[excerpts] ...

[...]

... ur “kitchen” consisted of a brick stove he (Meredith) had recently built in one tiny corner of block 14, No. 7 — the 9 by 12 room that was “home” to the three of us.

At night, Meredith had secretly wrested bricks from the rubble of an old wall the guards had torn down from around the church. He, of course, had no tools with which to dig and made-do with any small piece of wood or part of a tree branch he could find. But the earth was packed solidly and was extremely hard. Sometimes he retrieved only one brick in an evening’s work so it took weeks to gather enough. The stovepipe had been patiently assembled from 21 old tin cans.

It was my job to collect those cans, which meant many trips to the dump heap and months to find them. We didn’t get many cans in camp, and if one had a can, he had better keep it in case of future need or the possibility of trading it for something else. The burner, the most difficult part to procure, was a thick metal tile form. For it we had paid the exorbitant price of two full cans of evaporated milk. But what a difference that “kitchen” made! During the winter we would take our half- bucket allotment of coal dust, mix it with clay and roll it into small balls, baking them in the sun.

Then we would buy whatever edible items there might be in the small camp canteen. Thus we managed to supplement the wearisome, half-palatable, mess-hall diet, which so often consisted of delights such as worm-ridden bread, fish soup and a dark porridge of kaoliang.

The first item in my kitchen set was a baking pan (not that anyone would have succeeded in identifying it as such). It had originally been an oversized sardine tin, of the sort our White Russian neighbors sometimes received in packages. The rough edges had been lovingly smoothed, and small handles fastened at each end.

Now, when our birthdays came and we got the promised two-cup ration of flour (though we seldom did), we could have a birthday cake! The next implement was a spatula, made of real rubber. Meredith didn’t tell me until later that it had been carefully whittled from a discarded boot heel, a bonanza he had discovered in the camp trash heap.

Completing the set was a tea strainer.

Afterwards I learned that the patch of screening from which the gift was devised was the remnant of a carefully scrubbed and well-boiled fly swatter!

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[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/GordonHelsby/photos/p_FrontCover.htm

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