Grandma's Almond Tea

I occasionally chat with my mother about my grandmother, and sometimes I forget it if I don't write it down. My mother should not know much about her small talk and life interactions with me. I often write it on the Internet as a record.

Occasionally, when talking about my grandmother, my mother would run out like a "daughter", as if she was talking to someone about her and her mother, and she didn't care if I was her child, but she was still a child.

When Kaohsiung Hongmaogang Cultural Park first opened, I was a blogger who liked to run out, take pictures, and leave behind the whole city. Occasionally I invite my mother to join me: Would you like to go to Amitabha? Go to Oyster House to eat? Go to Dashu Old Iron Bridge? ...My mother is not a person who likes to go out. She really gave me half of my genes. Sometimes when I go alone, I even ask each other, "Do you want to be together?" The reason for the trip is always to travel together at the right time, in the right mood, and with enough physical strength.

That time I went to Hongmaogang Cultural Park together. I was busy taking pictures, taking pictures of my mother, the port, the big ship entering the port, and the tower that I once visited with my father. When I went out with my mother, I was always worried that she would be bored. I thought the places I took her to visit were not interesting and made her want to go home.

But that day, my mother saw the retro-style almond tea stall in the park, and suggested to drink a bowl of almond tea with fried dough sticks before going home.

I slowly discovered that almond tea was my mother's favorite food.

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At a night market not far from home, my mother and I passed by and saw almond tea. My mother asked me to stop and buy a cup of smoky hot almond tea. I stopped by and bought some crispy fried dough sticks. I needed to get home quickly. Taste it while it's still slightly hot.

The fritters are dipped in almond tea and put into the mouth, sucking the thick almond tea, chewing the slightly soft but still crisp fritters, always make people eat a whole portion accidentally, sometimes greedily from the mother She has to leave the part she hasn't finished eating, and continue the sweet taste.

It was cold in winter, and sometimes my mother was so cold that she closed the glass door of the living room, and the light rain outside was like the wet and cold weather in Taipei. I saw my mother shrunk and wrapped in a chair in the living room, asking her, "Would you like to buy you almond tea?" Did you buy food?"

She said, "No. It's so cold, why are you going out?"

Until it was close to her return, I called her at the right time and asked, "What does she want to eat?"

She asked me what to eat?

I said, "Is almond tea good?"

She said happily, "Wow!"

Or sometimes, I like to create a little romance and small surprises in life, and quietly create food from behind my mother's eyes that will brighten my mother's eyes. My mother will spread her smile and accept these small surprises, while chanting: all. Shopping for something to eat. (But in fact, the mother knows the child's favorite food, and the child knows she likes it is always a lot more!)

My mother is a person who doesn't like hot food except for dinner. She doesn't like hot beancurd and beverages that I buy, except for the flavor of almond tea sticks. No matter where she goes, she sees almond tea and always stops for a while. Down the pace, hesitant to buy a drink to drink.

My mother told me later that my grandmother used to carry almond tea to the fields to sell.

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Before my mother graduated from elementary school, her family had not gone bankrupt because her uncle acted as bailout for others. My grandmother was a woman who would not worry about food and clothing as long as she worked in farming. When her mother was ready to go to junior high school, even the pigs were sealed because of the bailout. The situation did not allow her to continue her studies, and forced everyone to work harder to make money to pay off large debts and share the household.

My mother said that every time she watched her grandmother pick up soy milk, almond tea and fried dough sticks on top, and go to the fields to sell to farmers who were already working in the fields, she couldn't bear to look at her back.

My mother couldn’t do farming or work, so she had to go to Tainan to learn sewing. At that time, her mother was ten years old and the family’s debts had not been repaid. My grandmother in her 60s and 70s went to the fields every day to sell almond tea and soy milk, and pay them back together. Get those debts off.

Every time my mother wanted to go home from Tainan, my grandfather would always tell my grandmother to leave a bag of almond tea for my mother, so that the mother who came home late at night on the night bus could drink a bowl of hot almond tea, and then She chatted with her grandmother until she fell asleep (the mother said that on the day she returned home, her grandfather would definitely stay away from them, because they chatted too loudly.)

My grandmother is the age to be my mother's grandmother, because she is old, and my mother can't bear to see her work so hard. Later, my mother said to my grandmother, "You are not allowed to get up and sell almond tea. If you go to sell it again, I will not send the money. Go home." Since then, my grandmother stopped getting up early to sell almond tea.

I asked my mother, "Do you think of your grandmother when you drink almond tea?"

"It's not that I think of my grandmother, but my grandmother's almond tea is so thick," she said.

Photo: 20130224 Almond tea fuel bars at the Xiaohong Canteen in Hongmaogang, Kaohsiung. (don't know if it's still there)

A certain paragraph 20140223 was written on Facebook, but I didn't take it out to see that I had forgotten the conversation with my mother at that time, and the grandmother my mother talked about. (Sure enough records are important)

if. Mother's Love Series