Paying off family debts
Kuo admits that although he originally wanted to come home to help his mother, it’s she who has been helping him out, preparing ingredients every morning and cooking adzuki beans and taros for him to serve with shaved ice.
Kuo-Li Charng Mei, who is 94, disagrees with her son: “He has been a tremendous help since he came back.” You can feel the mutual care and love in their interactions.
The old lady has an astonishing sense of purpose and business acumen. She smiles and says: “I used to talk about retiring and going on tours. But you can’t be a tourist every single day, can you?” She feels better selling frozen desserts.
In 1945, Kuo-Li opened a grocery store in her house, selling joss paper, sesame oil, and miso, as well as black tea, wax-gourd syrup, and other cold drinks.
However, her husband Kuo Cheng-hui stood surety for a friend and became enmeshed in debt, and the court seized their house at one point. Kuo-Li started selling popsicles to repay the debts and even kept a pig behind the house to supplement the family income. In 1966, to send her son to university, she had to sell the pig to scrape together the money for his tuition fees. She struggles to hold back tears as she recalls those difficult days.
The debts were gradually cleared up, and they eventually accumulated savings of their own. In 1982 Kuo-Li made a bold investment, spending hundreds of thousands of NT dollars on an ice cream machine. Her innovative mind also came up with as many as 16 different flavors of popsicles. The dazzling array of frozen desserts listed on the wall—numbering more than 30—are all her inventions.