress) in colorful clothes and wearing heavy makeup, ordinary villagers have created a song of cultural confidence. The performance,     10     must-watch for the local people, graces the village square one more time.

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★ Time: 10am-1pm (GMT)

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Yours,

Li Hua

7 . By the time he was 24 years old, Imran Nuri quit his job in a bold move, and emptied his savings account to carry out an ambitious _________ he’d been bearing in mind. Nuri would drive his car to every state on a 100-day trip to find 1,000 _________ and ask them to share one thing they wish they’d _________ when they were younger. Nuri was hoping for answers that might help him _________ the rest of his life.

He _________. But to his shock, he chose a _________ person for the first time. He met a man, who had a dark look at Nuri. Nuri thought the man was going to _________ him. Then, doing the most _________ thing he’d done, he introduced himself, “I’m _________ around the country to talk to 1,000 unfamiliar people. I’m asking them for pieces of life advice about things they wish they knew __________.” The man remained silent for a minute or so and __________ said, “We should spend more time with our family.”

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a man in his 50s who had stage 4 terminal cancer told Nuri, “Life is about the human __________. There would be no life without social interactions.”

In Tillamook, Oregon, a waitress — a college student — told him, “Whether it’s changing your major or changing your whole life path, you don’t have to __________ yourself for taking a step back and reevaluating your past choices. Just do what you think to be right.”

Nuri found beauty in every place as well as __________ from the people he met. Those people taught a lot. Now he always puts himself in other people’s shoes even when a person __________ the world differently.

Tianshui in Northwest China’s Gansu Province is sweeping social media with one of its unique dishes. This city is stepping into the spotlight now that its local street dish malatang has become increasingly     1     (influence) on social media.

According to the China News Agency, one restaurant owner in Tianshui     2     (note), “we have been serving at least 400 customers a day, as people from other provinces drive to the city to get     3     taste of the local cuisine.” “There has been a long queue outside my restaurant even on weekdays,” said the shop owner. The growing     4     (popular) of this kind of street food can also be reflected in its main ingredient, the Gangu chili pepper, or lamb’s horn pepper, grown in Gangu county, a place well-known     5     the “Hometown of Chili Peppers” in China.

The sales of products such as the broth for Tianshui malatang and Gangu chili peppers have been surging recently. In some places, the sales of Gangu chili peppers     6     (increase) tenfold in the past two weeks. Young customers born in the 1990s have become the leading force for its consumption,     7     (account) for 40 percent of chili pepper product sales. At the same time, related hashtags such as “going for malatang in Gansu by high-speed train” have been trending on China’s Sina Weibo,     8     on the short video platform Douyin, the topic Tianshui has been viewed more than 12 billion times.

The successful tourism experience     9     (earn) by the cities of Zibo and Harbin has paved the way for Tianshui,     10     the culinary dish is becoming a main force for the city to stand out.