Geese in Hua Hong Ice Factory

Now that I am rearing my first THREE geese ever I can share some stories about my Grandfather's geese in Hua Hong Ice Factory during the Japanese Occupation and the first few years of my mother;s marriage.

The Ice Factory was on  the eastern side of the Pulau Kerto. Grandfather had started the Ice Factory because in the early 1930's electricity was introduced by Rev James Hoover to Sibu and he decided, with Rev James Hoover's help to get the first ice making machine from the USA, via Singapore. 

He also installed electricity for all the quarters in the Ice Factory Complex. There were three Management Quarters, which were really quite big along a mud path extending from the factory, the main complex. The office complex was towards the river bank. The staff quarters were behind the factory. It was good for every one to have not only electricity but ice!!

I was told that Grandpa and his partners, the two Wong brothers, (Wong Hung Kwong and Wong Liing Kwong) employed more than 30 people to run the ice factory - rubber crepe factory - rice mill . It was a Three in One kind of business which really prospered for many years.

I heard was my great grand parents and grandparents were very frugal and did not want any food scraps, vegetable waste and rice husks (from the milling ) to go to waste. And they, in particular, had wanted their great grand children to be involved in food production before, during and after the Japanese Occupation.

The kids were given tasks to feed geese, ducks , chickens and pigs.

The trend of having domestic animals continued when my mother married into the family. Great grandmother who was very fond of domestic animals encouraged my mother to rear ducks, chickens, geese and even goats. At one time my father even reared three buffaloes, provided by the Agriculture Department . But he did not succeed to breed any because the kampong people on the other side of the island did not like the marauding buffaloes which wondered into their land. They shot one of the buffaloes. My father gave up rearing them

My mother remembered that whenever the family slaughtered a goose during the holidays, each goose would be more than 8 katis and here was so much meat, filling up a whole basin. We Foochows called this kind of basin as Wash Face Basin, or Seh Mingmuong.

 A whole basin of the chopped meat would be ready and Great Grandma would be there to look and decide how to have the meat cooked. My mother said that chopping up the goose meat was a daunting task. The bird was so big that she felt that her left hand would drop off. My mother had the typical rustic Foochow way of expressing herself, using a lot of metaphors and old style Foochow expressions.

My mother used her left hand to do all house chores like cutting meat or chopping a branch but she wrote with her right hand, as was the norm of the time.

Great grandmother liked to eat braised goose meat. She would add half a bottle of home made Foochow rice wine.

A cousin, Yew Ping, used to tell us that Great Grandmother made salted vegetables. She told us that the soup of any meat and salted vegetables was awesome. Great grandmother really knew how to flavour food in the kitchen. Perhaps it was because she was brought up in a scholarly family in Fujian.

if there was any left over meat , especially the boney pieces, Great Grandma would ask her to make soup with the salted vegetables.

Cousin Yew Ping stayed with the family until I was about four years old and she was old enough to get married. She married into a Lau family in Tulai.

Goose eggs according to my mother were huge and very often one egg was enough as a side dish. That was another side dish that Great Grandmother liked.

Great Grandmother moved to stay with Grandpa in Sg. Merah when we moved to Sibu in 1956. She missed rearing all the domestic animals in Pulau Kerto. But by then she was more than 70 years old. Her bound feet were really tiny and she could not walk very well up and down the two storeyed house, newly built by Grandfather.

She would have loved to live with us but as more siblings were born, my mother had more to do, so Grandfather thought that she should live with him instead and not with us. My mother never had a maid servant in her whole life.

We also stopped rearing geese in Sibu but mother continued to rear ducks and chickens because they could be caged.