Wu-Hsi Vegetable Rice

Wu-hsi, my mother’s home town, is a beautiful city midway between Shanghai and Nanking in the central eastern part of China. It is noted for its lovely cobblestone streets, winding lanes, and cassia trees, whose fragrant yellow blossoms peek over the scalloped walls surrounding the residential compounds. In the mid-eighteenth century, when the Emperor Chi Lung made his famous tour of China, he stayed two weeks in the home of my mother’s ancestors. The record of how Chin Tzuan-yuan, the lead