A Dishwasher, Hiding Food, and a Bamboo Stick

Dependency on a tyrannical communist state is hard to shake even decades after that state had ceased to exist as a tyranny. People were so used to be told what to do at every step of their lives that they even waited for the government agents to come into small communities to shovel snow off their village streets. Some call it laziness but it is more insidious than that.

A totalitarian government has rules, regulations, laws, and decrees that govern everything their population does. Because there are so many, people are afraid to decide anything without consulting first the Communist Party powers lest they be chastised in front of their co-workers, which was embarrassing enough, fined, or worse, imprisoned.

We had to make do with extraordinarily little because we were allowed few possessions, we had to be all equal in our misery. Owning too much stuff was reactionary.

One “scholarly friend” insisted that what happened to us in eastern Europe is terrible, but it is never going to happen here, this is America, we are Americans and somehow exempted from hardship and terrible times. But here we are, Americans just elected a Marxist duo in the White House because capitalism was evil, and it has run its course of prosperity.  We had to try Venezuela’s socialist system because it “worked” so well for them, social justice, and all.

Another self-proclaimed educated and savvy American claimed that our Constitutional Republic is a Fabian socialist society. If I say that such Americans are naïve, ignorant, uninformed, and some even stupid, Facebook “moderators” will suspend me for three days for “hate speech.”

In our socialist and Marxist “paradise” we did a lot of manual labor which built character. We were such characters that some risked their lives to escape this “paradise” at all costs. I was luckier than most as I had the opportunity to fly in on a comfortable jet.

We washed dishes by hand in a small tub with a little water heated in a pot on the stove and a caustic detergent that ruined our hands. Water was not easy to get in a village, it involved carrying a bucket from far away where wells were located. The government controlled in towns how much water came through the tap.  We had to conserve as they kept careful records of any excessive consumption.

This water conservation by necessity was drilled so much into our heads that, when I came to America, I believed dishwashers were a huge waste of water. Years of living in America had not convinced me that it was a life saver for families with children.

The house I had just bought in the south had a broken Maytag dishwasher.  Before I had a chance to fix it, my mother repurposed it as a hiding place for snacks and sodas. What better use for a “water-wasting” machine than as a kitchen cabinet for food that was to be divided as special treats from time to time?

I finally started using a dishwasher six years ago. Until then our brand-new dishwasher sat idle and empty. One Thanksgiving I had so many dishes to do and no volunteers to help that I decided to try the machine. I sat in awe looking at my clean and sterilized plates and wondered why I waited so long to make my life so much easier and my hands less wrinkled.

Another thing my mother could not shake from our previous life under communism was hiding food for rainy days, no matter how much abundant food supply she saw in grocery stores or in our own pantry.  It was something I disliked greatly – hoarding food for bad times and times were always bad except at Christmas time.

What could possibly be worse than being hungry all the time? Starvation for sure. She placed our food under lock and key and gave us small portions from time to time. This ensured that we had something to eat but it was never enough, I was always hungry.

Mom’s food hoarding for rainy days was not unusual. Our friend Ligia, another survivor of communism, made sure her pantry was stuffed to the rafters with canned food. The only other place where I saw more canned vegetables was in the grocery store.

The first home I bought was built in 1959 and had a lovely state of the art Frigidaire teal stove with a pull drawer for the electric plates and two large ovens with a rotisserie rack. I loved that stove! It was so well built that 31 years later it still worked like a charm and we cooked so many delicious meals on it. To me it represented the well-built American products, and the can-do engineering spirit I had learned to admire. To me, it was a jewel, and my house was a mansion compared to where we lived in my communist tiny apartment.

I had to remove this gem of a stove and reluctantly replaced it with a modern one when we sold the house. It broke my heart because it was part of America’s ingenuity and manufacturing pride that had made United States the best country in the world. It was a tangible luxury for me and my mom, so much better than the deprivation in our previous life under communism.

But the one habit born by the communist scarcity, is a habit I cannot shake even today. It involves a bamboo stick about two feet long. I had warned my husband who jokingly said that he would throw away my bamboo stick one day.

Without a washing machine or dryer, we did our laundry by hand. We used cheap soap and washed our clothes and sheets in a bath tub but, to make sure whites came out cleaner, we boiled them in a large pot on the stove or over a fire pit outside and stirred them with a strong stick to keep them from getting burned on the bottom. The stick had to be made from long-lasting wood.

I cannot remember who cut this bamboo stick for me, but I had it since 1978. I still use it today to push clothes inside the washing machine, to make sure that all laundry items are submerged under water thus being properly washed. Some old habits driven by communist poverty die hard.