Before the elevated road was built at Wugui Bridge, there used to be a row of little shops by the Shahe Road entrance to Tazishan Park. One of them was called Old Ma’s Home Cooking. Its owner, Ma Huaizhen, wore his hair in a Daoist topknot, and on the wall he kept talismanic charms of the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice. Old Ma’s signature dish was called “Eightfold Auspice,” a vegetarian braise of potato, taro, bamboo shoots, and peppers. Yet the taste was marvelous. Every mouthful seemed to turn into a different meat: first red-braised pork, then taro chicken, then chicken giblets, then ratfish. The poor people living nearby loved to go there for a treat, because the flavor was beyond compare and the price absurdly kind.
Once, on his child’s birthday, Ma Huaizhen was in such high spirits that he laid out a table of food and wine and invited seven or eight friends and neighbors. After several rounds of drinking, Old Ma brought out a black ceramic dish from the inner room, glossy as lacquer, and inside it lay five or six black soup ladles. He casually twisted open a bottle of mineral water and poured it into the dish, then waved for the guests to taste it. Each guest dipped up a spoonful of the water and found, once it entered the mouth, that it tasted like mellow strong liquor going down the throat, fragrant and powerful. That night they drank seven or eight buckets of purified water dry and went home completely satisfied.
Not long afterward, thieves broke into Ma Huaizhen’s house. The black ceramic dish and the black ladles were stolen. Ma cursed in the street for five or six days, weeping bitterly all the while. A few months later he sold off the shop and left, and from that day onward no one ever heard of him again.