Erdaogou was the very path where Xiong Tingbi, the Ming Dynasty's Vice Minister of Defense, once crossed Fushun on a snowy night. This railway stretches all the way to Beijing, following the same route Dorgon took when he entered the Shanhai Pass.
Aunt Tian had no other options. With only two thousand yuan in her pocket, she'd already spent one thousand on heating fees. How would she get through the New Year? Once the remaining thousand was gone, what would her family live on? So she joined the others blocking the railway. While the elderly who'd worked their whole lives had some justification for protesting, someone like her felt apprehensive. But a mother's courage emerges when her child is involved—thinking of her daughter sleeping under three quilts at home, watching frost form and mold blacken their walls, she swallowed her pride and participated.
With the railway blocked, dozens of train crews were stranded at stations in Fushun or Shenyang. The Ministry of Railways soon learned of the situation and dispatched special investigators. Hundreds of municipal and district officials were temporarily assigned to the scene. You couldn't use force against elderly protestors. After prolonged negotiations, the open-pit mine supplied additional coal to the heating company, and heating resumed. But the heating company declared: "Our water and labor still cost money. Without full payment, we can only maintain minimum temperatures—about 11-12°C indoors. It'll have to do. Don't go shirtless indoors in winter."
Survival was enough.
That's how Northeasterners are—survival is sufficient. Since indoor temperatures were at least above freezing, the protests ceased. People drilled holes in windows to install stovepipes, set up coal stoves indoors. If they couldn't afford coal, they'd chop willow, poplar, or birch branches from roadsides and mountains. A few baskets could last days. When lower branches were gone, they'd climb roofs, tie ropes to saws, toss them over high branches, with one person pulling from above and another below—this became their method for gathering firewood.
This was how they'd lived decades earlier—old methods readily revived.
Nowadays, educated youngsters watching documentaries about post-Soviet Russia's hardships might be shocked, but elderly Fushun residents have lived it. "Don't bother watching," they'd say, "I'll tell you." State-owned enterprises' "iron rice bowl" was shattered before private capital fully developed. During that transitional period, everyone suffered from poverty.
Aunt Tian scoured the streets for work and found a storefront selling only Double Cooked Pork takeout. With just two woks, one cook fried meat slices using both hands simultaneously while an assistant sliced pork tenderloin and coated it in batter. This assistant position paid 500 yuan monthly with one day off weekly.
Human labor had never been so cheap. During those years, many Northeasterners lived in profound discouragement. Aunt Tian worked six months, starting at 7 AM daily to mix batter—clattering chopsticks until 7:30—then slicing thirty to fifty jin of tenderloin. Boss Chen insisted on 3mm thickness for Double Cooked Pork slices—about the width of a disposable chopstick. Over two thousand slices daily, her neck constantly bent over the cutting board, one hand steadying the meat, the other wielding the knife. While she prepared the meat, Boss Chen simultaneously fried slices with his left hand and stir-fried with his right. Their partnership built the business, but it also gave Aunt Tian chronic cervical spondylosis.
Over time, Boss Chen developed feelings for Aunt Tian—a natural attraction between man and woman, marred only by his existing marriage.But Boss Chen's wife had other interests—she went to the square outside the district government office building every day to dance ballroom dance. Ballroom dance was a wonderful thing; it awakened a second spring in those middle-aged people who had hastily decided on their marriages early in life because of state-owned enterprises or iron rice bowls. Back then, wasn't it because he was a state-owned enterprise worker that she married him? Otherwise, who would have chosen him? And now he's even been laid off. This Old Wang she danced with was quite something—he used to be the star of the district's amateur drama troupe. Though he wasn't doing well now, making a living by performing educational children's plays at various schools and giving kickbacks to the principals, Old Wang had a great figure. At forty, he still had such a slender waist, unlike Old Chen with his round belly that wobbled up and down when he walked. And Old Wang's buttocks were like little motors, shaking left and right at high frequency when he danced the cha-cha. Now that was a man with energy.
As time went by, just imagine—your wife swaying left and right in another man's arms, dancing away her youth—soon enough, rumors reached Old Chen's ears. Whether there was anything actually going on between them, ordinary people didn't know, but the two were always seen together. When they danced, they touched everywhere and dared to try any position. A group of retired old ladies who watched them spread the story until everyone knew.
For a man, as long as life was tolerable, even if there was a hint of green on his head, he could manage. Old Chen was psychologically exhausted and didn't care anymore. As long as his wife didn't bring the man home, he felt they could still get by. But after meeting Aunt Tian, Old Chen felt physically that he still had some life left in him. On a stormy day, with few pedestrians on the street, the two of them sat leaning against the wall in the three-square-meter shop after finishing their stock preparations.
Old Chen said, "Xiao Tian, I never noticed before—how come your arms are so fair?"
Aunt Tian replied, "You never have anything proper to say."
Old Chen reached out and touched her arm, saying, "You're a divorced woman, so fair-skinned, with no one to cherish you. What a waste."
Aunt Tian didn't resist and said calmly, "What, are you going to cherish me then?"
Old Chen moved his hand to her thigh, lifted her skirt, and started feeling inside, saying, "I've been thinking about this for quite a while."
Aunt Tian slapped his hand away and asked, "So if I don't let you cherish me, does that mean I can't keep this job either?"
Old Chen grinned and said, "Well, I'd have to find someone who'll let me cherish them, wouldn't I?"
Aunt Tian sprang to her feet, her hands still covered in batter with no time to wash them, and rushed out of the shop into the heavy rain.
Old Chen called after her, "Look, I was just joking. Come back, don't catch a cold."
Aunt Tian ran home crying all the way. When she entered the house, she saw her daughter studying. Aunt Tian sat cross-legged on the bed, and her daughter asked her what was wrong.
Crying, Aunt Tian said to her daughter, "My life is too hard, too undignified. If it weren't for you, I'd have gone astray—I'd go out and fool around, living however I pleased. But with you here, I can't let you lose face because of me. If the two of us live together, people would point at your back and say your mother is improper. Just five hundred yuan—only five hundred yuan a month—a single coin can stump a hero, and I really can't take it anymore. Look at you—what can you do besides study? Can't you share some of the housework? Have you even cleaned the house? All you do every day is ask for money. Do you know how hard it is to earn money? You don't know a damn thing."All human suffering is essentially anger at one's own incompetence. And when the weak are oppressed, they transfer their pain to those even weaker.
After scolding her child, the mother and son hugged each other and cried. When they finished, Aunt Tian said, "Starting tomorrow, I'll push a tricycle through the streets to do business. I refuse to believe I can't feed these two mouths."
She pondered: what kind of business would work best? A food program was playing on TV, where Liu Yiwei was introducing Sichuan's Spicy Hot Pot, saying that at Chongqing's Liberation Monument, people queued over a hundred meters long to eat it. What did this stuff taste like? We northeasterners have been eating pickled cabbage with vermicelli and scallions dipped in soybean paste for years - we'd never tasted Spicy Hot Pot. Aunt Tian thought, whatever I sell must be something others haven't tried. If everyone could make it, why would they come to you?
No one in Fushun knew what Spicy Hot Pot was, and the agricultural markets didn't carry the seasonings. Aunt Tian went to Shenyang, but several markets there didn't have them either. Just as she was about to take the bus back to Fushun, a downpour started, so she took shelter in a nearby Xinhua Bookstore.
Chatting with the clerk, who asked why she'd come to Shenyang, she said she was looking for Spicy Hot Pot base. The clerk said, "We have cookbooks here - want to take a look?"
Aunt Tian found one exactly fitting her needs: a Sichuan cuisine cookbook written by someone from Henan and published by a Jiangsu publisher.
Back home, Aunt Tian started buying seasonings according to the cookbook's instructions, then began her culinary experiments at home. Having never tasted Spicy Hot Pot, she didn't know what it should taste like or what would make it authentic. There was no internet back then, let alone Taobao - otherwise she could have just bought a ready-made base online.
As she cooked and tested, she pulled in Liu Zhengliang, who was still in middle school, and his mother to taste her creations.
Aunt Tian said, "We northeasterners making this numbing-spicy flavor - who knows if it's authentic or not."
Liu Zhengliang said, "Even chili peppers aren't originally from Sichuan. They originated in the Americas, where Native Americans ate them. Sichuan people have only been eating them for over two hundred years. Aren't all dishes just made to taste good? If what you make tastes delicious, that's what matters. Who cares about authenticity?"
Aunt Tian smiled at Liu Zhengliang's mother: "I love hearing this kid talk. Some ingredients are hard to find - I can't get bamboo shoot tips or water spinach at the market. The Shenyang vegetable wholesale market has them, but out-of-town vegetables are too expensive. I can only charge three yuan per serving - if it's too expensive, students can't afford it. Just the green vegetables would cost sixty to seventy cents, making the math impossible."
Liu Zhengliang said, "It doesn't have to be exactly like Chongqing's. Add some kelp knots for hot pot, fry some radish balls - students aren't that picky. As long as they get full."
Hearing this, Aunt Tian's eyes lit up. The customers' needs were simple - all poor kids who lived too far to go home for lunch. The core demand was getting full for three yuan. So what fills you up? Plant protein and starch - bean curd sheets and vermicelli. These were cheap, and she wouldn't mind adding plenty.
As they ate, Liu Zhengliang and his mother said, "This flavor is good - tasty but not too spicy."
Liu Zhengliang's mother asked, "When you sell door-to-door, where will you wash the used bowls and chopsticks?"
Liu Zhengliang said, "Why not just put plastic bags over plastic bowls? When they finish eating, just throw the bags away. If they want takeout, they can carry the bags away. Aunt Tian, you wouldn't need to wash dishes - how convenient!"Aunt Tian said happily, "The child is indeed a good learner, so clever. Let's do it this way."
Liu Zhengliang asked, "Aunt Tian, what should we call this dish?"
After thinking for a moment, Aunt Tian replied, "Since it's served in a plastic bowl, and we're not sure how it relates to Sichuan Spicy Hot Pot, we don't want people saying later that Fushun folks are all about trickery. Let's call it Spicy Hot Bowl."
Working through the night, Aunt Tian welded a stainless steel stove herself. After all, as a former steel plant welder, she was thoroughly familiar with such metalwork. Since stainless steel conducts heat too well and could easily burn people, she needed to fire a coarse ceramic inner liner. The outer side of the liner had to be filled with insulating sand for heat insulation. Without proper insulating sand, she used crushed firebrick fragments to fill the gap between the liner and the stove. Aunt Tian handled both the firing and the construction alone—this embodies the allure of Northeastern women, where industrial civilization has endowed women with the same skills and craftsmanship as men. Her tricycle, with the cargo compartment in front and the rider pedaling from behind, was nicknamed the Reverse Riding Donkey.
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