13 Years at My Family’s Tofu Workshop | 人间 · 英文版

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《跟着父亲做了十几年豆腐，

我变成了一颗泡不开的黄豆》

Online shopping did not truly begin to spread across my hometown of Jicheng, Gansu province, until around when I finished middle school. Trends always take longer to reach our small county town in the depths of China’s Northwest. Online retail platforms—think Taobao and JD.com—only became popular here after 2015.

In Jicheng, agriculture is a small-scale affair, while industrial production has almost entirely vanished. The town relies on a lively network of family-run stalls and workshops. Run at a relatively low cost from residents’ own homes with every family member enlisted, these workshops represent a ticket out of financial vulnerability for many households in the county.

This was the true, hidden force of our local industry. In Jicheng, a myriad of family-run shops specialized in all sorts of retail—mustard and flaxseed oils, halal foodstuffs such as baiji mo (白吉馍, a kind of round wheat bread baked over a fire), hand-pulled noodles, soy and mung bean products, and even sewed items such as hemp shoes. Customers favored the mountain goods market or the street markets on Xiguan and Dongguan Street over supermarkets, and sometimes they would even drop by the vendors’ homes. Of course, these primitive, simple businesses show up nowhere in the official GDP, but they’ve sustained local economies in China’s small towns for thousands of years.

Where are the roots of China’s industrial civilization? Perhaps, they’re right there in the family shops in the meandering back alleys. Among them is my Dad’s tofu business.

Dad didn’t have any know-how when he started making tofu. He had been a long-distance driver until an accident landed him in serious debt. He needed a new occupation, which is how some acquaintances got him in touch with a guy making tofu in town. Mom recalls that the man hailed from Sichuan, where his kids lived and had reached school age. Otherwise, why pack it in and pass his knowledge onto someone else?

The tofu guy started by showing my father the ropes, without actually talking him through it. Much like most artisans, he was not keen to show all his cards at once. Whenever he did offer feedback in his thick Sichuan accent, my dad was usually none the wiser. In any case, Dad got the message after a while. Because he’d paid tuition and now there was no way out, he got over his initial embarrassment, gritted his teeth, and bought two packs of fine cigarettes. For each question he raised to his master, he offered tobacco and tea, one smoke and cup at a time, but even these pleasantries earned him a little over half of the guy’s savoir faire.

You could hardly say that my dad nailed it at the beginning. His tofu brine was past its prime, or he’d mixed in a little too much calcium sulfate a, a widely used tofu coagulant. He had yet to grasp the right amount of water to use, so the resulting slurry was either too thin or too thick. Both to the eyes and to the palate, Dad’s tofu was a disappointment. “What a waste of soybeans,” my mother would declare before making us all eat our fill of faulty tofu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Boy, did that make me hate tofu.

With the pressure to make money, though, Dad could only afford so many rounds of trial and error. He poured himself into the trade, and soon enough, his master was finally approving of his craft. My sister and I sure were thrilled to see tofu off the family table.

In 2006, already marching to the beat of his own drum, Dad dug up a small vegetable garden on the west side of our old courtyard house, where he built a small factory out of mud and bricks, dragging inside a soy milk maker before welding a steamer all by himself. The rest consisted of inexpensive tools—bamboo partitions, gauze fabric, wooden racks, hoisting jacks, and so on.

A day of work in summer began by 3 a.m., when the alarm clock woke Dad up to soak the soybeans. On warm days, it didn’t take long to hydrate the beans, but over-soaking the beans would make it hard to extract the slurry later. On winter days, he could put the beans in water before bed, but had to wake up at 5 or 6 a.m. to deal with them. The freezing cold could bite one’s ears off.

In the Northwest, all year long, early morning soybean grinding is also quite a grind on the tofu maker. It requires fast hands and wits, with one person doing the job of three. The soy milk maker burns if you leave it to churn without beans. Often, the machine is running out of soaked beans, but as soon as you add more, it’ll be time to empty out the full soy milk bucket. After three buckets of soy milk, the grinding disc will be overflowing with bean dregs to be cleaned, but the boiler is bubbling with a hundred kilograms of cooked soy milk ready to be switched out, otherwise it’s just wasting fuel. No distractions are allowed when you’re doing this precisely interlinked series of tasks.

As the coagulant took effect, the loose molecules of soy protein started coagulating one by one until the pot of bean curd was ready for us to press. Soft tofu is easier to press than firm tofu. Dad placed two special bamboo partitions on the bottom, then stacked a square wooden frame on top. He pulled a square of porous gauze, or cheesecloth, evenly over the frame, leaving the four corners out. With an aluminum ladle, he then carefully scooped in the curd, the solid substance formed through curdling, until it covered the bottom. Then, he layered scoops of bean curd into the mold, filling it from the corners into the center.

In the end, he grabbed all four corners of the gauze with one hand, all while tying a neat knot around them with the other. The wrapping must be tight, otherwise the shape will fall apart as soon as it comes under any weight. Then, Dad would cover the mold with a wooden lid, placing two large buckets weighing some 30 jin, or 15 kilograms, of water on top in order to press the whole setup. From here on, it was all a matter of time.

Firm tofu followed a similar method, sans the wooden frame at the pressing step per local customs in Jicheng. Wrapping firm tofu is a true handicraft; only sometimes would Dad step aside as the technical director to let us kids try our hand at it. Here, even my otherwise dexterous sister had a hard time wrapping the curd.

Wrapping firm tofu starts with placing a large woven bamboo mat on the wooden board designed for draining the liquid, and lining the mat with a square of a stronger gauze. My sister and I would stand on either side and evenly lift the four corners of the fabric. Dad poured some curd directly onto the center of the cloth before smearing it finely with his aluminum ladle to avoid air bubbles or cracks. He would then immediately add a new layer of curd. Time was of the essence here—if the curd cooled down before the vapor got out, it would seal in the sourness of the brine and ruin the flavor.

With Dad’s last ladleful, we stepped in for the wrapping—neither too loose nor too tight. This was not a simple skill you could learn overnight. After the tofu was wrapped, the wooden board and heavy water buckets went on top. Once again, this step required delicate care. A single bucket wouldn’t have been enough to press the liquid out, but if you pressed it too much, you’d end up with bean dregs.

The whole setup of firm tofu and heavy water buckets was like this upside down pyramid in a void—balance was crucial here. Such is the way of life: slow and steady wins the race. In my youth, when I got tired from work, I would occasionally stare blankly at this wonderfully balanced tofu-making contraption. Once I started studying physics in middle school, I even drew a force analysis diagram in my mind for the entire thing. Now, I got it: making firm tofu works a bit like life. Our existence is like that large, pressing bucket, silently placed over our bodies for a long, drawn out period of time—just like the curd, we are slowly squeezed dry and pressed into tofu.

If you think there’s anything new under the sun, think again. It’s all the same old, well-trodden story.

I may have dreaded sales duty, but what I truly despised were the days spent at the tofu workroom. Neither spring nor autumn ever penetrated those walls where you could only freeze or suffocate in the heat.

Summer may have been our off season, but we didn’t get any days off. There’s nary a gust of wind in the hot and dry summers in Jicheng, and yet you could find us at the workroom alongside boilers full of raw soy milk. This was a tough job. Whenever I’d open the lid to load up the boiler with crushed coal, fiery sparks gushed out immediately, and the heat wave menaced to swallow me up. Beads of sweat—the size of soybeans—poured out from my forehead. Sweat had pooled and dried on my half-sleeve blue top, leaving behind a pattern of white, salty traces.

The tofu workroom is like a sauna, and perhaps I owed my fair complexion to all the time I’d spent there since my early childhood. My skin never gleamed with the ruddy color that was the standard for locals. My mom lamented that I looked like a little girl, though really, I went against the family’s grain in just about every way.

Whenever I slacked off, I would squat on the steps in the yard to look at the tofu workroom, still wearing my apron and slippers. The steam rose like smoke puffing out of the windows, doors, and vents. The white mist that surrounded the brownish red walls made the factory look like the alchemy furnace of Taishang Laojun, a Taoist deity. As the water vapor diffused and muted, a sense of immortality filled the yard. The whole spectacle was a fascinating reminiscence of a scene in the 1986 rendition of Journey to the West, showing a large blanket of clouds spreading over Lingxiao Temple during a peach banquet in heaven.

Dad was not a fan of my imaginative spells. He never ran out of steam to shout at me.

I feared winter the most. Our family was poor, so I only wore my good pair of shoes to school. At work, my sister and I had to tire ourselves wading in bean water with hand-me-down work boots from the grown-ups. Dad’s old mud shoes still reeked of his foot odor. In the summer I could at least get away with wearing slippers, but winter left me no choice.

In winter, the sweltering steam in the tofu workroom kept our clothes drenched in sweat, the inside of our rubber shoes was always wet and cold. Stepping in them was a pain. Whenever we pushed open the heavy door curtain, piercing cold air blew across our faces, reminding us of the sharp contrast between our furnace of a workroom and the icy outdoors.

Mom had her own reasons to dread winter. Arthritis comes with prolonged exposure to heavy humidity. She couldn’t prevent her seasonal ailments—chilblains, chapped skin, and scabs accosted her all winter long.

Mr. Jiang was fairly young himself. He’d just graduated from normal school and he was stricter to me than any other pupils. He was keen on hitting the students’ palms with bamboo boards, and I was his daily target. However, from that moment on I never held a grudge against him. The story of our family business soon became well-known at school. But unless it came from a female classmate, I was also usually impervious to teasing.

We had a rapid turnover at the tofu shop; several of our full-time workers complained and quit after barely two or three days. They were hardly to blame. Those working for factories at least got some holidays, but there was no such thing as time off in our workroom. If anything, in peak times, these ladies often had to return home late. The way things were in Jicheng, our family could not possibly afford to hire male workers, and not just due to their usually higher wages. These men usually liked their tobacco and booze. A small family business like ours just couldn’t deal with any of that.

So, my sister and I had to roast over at the tofu workroom. No wonder I was known for slacking. How could you possibly expect a 10-year-old kid to work like a grown man?

My sister and I often quarreled with Dad. With his machismo, his educational methods boiled down to whatever stick he could find to discipline us with. We often fled from his constant, unfiltered scolding to go to Mom’s stall or simply slip out of the house to play. Sadly, no breakout went without punishment. At school, I always did excel in political sciences, perhaps because Dad and I made a perfect recreation of class struggles between capitalists and the proletariat. I could really relate, in a straightforward, personal way, to Marx’s critique on the primitive accumulation of capital and the accompanying exploitation.

Eventually, we hired a stable long-term worker who came to us through an acquaintance. Auntie A La was a tall, capable Tibetan woman who worked fast and had a son four years my junior. She was especially kind to me, always making a case for me against Dad’s roughness.

With Auntie A La, whom neither of us kids truly ever saw as hired help, business at the tofu shop became much easier to handle. She ate with us, and sometimes even took care of the cooking. Her crispy pork dough drop soup (酥肉疙瘩汤, sūròu gēdatāng) was my favorite. Apparently, this was a local specialty in her hometown. The cleaned pork belly was cut into small slices, stir-fried in the pan until crispy, and then mixed into a bone broth soup after stir-frying some more with diced potatoes and sliced carrots; once the soup boiled, she would use a pair of chopsticks to add drops of a batter made with buckwheat and wheat flour, which formed small lumps as they boiled with chopped green veggies. Finally, a few handfuls of bright green garlic shoots and coriander topped a bowl that warmed our stomachs for a whole winter.

Freshly made tofu does also smell great, and even though my sister and I were sick of it, some other soybean products we did like. I never said no to oily tofu skin.

Oily tofu skin is basically the condensed layer that forms on the surface of cooked soy milk as it cools down. A large pot of soy milk yields up to three sheets of oily tofu skin, and the consistency of the soy milk is crucial for the coagulation of the skin. If you add too much water when grinding the beans, the skin does not coagulate. The skin is a telling sign of a good pot of tofu.

My sister and I never quite enjoyed the thickness and beany smell of soy milk, but Auntie A La loved it. Maybe that was the secret to her shiny, thick black hair. Mom scolded me for my pickiness. “Like casting pearls before swine!” And, honestly, she did have a point.

Nowadays I love soy milk, though the stuff you usually buy from stalls is too thinned out and has no bean flavor. Since we shut down our family tofu workshop, the thick soy milk of my childhood is no longer available to me. How ironic that I now long for what I once scorned as a kid. But, that’s how it was with the era of manual production. People often complained about the low yield and high costs, only to yearn for everything that was lost when machines replaced human labor with the arrival of the industrial age.

Translated by Ana Padilla Fornieles