Hyderabad: Can a mere mention, or rather the uploading of a video tutorial, of an iconic gastronomic heritage of a country lead to an internet celebrity chef being termed as a traitor, stirring up a discussion on free speech worldwide?
Well, it happened in China to chef Wang Gang, who had to end the raging controversy on the internet by uploading a video, apologizing for the ‘how to make egg fried rice video,’ besides vowing not to cook egg fried rice again in his life, and then go on to delete that video, too.
Egg fried rice, which one can safely describe as China’s gift to the culinary world, is the most common dish in China that every Chinese learns to cook first. Its origins are traced to Yangzhou and to the reign of the Sui dynasty and is celebrated as a favourite food of Emperor Yang. But that is old history. Recent history of China, however, has given a bad name to Egg Fried Rice that mentioning it on certain dates in the months of October could spell disaster.
In 2021 a man in Jiangxi province was detained for 10 days after he posted on Weibo, China’s microblogging website launched in lieu of Facebook, X and all that are not available to the Chinese, a comment: Thank You egg fried rice. Coming to the story of Wang Gang, the charge against him is that he has the penchant to post videos on egg fried rice around October 24 and November 25. And of course it is true.
Even if it is not on those two days, he has done what is perceived as a mischief, at best and a crime punishable by up to 3 years in prison under a law passed in 2018, banning the slander of national heroes and martyrs, at worst. But what has those two days got to do with egg fried rice or slander of a national hero or martyr? Well, for over a decade China’s liberal-leaning people have been celebrating November 25 as China’s Thanksgiving Day, rather secretively.
So, what happened on November 25? The story goes like this: It was on that day in the year 1950 that the shelter office of China’s then military commander Peng Dehuai was bombed by the United Nation forces at the height of the Korean War and one of their officers, Mao Anying, was killed. But what is there for the liberals to celebrate in the death of an officer and even call it a Thanksgiving Day? The fact is that Mao Anying is no ordinary soldier but the eldest son of Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China.
