THE MAN WHO EATS.

The God of Lightning does not hit the man who eats, my grandfather often said when we were young. The lesson? Eating was a virtue. Grandpa could go on for hours citing Confucius and his disciples on the merit of eating. Sometimes, to make us appreciate food more, he told my sister and me hunger stories. A poor scholar went to a banquet and saw sesame seeds scattered on the table. "Let me teach you calligraphy," the man said to the guests, after which he licked his forefinger and wrote like a master on the table, cleaning up the sesame seeds as he went. A poor man from a village visited a rich friend in the city, according to another story, and the friend invited him to a fancy restaurant, ordered a cup of tea, and asked him politely to help himself to all the good smells. Grandpa also told us tales about a famine in the fourteenth century, when neighbors traded their children so they would not have to cook their own sons and daughters. They started with the youngest in the families, Grandpa explained, because the little ones knew nothing and would not be afraid.

The last story both frightened and enchanted me. Throughout my childhood, food was always in short supply and rationing was never-ending, but famine, a word with a dangerous appeal, was a mystery. I was about four years old when my grandfather first told me the story, and, as the youngest, I imagined my parents trading me for the boy next door. He was my age but bigger and fatter--a good deal, then, for my family. Knowing that I would be the one sacrificed in a time of famine, I felt important, grown-up, and sad. I studied the tins of crackers and cookies that Grandpa kept on top of his bookcase and wondered if I deserved a treat because of what I would do for the family. Grandpa shared a bedroom with my sister and me. Our room was about a hundred square feet. It had two beds and the furniture that Grandpa had brought from his previous residence: a sturdy desk and a big wooden bookcase. If I stood on the edge of the double bed that my sister and I shared, it would take only a small hop for me to land on Grandpa's single bed; I could then climb onto the desk from his headboard, and from there it would be easy to reach the tins on the top shelf. But we were not allowed to take the hop to start the intrusion. Everything Grandpa owned was too precious for us to touch. On his desk were brushes of all sizes, an inkstone, a stack of rice paper for painting and calligraphy, a bronze paperweight and a marble one, and a lamp with a bridge and a pavilion exquisitely carved into the base; in his bookcase, the books were brittle and yellow, bound with strings that had come loose. The only unbreakable objects were the cracker tins, and the bags of gourmet pickles, also kept out of our reach, that he bought on monthly trips to an expensive store. He ate his snacks alone.

When Grandpa was in a good mood, he taught us to recite poems written during the Tang dynasty, between the seventh and the tenth century. Once in a while, he sneaked his own poems into the curriculum and gave us each an animal cracker whenever we memorized his work. My sister, who was four years older, taught me to put the cracker in a glass of water to make it grow. Together, we watched the rooster or the elephant become fat, and then we scooped it out carefully with a spoon. Sometimes we were too greedy and let the crackers stay in the water too long; at the first touch of the spoon the cracker would disappear, a phenomenon that puzzled me for the longest time during my childhood.

On Sunday afternoons, my parents often had to take part in required parades--my father, who was a physicist, with his research institute, and my mother, a teacher, with her school. It was the middle of the nineteen-seventies, toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, and it seemed that there was always a parade on Sunday in those years, to celebrate a new policy of the Party, or the recent publication of a poem of Chairman Mao's. Sometimes the call for a parade came on a weeknight, and it would last ...