Had steamboat dinner with my Mom today. We ate chive dumplings, which reminded mom of something from her childhood.
According to Mom, when she was a small girl, she used to keep a coin in her mouth. It drove my granny crazy!
I asked Mom why she did such a gross thing and she said back in those days she didn’t have a purse cause she was too little so she used to put whatever coin she got from my grandparents behind her ear.
However, the coin kept falling off the back of her ear, so she came up with the brilliant idea of keeping it in her mouth instead.
One day, while she was playing with a neighbour, she accidentally swallowed the coin. She started panicking and cried hysterically.
My late grandfather told my Mom that there were only two ways to get the coin out; she had to go to a doctor who would cut her belly open and pluck it out…or she would have to eat chicken poop which would induce vomitting.
“Which method do you want?”, asked my grandfather.
She thought for a while, and with tears in her eyes, “I’d eat chicken poop”.
My uncle (mom’s elder brother) who was observing the entire episode, helpfully suggested to Mom that they hunt for the perfect chicken poop together. Back in those days, my granny reared a few chickens so there were plenty of avian poop to choose from.
There were watery ones, and there were solid ones. After studying every single chicken poop they came across in my grandparents’ backyard, my uncle asked mom whether she had decided on which one to ingest.
“I want the watery one”, she said.
“Why?”, asked my uncle.
“Cause it will dissolve in water better”, Mom replied.
At this point, my grandmother told my uncle to cut it out and stop bullying my Mom.
Only then Mom realised that she had been taken for a ride.
She stopped speaking to my uncle for 2 weeks and proceeded to stuff his precious encyclopaedias in several Milo tins and buried them under the chicken pen, while he was at school.
As for the coin in Mom’s belly, apparently my granny soaked a stalk of chive in water till it’s soft and made my mom swallow it whole. The belief was that the chive would wrap itself around the coin, of which my Mom would then safely pass it out.
True enough, she safely pooped out a chive wrapped coin a day later.
