"To Be Rich Is Glorious"

Below is the sign for "Dek Go" (the 'o' in Go is pronounced like 'awe'), a noodle shop in downtown Korat where I've eaten lunch almost every week for the last 4 years.

Unlike a lot of the 'mom & pop' noodle shops around Thailand, 'Dek Go' is a chain with operations in most provinces. I should mention that even though it's a chain, there is not much to distinguish it from other noodle shops - aside from its name.

But what's in a name? Dek Go is the given name of the founder whose full name is Deng Dek Go (Deng, being the Chinese family name). I've been told on more than one occasion that Deng Dek Go was a Chinese-Thai businessman, who owned a prosperous Pork Ball processing plant - so prosperous that he was able to have/ afford 12 wives, as was not uncommon for wealthy Thais in past generations. As the story goes, he kept his wives busy (and I imagine out of each others hair) by giving them each a Pork Ball noodle shop to manage and earn pocket change to cover salon expenses.

Here is a picture of some pork balls - although these may actually be fish balls. Bet you didn't know fish had balls (that's a joke from Good Morning, Vietnam, by the way).

Pork balls and multiple wives may be intriguing, but that's not why I'm telling this story. What caught my interest was this poster on the wall (i.e. chain-linked fence - you can see the shadow coming through the back) that I noticed for the first time just the other day.

On the left, is the founder of 'Dek Go', Deng Dek Go, and on the right is Deng Xiao Ping, the Chinese leader who took power after Mao passed away and is credited with returning China to world prominence. They share the same family name and a striking resemblance. I'm not sure if they're brothers, but perhaps they're cousins.

I have to admit, I was impressed. Although being a pork ball magnate and having 12 wives has made Deng Dek Go a kind of curiosity (always worth a good chuckle), being a relative of Deng Xiao Ping gave him new significance.

Since studying Chinese and living in China, my favorite figure in Chinese history has always been Deng Xiao Ping. After Mao's death, he effectively halted or reversed the radicalism and corruption of the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution, while (somehow) still saving face for Chairman Mao. How do you put a positive spin on the widespread famine caused by Mao's policies? In official doctrine, Deng established that Mao was "70% good and 30% bad" and with that it was time to move on.

He's famous for saying, "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." He applied a new pragmatism to radical Marxist/ Maoist ideology that could only come from a man who was a founding member of the Communist Party in China, joined the Long March (where only 8,000 of the initial 100,000 soldiers survived while eluding the Kuomintang army), and rose to the highest levels of the Communist Party Leadership only to be purged from politics (and sent to work as a laborer in a rural factory) three different times!, then, asked to return a final time to develop China's economic and political framework, as we know it today.

My favorite quote of his is "Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious." For anyone who has studied recent Chinese history, for him to say that and not be submitted to a "struggle session" is truly a Great Leap Forward, and I would like to think he was inspired by his Pork Ball/ Noodle Franchise-owning cousin in Thailand.