Mau and the Moors! A Chinese New Year tale.

Most historians agree, grains are the staples of life. They are so important in the world’s diet that, “it’s almost impossible to imagine human existence without them”, as quoted in a 1999 Special Issue of Cooking Light Magazine. This might be news to people who maintain membership in the low-carb movement. Many human bonds have been forged along the fibers of grains. In the Biblical “Last Supper”, they appropriately broke bread; Spain’s famous dish, Paella, owes its existence to the rice that was imported into that country by the Moors. Italians, Mexicans, countless other peoples of the world have survived on a multitude of grains. Hostile invasion and peaceful resolution is not necessary for cultures to meet at the table over the complex grains of rice.

“Hell, we spend 45 million dollars on Chinese food a year! That’s enough money to fund anything! How much money did those people spend on soul food in our neighborhood?” The commentator was angry. He was commenting on a national radio broadcast that merchants from many communities come into the African-American community, setting up shop, extract resources from the community but give nothing back. I thought about those comments when a guest insisted on dinner at an Asian restaurant. As I cautiously scanned the menu, I saw a dish that intrigued my taste buds.

As I sat waiting for my meal to arrive, I thought about the fact that contrary to popular belief, Asians do not have a monopoly on rice farming. So while dinner is prepared, let me tell you about a story about two cultures, and two places, and give you something to think about the next time you sit down to dine over grains of rice from your favorite Asian restaurant.

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W
here Mau meets the Moors!

Flo Oy Wong, an Asian-American artist, used rice as the vehicle to express her spiritual and creative essences. As an American woman and artist of Chinese descent, this primary staple of her life expressed certain meanings and metaphors. In an essay about Wong’s work, Author Terri Cohn stated, “Wong’s Asian Rice Sack Series is an ongoing body of hand sewn work in which she has used rice and rice sacks as fundamental media with which to discover and express her personal, collective and cultural narratives and concerns.”

One narrative described in the Asian Rice Sack Series, called the Baby Jack Rice Story, was an ever-changing display of rice sacks, photo-silk screened with images of two households: one, the Chinese American family of her husband, Edward K. Wong; and the other, the African American household of Cut and Bikini Caddie, childhood friends of her husband. While this may seem to be a strange homogenization, don’t underestimate the power of a tiny grain of rice connecting peoples of the world in a melting pot of humanity.

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While researching his book, Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball came to Sierra Leone and visited Bunce Island, the British slave castle. It was there that his ancestor, a South Carolina planter, purchased a little girl he called, "Priscilla”, from a slave ship. Edward found a link to Priscilla from her modern day descendants, an African-American family living in Charleston, South Carolina. Amazingly, Edward was able to trace slaves taken from Sierra Leone to a particular place in the American South. This lead to a homecoming of community leaders from slave decendent communities in the South back to their ancestral homes in Sierra Leone. And this was all made possible by the fabric that held artist Flo Oy Wong’s exhibit together, tiny grains of rice!

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Rice was South Carolina and Georgia’s staple crop in the 18th Century, and rice planters in the low country region of those colonies were willing to pay high prices for Africans brought from the "Rice Coast”, the traditional rice-growing area stretching from what is now Senegal and Gambia down to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Rice planting in the Southern colonies was labor-intensive and demanded specialized knowledge. Low country planters even knew about “Bance Island”, as it was called then. And slaves knew more about the business of the rice than their owners for generations. Indigo, cotton, forest products and manufacturing never came close to matching the riches that planters drew from slave-based rice production.

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