The Liu Hua Chun Restaurant 1973: Changes in Revolutionary Nanking

Li Yueh-ying serving customers

From China Reconstructs, March 1973.

Changes in a Restaurant

Old Nanking was a parasitic consumer city. Wine shops, restaurants and the like made up half of its industrial and commercial units. A total of 84 wine houses and restaurants lined the 500-meter length of Kungyuan Street, located near offices of the big Kuomintang government officials. A great many people made their living waiting upon the official elite. In the city as a whole there were about 100,000 waiters and waitresses and servants, who constantly faced abuse and humiliation from their patrons and employers.

After liberation the socialist transformation of private industrial and commercial enterprises carried out by the Party and government gradually changed these enterprises into ones serving production and construction, and for the workers, peasants and soldiers. Service personnel, knowing that the place of work is theirs, try to do their jobs well in the spirit of serving the people wholeheartedly.

To the right of the new Nanking railway station now stands the Liu Hua Chun Restaurant which has a history of half a century. When it was on Kungyuan Street before liberation its business was devoted solely to giving elaborate banquets for officials, compradors and the landlord class. Today, working in the all-night service department of this restaurant is a middle-aged woman named Li Yueh-ying. From the age of 13 she had to earn a living as one of the hostesses at a restaurant. The owner used her and her elder sister to attract customers. She had to be attentive to the customers and drink with them, but when there were none around she was kept busy at other tasks, working for 14 to 16 hours a day. She got leftovers for food and could have only a small portion of the tips. Just let a customer make the slightest complaint and she would be cursed or beaten. Once she couldn't stand it any longer and refused to keep company with one of them in getting drunk. He threw the wine pot at her, soaking her from head to foot. The owner fired her for "offending the customer".

Li Yueh-ying returned to restaurant work after liberation; in the new society the service trades are no longer looked down upon but are considered honorable work needed for the revolution. "Today service personnel are no longer playthings of the official elite but servants of the people just like cadres in other jobs," she says. With this new understanding she goes about her work with enthusiasm and a deep sense of responsibility.

Once an old lady who suffered from ulcers, while stopping at the restaurant for a meal as she passed through Nanking, became violently ill. Li Yueh-ying first took her to the clinic serving the restaurant workers and then, as the case was serious, to a hospital. While the old lady stayed at the hospital, people from the restaurant went to visit her several times. When she got well they helped her to buy a ticket and saw her off at the sta-tion. Later her son wrote them a letter of thanks, praising them for their warmheartedness in serving the people.

There are many workers at the restaurant who, like Li Yueh-ying, serve the workers, peasants and soldiers with constant devotion, thus earning it a name as "a good restaurant just as you enter Nanking". The Liu Hua Chun Restaurant was moved to its new place in 1968 after the bridge across the Yangtze and the new railway station were completed.

Since the Yangtze bridge officially opened to traffic, this restaurant's 190 workers serve 15,000 people a day and as many as 20,000 on holidays. It has added a quick-meal department and all-night service to meet the needs of travelers. The cooks also did their best to increase the variety on the menu to suit the tastes of out-of-town customers. Hu Shan-yi, a veteran cook, offers many of the Nanking and Soochow dishes which are his specialty and from the other cooks has also learned to prepare dishes special to other parts of the country. Through pooling their experience and constantly improving their skill the cooks now can make nearly 200 kinds of staples and meat and vegetable dishes instead of the original 70. They have also extended their service to selling hot meat-filled steamed buns on the station platform and in hot weather cold drinks in the mines and fields.

Old Nanking could never have changed of its own accord. It took the storm of revolution, which toppled the reactionary rule of the Kuomintang, to wash away the city's dirt and crimes so that work could begin on building a vital new Nanking.