By KEN DAJI

Food & Drink Correspondent

SHANGHAI (China Daily Show) – What started off as just another day shilling stodgy protein in a batter coating ended dramatically for chef Lao Bing last week, after one lucky customer made a unique discovery in his bag of chicken product — a precious nugget bearing a passable resemblance to Communist Party hero Lei Feng.

Lei Feng is a semi-mythical icon in China, a Model Worker who inspired dozens in his lifetime, despite dying tragically young, after a truck backed into a telephone pole, toppling onto 22-year-old Lei’s head.

The Lei-looking nugget, meanwhile, consists of mechanically separated poultry, machine-moulded, and cooked in a fryer.

Experts say the similarities are uncanny.

“Both entities endured an existence of miserable servitude, before suffering a premature death, to be reformed afterward into a barely recognizable, yet easily digestible morsel,” says ageing historian and noted Sinologist Sir William Buckfast.

March 5 marks the anniversary of Learn From Lei Feng Day, an occasion usually celebrated nationwide with dutiful acts of bored obligation.

This year, however, the miraculous deep-fried find has catapulted Comrade Lei back into the public eye — and also started a vicious legal battle between Chef Bing and his unnamed customer, who quickly sold the precious find for an astonishing 540 million yuan ($8.8 million).

Coal entrepreneur — and latter-day art collector— Wang Ma is now the nugget’s new owner, following an intense sequence of frantic, last-minute bids against himself at the hotly anticipated Poly Group auction. Witnesses say the hammer was about to fall on Wang’s $4-million bid before the 59-year-old businessman insisted on more than doubling his own offer to $8.8 million, a figure considered auspicious in China.

“As undisputed owner of a multi-million-dollar piece of Communist Party poultry history, I am possibly the luckiest man in the world,” a jubilant Wang told reporters.

The small piece of finely ground white-meat slurry, coated in a generic spiced batter, is due to form the centerpiece of a proposed Lei Feng Memorial Museum about the orphaned soldier, a project which Jiang is personally bankrolling.

Visitors to the new museum, expected to open in March, will be able to listen to audiobooks of Lei’s collected works — which include novels, two prose poems, and an uncompleted three-act red-rock opera — and view numerous waxwork tableaux illustrating the martyr’s many amusing adventures.

These include an early visit to a plastics factory, said to have inspired the teenage Lei to “grasp the rubber with both hands,” and a scene depicting a night out at a pig farm.

An animatronic vignette re-enacting the full sequence of Lei’s legendary death — in which a flatbed vehicle backs into a pole that flattens Lei’s head midway through a Chairman Mao recitation, before the driver flees — will be viewable as soon as the technology can be downloaded from the servers of a British waxworks company.

Meanwhile, Chef Bing says his nugget business is now booming, despite the ongoing legal wrangle over ownership of his foodstuffs. “My lawyers will argue that, until they enter customer’s digestive tract, all Chef Bing signature dishes technically still belong to me,” the fry cook insisted yesterday.

While few of his customers agree, when China Daily Show visited Bing’s van this morning, many were still excitedly checking their takeaways to see if any resembled any other local celebrities

One seemed convinced that a deep-fried sausage was the spitting image of former premier and Beijing massacre enthusiast Li Peng. Meanwhile, numerous steamed buns of Binf’s were being flatteringly compared to ex-President Jiang Zemin.

Bing says the secret to his food’s flavor is using a traditionally artificial, ammonia-based recipe that’s no longer legally permitted in the US.

The nugget’s newfound fame is sure to boost the government’s ongoing ‘Learning from Lei Feng’ campaign, though, which begins soon Indeed, several pedestrians whom China Daily Show spoke to agreed that the upcoming campaign has already inspired them.

“I have learned to enjoy life while I still can, rather than wasting it serving some nebulous higher cause or meeting society’s expectations,” enthused Linda Li, a post-graduate student who has decided to abandon her intensive course of piano lessons to instead go backpacking around Inner Siberia. “Frankly, that’s good advice for anyone in China.”

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