The Charity Kitchen-1

The charity kitchen never really closes.

Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, someone unlocks the doors before sunrise. Stoves are checked. Rice cookers begin steaming. Hot water is boiled. The first patients' families arrive carrying bags of vegetables and plastic containers waiting to be filled. By noon, every stove is occupied. By dusk, every countertop has to be scrubbed clean again. Tomorrow, it all starts over.

For more than twenty years, an elderly couple has repeated this routine almost every day. The owner Wan is seventy two, and his wife Xiong just entered her seventies. They laughed when I asked whether they have ever considered retiring. "We'll keep doing it," the wife said in a heavy Nanchang accent that I barely understood, "As long as the cancer hospital doesn't take us away." People around her broke into laughter, and so did she. I did not get the joke until my mother translated it into Mandarin. The dark humor of Nanchangese! 

Age, however, has begun to catch up with them. "We're not as healthy as we used to be." The sentence hung in the air only briefly before another person walked out carrying noodles. She was wearing a hat to cover her hairless head, a byproduct of chemotherapy. She cut off the pessimism in the air, “You guys are doing good deeds. We patients are all very thankful. Heaven will bless you.” The wife giggled, “Well, if you say so. Hey, you can cook for free tomorrow.”

Apparently, running the kitchen has never been profitable. The husband began doing the arithmetic almost immediately, "On a good day, we make two or three hundred yuan (thirty to forty four dollars)." He paused. "That's not even enough to cover the electricity." Electricity costs seventy Chinese cents (0.1 dollars)  per kilowatt-hour. Gas stoves, refrigerators, lights, rice cookers, exhaust fans—everything runs all day long. "If we hired workers," he said, "we couldn't afford them." So they clean the kitchen themselves. Their son comes whenever he has time, washing the pots and pans left behind by patients' families and helping tidy the cooking stations after lunch. It is a family business that survives less through income than through labor.

The wife, though, insisted that money has never been the point, "We earned enough years ago." Their children have stable jobs. "We don't need this kitchen to make money." Nor, she added with a shrug, did she care much about reputation. "Some people praise me. Some people criticize me. I'm happy doing what I'm doing." She pointed around the room with pride, "When we started, there wasn't anything like this." Today, many hospitals have “convenience kitchens”. Others have copied the idea over the years—including the one inside Jiangxi Cancer Hospital. She smiled, "They all learned from us." There was no boastfulness in her voice. Only the satisfaction of having watched one small idea spread. 

Not every family who walks through the kitchen can afford even its modest fees. Rice costs one yuan. "Enough for two people," a patient told me. Sometimes, even that one yuan disappears. "If they're really struggling," the wife said, "we don't charge." Some families return for months.

Others come back year after year, as cancer recurs, treatments change, and life settles into another cycle of hospital admissions. "When they've already been through so much," she said, "why keep collecting money?" The husband told me stories about the people who cook here. Some arrive from Hunan and cannot get used to Jiangxi food "So they cook for themselves." Others tell him that nowhere else tastes like home. "They only get used to eating food they cook here." For families spending weeks or months inside a cancer hospital, the kitchen offers something hospitals rarely can: familiarity.

Not everyone outside the kitchen shares the same kindness. The wife remembers vendors years ago charging desperate families eighteen yuan for a single plate of eggplant. She remembers people taking advantage of patients who had traveled far from home. "There are good people everywhere," her husband said, "And there are bad people everywhere." He shrugged, "We just do our own thing."

Up till now, the couple are still working on their own. Volunteers come and go, but no one wants to take over the kitchen, not even their son. Before leaving, I asked what keeps them going. "If people with money help patients pay for treatment," the wife said, "that's the best kind of charity." Her husband nodded beside him. The kitchen cannot cure cancer. At most, it can offer an affordable stove, a bowl of rice, and a place where food tastes a little more like home. The elderly couple believe in the simple truth of humanity: no man is an island. Twenty years earlier, they helped a mother who was looking for a stove to cook for her son. Tomorrow, another family will arrive carrying vegetables, hoping that one ordinary meal might make another difficult day a little easier. 

So the couple move on, working their remaining hours to Love against the odds of Time.