In 1982 Guo was allowed to leave China because of his musical talent, and has since become internationally renowned for playing bamboo flutes, working with Peter Gabriel and Sinead O'Connor as well as on soundtracks for films by Bernardo Bertolucci. Most of his family still live in China: one of his sisters is a TV presenter, one is a singer and another is a teacher. Guo lives in London with his English wife, Clare Farrow, with whom he wrote his memoir, Music, Food and Love.

When I was a child in the 1960s, growing up in the overcrowded hutongs, the maze of alleyways and courtyards in the north-east of Beijing, people would always greet their friends and neighbours with the words, 'Che fan le ma?' (Have you eaten?) If the answer was yes, then they would immediately ask, 'Che de she ma?' (What did you eat?) and expect a detailed, colourful description. From the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966, people were not free to express their thoughts about so many things, but with cooking, though ingredients were limited, people were still free to discuss their ideas, to share thoughts and opinions about food, to argue passionately as the Chinese love to do.

I am a musician, a Chinese bamboo-flute player and composer, not a professional cook. I now live in London, but I spent my childhood in Beijing, before, during and after the Cultural Revolution, a time in which music and cooking were the only constant forms of education I received. Music and food existed side by side in our courtyard, where the sounds of musicians practising their instruments and singing were regularly accompanied by the rhythmic chopping, dramatic sounds and irresistible smells of Chinese home cooking. When my parents first moved to the alley, they bought a wooden bed and a round wooden table, painted yellow, which we used for eating, writing, chopping vegetables, whatever we were doing: it was the centre of our family life.

My family lived in two rooms, in the corner of a courtyard which had once been part of a temple dating back to the Ming dynasty. My father was a two-stringed violin soloist from Henan Province in North China, and my mother was from Harbin in Manchuria, which had been occupied by the Japanese during the war. Very rarely did she speak about the occupation, but my favourite stories were about food and her childhood anyway. She would tell us how the peasants in the countryside outside Harbin would make jiaozi (traditional dumplings) at Chinese New Year. They would make thousands of dumplings filled with bai-cai (Chinese leaf) or suan-cai (preserved cabbage) and some with meat, enough to last right through to April. The earth was so frozen at that time of year, they couldn't plough or work the land at all, so they would line big clay pots (originally used for water) with layer upon layer of dumplings and store them outside. Frozen in this way, the dumplings kept their shape and intricate folds beautifully. Every day they would go out to collect the dumplings, which were delicious when boiled. So for those few, freezing months they just slept and ate good food. I loved that story very much.

I was given the name Yue (Leap Forward) because I was born in 1958, the year of the Great Leap Forward, an attempt by Mao to revolutionise agriculture and the steel industry, which led to chaos in the countryside and a famine that took millions of lives. Everyone in Beijing was given a book of ration tickets, to purchase 24 jin (1 jin is a little over 450g, or 1lb) of grain each month (the rations were much less for a child). This worked out as 7 jin of white rice, 7 jin of white wheat flour and 10 jin of yellow corn flour made from maize, which is low in nutrition and quite rough, but can be made into a kind of corn bread, porridge or bian, a thick pancake. The only other nutrition that was readily available was bai-cai in the winter, with tomatoes and carrots in the summer. There were ration tickets for other essential ingredients, including cooking oil, sugar, eggs and pork, but even with these my family remembers that certain foods were very difficult to find. Each adult was supposed to be able to purchase four eggs a month, half a jin of pork and a little packet of sugar. But even if you joined the long queues outside the government shops, you might only be able to get the equivalent of 60g (2oz) of meat, if any at all, and perhaps the same amount of sugar.

White wheat flour became something precious in our family and only once or twice a month my sisters would use our rations to make the light, hot steamed buns that we call man-tou. From an early age, my youngest sister Liang was given the task of carefully measuring out the quantity of white flour, using a ruler to smooth what remained. Sometimes, she remembers, when no one was looking, she would add just a little bit more. To make a dough that would rise, my sisters used what is known as the 'mother yeast': a piece of dough that has been kept out for a few days near the hot stove, so that it goes sour and changes texture. This mother yeast was often shared between neighbours in the alleys and it would make the dough rise, but it would be sour. So my sisters would dissolve a little white cube (jian, a substance from the earth, they said) in some hot water, adding the resulting yellow liquid to the dough a little at a time and kneading it constantly, until the dough no longer smelt sour and was ready to be formed into man-tou

In normal circumstances, in a family of eight as we were, each person would have two or three man-tou, to accompany a number of dishes, including meat and eggs. But at that time, we would each have only one, or sometimes even less, with a simple dish of bai-cai with a little finely chopped spring onion and soy sauce. My mother told me how I would sit on the wooden bed when I was eight or nine months old, watching my sisters knead the dough and moving my arms with excitement. However, to 'fill the gap', as we Chinese say, we would have to eat yellow corn porridge, which made me cry. Now, as a touring musician, I have to explain to Italian hosts why I can never eat polenta.

After my father's death in 1964, when my family was no longer receiving his musician's salary, we were very poor. My mother began to borrow money from her friends and school, 10 yuan at a time, until she found that she had already borrowed and spent her next month's salary: she had no money left to buy food. One day, when there were just the two of us at home, I kept telling my mother that I was hungry, but there was no grain to eat. Then I saw her going into our li wu (inner room) where my sisters slept and where we kept our special things. She opened a wooden case and got out my father's dark blue performance clothes. She took my hand, and we walked together through the alleys and streets to Wei Tuo Hang. I remember feeling her sadness but only half understanding: 'But we can get them back again, can't we, Ma? I want to have Ba-Ba's music clothes.' My mother kept saying, 'Yes, yes.' My father's blue woollen performance jacket and long traditional chang-shan were placed on the high wooden desk, and my mother sold them for four yuan and five mao qian, enough to buy some essential grain and vegetables. (There are 10 mao in one yuan, and at that time one jin of rice cost two mao.) 'Can we come back soon, Ma, to get them?' I asked. My mother said yes, although she must have known that they would be sold before we could have enough money to buy them back.

As we walked home we stopped outside a famous restaurant called Ma Kai (Horse Victory). I could see the steam coming out of the door as people were leaving and I could smell the dou-fu (fresh bean curd), meat and vegetables cooking. My mother looked at me. 'Xiao Yue, are you very hungry?' she asked. 'You know we have to buy rice and flour; but let's give ourselves a treat.' There were a lot of people in the restaurant that day, people with better salaries and fewer children, who were ordering dou-fu, beansprouts, red stewed pork and fish. 'What dishes can we have, Ma?' I wanted to know. 'We will order one hun-tun tang (little dumpling soup) to have with our rice,' my mother replied. There were six little minced pork and ginger dumplings in the bowl of soup, which had been made from a stock comprising fish and meat bones, and any other leftovers that had been boiled overnight, so it was very nutritious. We had half each and poured it on to our rice. I poured a little soy sauce on to mine, and it was so delicious. In the restaurant that day they were also serving chao san si (fried three-silk, a traditional name which refers to the preparation of the dish, in which the vegetables are cut as fine as silk). I still remember the smell: really earthy vegetables, potato, carrot, red and green pepper, quick-fried in oil with salt. But I knew it was too expensive for us to order. Still, I walked home to our courtyard feeling very happy and thinking that I had the best mother. It was the first time I ever went to a restaurant.

Sitting over breakfast each morning my sisters would ask each other, 'Jin-tian che shan mo? (What shall we eat today?).' By the beginning of 1966, the economy in China was slowly beginning to improve and we had a little more food to eat, although certain ingredients, such as sesame seed oil, sesame seed paste, pork, eggs and dou-fu, which in China is considered to be one of the best ingredients for your health, were still highly rationed. So my family's choice of dishes still depended on the supply of fresh, seasonal vegetables produced by farmers in the countryside. During the winter, these were limited to potatoes, cabbage and bai-cai, which we would heap in piles outside our door in the courtyard to stay fresh for many days in the intense cold. To add variety, we would have pickled vegetables, which were not rationed, a small amount of pork and a little of the highly rationed dried or preserved ingredients, such as dried lily flower and wood ear (a kind of tree fungus), bamboo shoots preserved in oil, dried bamboo sheets and dried mushrooms. In the summer, there were many more colourful vegetables available - tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, squashes, cauliflowers, yellow and green beansprouts, onions and green beans. You could also find jiu-cai (a thin, green and grasslike vegetable with a strong taste, like something between garlic and spring onion), jiu-huang (thin, yellow and grasslike, with a milder taste), xiao bai-cai (a green leaf vegetable), bo-cai (spinach), and of course aubergines - hundreds of them arranged in piles of deep purple on the grey earth outside the grocery shop. But we had no means of keeping these vegetables fresh in the fierce heat of our courtyard; so my sisters' choice of dishes was largely dependent on what was available each day in the government shops.

Summer cooking was therefore spontaneous and, while I liked to play games with my friends in the alleys, often I would be interrupted by the sound of my sisters Xuan and Liang, the singers in my family, calling out 'Guo Yue!' very loudly from the entrance to our courtyard, because they would be among the first to hear the shouts of 'fresh tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers!' as horse-drawn carts arrived from the countryside. My sisters were very bossy of course and, being the youngest, I would be sent running down the alley to get the vegetables from the grocery shop. This shop was called fu shi dian, meaning 'less important or secondary food shop', because it sold only the ingredients that are used to fill dumplings or to make dishes that accompany steamed rice, man-tou and noodles; not the all-important grain itself (the rice, wheat flour and maize flour), the primary food for all Chinese people. To buy this rationed grain, you had to take a white sack to a special shop called liang shi dian (starch shop), which was about 10 to 15 minutes' walk from our courtyard. Inside there was the incredible smell of flour, which was stored in a big metal container, alongside another container of white rice. Using a metal scoop, the flour was weighed on a pair of scales made out of red shiny wood, comprising a big metal plate and a piece of string with a weight attached, which measured the rationed amount of grain that you had requested - we would only fill our sacks of rice and flour maybe once every two weeks; buying vegetables was a daily activity. However, another day, I heard shouting from a courtyard near the grocery shop and I went to have a look. I saw a man and a woman being beaten by the Red Guards with leather belts. Somebody pushed me to the front of the crowd and handed me a stick. I turned and ran in the direction of the river until I saw clear water. 'Don't let him go out in the alleys so much by himself,' one of the musicians in the courtyard said to my mother. 'Buy him a little bamboo flute and I will teach him.'

In the winter my sisters used to make a lot of soup, which is traditionally eaten at the end of a Chinese meal: bai-cai soup with glass noodles (made from mung beans), their brittle transparency changing to the texture of silk in boiling water; fresh or frozen dou-fu (which we kept outside in the courtyard to freeze during the winter, thereby altering its texture), with spring onion, dried shrimps, sesame-seed oil and rock salt; spinach soup, with egg and spring onion; cucumber and tomato soup with 'egg-flowers', which is when the egg clouds on the surface of the hot soup; or the most basic soup of all, which is simply boiling water with soy sauce, sesame seed oil and spring onion. The idea is to fill any of the gaps that are still remaining after your dishes: we say guan feng, filling in the little spaces as though you are completing a wall. My mother used to tell us a story that when the city wall of Beijing was being built in the Ming dynasty, the workers used a thick, sticky rice soup to fill in the gaps between the big stones. 'This technique was even used for the Great Wall of China, Xiao Yue,' she used to say, laughing at the expression on my face.

One evening, when my sisters were at home, a note was sent to our courtyard, saying that my mother should be collected from the school where she worked. When my sisters brought my mother home, there was black ink in her silver hair and salt in her wounds. 'They're only children,' my mother kept saying. 'They don't know what they are doing.' The Red Guards had beaten my mother because she had been a language teacher in the Sichuan Province: they said she had worked for the Guomindang, against Mao's communists. I didn't understand. I put my arms around my mother and I could hear her heart beating. 'They're only children,' she kept saying.

In 1967 my mother was sent by the Red Guards to be 're-educated' in the countryside. She had to dig mud out of a river and to work in the fields. Each month she was allowed to come home for one night. She stayed in the countryside for more than two years.

Soon afterwards, my second sister Xuan was sent to the Shaanxi Province in north China - deep countryside, where she worked in the fields growing wheat and maize. My youngest sister Liang, who had always cooked for the family, even when she had to stand on a stool to reach the stove, was sent to the countryside beyond Beijing, where the fields smelt of manure and the farmers grew the most fragrant rice in China. My third sister Yan, with the few English words that my mother had taught her, went into the foreign-language department of the army and was stationed in a town outside Beijing. Only my first sister Kai remained in the courtyard, as a teacher in the same primary school as her future husband Liu Qing Puo. Every day they had to attend revolutionary meetings in the school; at the centre of these was the Red Guards' da zi bao (big character report), in which criticisms were made of people in the school. With his good revolutionary background and communist beliefs, Liu Qing Puo, whom I always respectfully called 'Ge' (older brother), protected my first sister, and began to look after the interests of our whole family.

Each morning, Kai would leave a little money on the table, usually one or two mao, for me to buy fresh ingredients for our evening meal. I would stand in the queue of people outside the grocery shop, looking at the vegetable colours and shapes on the earth, listening to the conversations and watching the faces around me. The grocery shop was a place for people to meet and talk, freely and with lighter hearts, about food. Men and women would discuss the colour of the aubergines, which they chose with as much care as if they were studying a blue-and-white Ming porcelain bowl; they would argue about how fresh the green beans or cucumbers were that day and whether to make aubergine boxes or save their cooking oil and instead make noodles with their pork for lunch, and a dish of aubergine mud with steamed rice for the evening. I remember enjoying the atmosphere, the open discussions and laughter. People seemed to let go of their tensions in the grocery shop; their faces became animated again; they looked happy. Sometimes I would go up to the big wooden counter to buy some pork with yi mao in my hand. I was always mesmerised by the huge meat chopper; its blade was so sharp it would slice with infinite ease. But I would feel my face going red as I asked for a very small piece of pork, so thin that it was difficult to cut. This slice of meat was for the most part fat, with just a small amount of lean pork called shu rou. I would take the brown paper parcel from the man's hand and turn away quickly, my pride stinging. But as soon as I had crossed the high wooden step at the entrance to the shop, my embarrassment would be forgotten and I would bounce the parcel up and down in my hand as I walked happily back to my courtyard, anticipating the imagined delights of pork with noodles, ginger and sesame-seed oil, or dumplings filled with pork and bai-cai, or diced pork with carrot and potato, cooked in garlic, sugar and dark soy sauce.

In the summer of my second year at middle school, my family built a little brick kitchen against the wall of our courtyard, for summer cooking, where I also practised my flute all year round. A suona (wind instrument) player moved into our courtyard at this time and his own brick kitchen was just a few steps from ours. He was a talented cook and I began to compete with him, to make the most delicious food in our courtyard. In the company of the suona player, I began to learn the principles of Chinese home cooking, to understand what I had previously felt instinctively, about the techniques regarding chopping, combining colours and textures, absorbing flavours, making parcels of tastes, cooking in a variety of ways. I found the whole process fascinating, the ideas somehow interwoven with my music. But whereas the tunes I played on my bamboo flute were part of the Revolution, with my cooking I felt completely free, able to experiment as much as I liked, to move from tradition to invention, alone in my kitchen.

When I was 15 years old I entered the gao zhong (high middle school) at a time when government policy had just changed regarding education: we were not invited to think for ourselves, or allowed to argue a personal opinion. Our ideas and thoughts had to be those that we were given. At the weekends, however, we were free from political studies and, during the winter, on bright sunny days, we would go ice skating in the Summer Palace, a group of about 12 boys, leaving the alleys early in the morning on our bicycles and riding out of the city, through the countryside. We all wore exactly the same clothes: a warm, padded dark-blue cotton jacket and trousers, fur hat with ear flaps and blue cotton padded shoes with laces. We each carried a metal flask of cold water from the courtyard taps, a pair of ice skates, which I used to borrow from friends of friends, and an army-green cotton bag, containing an aluminium box. Inside these identical boxes we took with us the most delicious food: huo-shao, the toasted bun, similar to man-tou. You could buy these cheaply from street stalls, or make your own by toasting circles of dough in a pan with some peanut oil, building up layers with peanut butter, rough rock salt and sesame seeds on the very top. We then cut each one in half and put a piece of dark stewed pork, cooked with soy sauce, ginger and star anise, inside.

Each year we school children were sent to work in the countryside. The village we worked in was very poor, and surrounded by big fields. Mao wanted us to understand where our food came from. In the summer it was incredibly hot, maybe 36°C or 37°C, so we would start work at five o'clock in the morning, when the air was still wet. Dressed in white cotton vests and blue trousers, with straw hats on our heads which I loved, we each carried a scythe to cut the wheat by hand. Lunchtime in the wheat fields was always at midday, when the burning sun was at its fiercest. We would sit at the top of the field wearing our straw hats and eating steamed rice or man-tou with red stewed pork and bai-cai, cooked with ginger and star anise. There was a group of 10 students and two teachers from our school who were in charge of cooking for us, bringing our food, bowls and chopsticks into the fields, boiling our water and providing medical assistance if necessary. There were loudspeakers in the village square and every so often revolutionary music or a political speech would fill our ears as we worked. But we didn't think about it: the Revolution was just always there.

In 1976, one week before my 18th birthday, Mao Zedong died. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1977, life in China slowly began to change: we were given the chance to be close to girls in public for the first time at dances, and afterwards we would make appointments to see them in the gardens of the Summer Palace, at restaurants, drinking jasmine tea and eating steamed rice with hong shao dou-fu (red stewed bean curd). By 1981 it was even possible for me to get permission to leave so that I could study music at the Guildhall in London and I received a passport, which was worth more than gold to me. I wanted to be free.

My last day in Beijing, in May 1982, was celebrated with a great feast of jiaozi: hundreds of dumplings made by my family and friends. Twenty people sat on the steps inside my courtyard and on wooden stools, around the little worn-out table (xiao zhuo) that my father had made when I was small. My sisters were rolling the dough into circles, while my friends and I filled these circles with a mixture of minced pork, chopped xi hu-lu (squash), egg and ginger, folding and sealing each dumpling with unthinking dexterity, while we talked and talked for hours. Since then I have experienced freedom, and I value that. But still, there is a part of me that has remained in the hutongs, amid the colours, smells, rhythms and sounds of my childhood world. And it is that part that comes alive again, each time I begin to prepare the ingredients and cook in my London kitchen, or practise my long notes and traditional melodies on the bamboo flutes. My mother died in 1994. When I saw her, finally free, she looked so beautiful and calm. My sisters buried her ashes as she had wanted, in the earth beneath some green bamboo, which now bends in the wind, making its own natural music. Although it is now more than 20 years since the courtyard feast that marked the end of my childhood, the traditions that I brought with me from China, the music and cooking that I learned in my courtyard home, have kept my childhood vivid, in both my imagination and senses.

Dumplings (Jiaozi)

makes 100

670g plain flour
330ml cold water
1 bai-cai (Chinese leaf, also called pak choi), very finely chopped, sprinkled with salt, left for 30 mins then squeezed dry
225g extra-lean minced pork, organic or free range
10-12 tiger prawns, peeled and finely chopped
4 spring onions, using both the white and green parts, very finely chopped
15g ginger, peeled and very finely chopped
sunflower oil
2 eggs, beaten
soy sauce
Chinese cooking rice wine
sea salt
sesame oil

Suan zhI (garlic sauce)

5 cloves garlic
Chinese dark rice vinegar
sesame seed oil

Put the flour in a large bowl and drizzle water onto it, mixing the flour. Then use your hands to form a large ball. Leave to rest for 30 mins. For the stuffing add the bai-cai to the pork, prawns, spring onion and ginger. Heat 2 1⁄2 tbs of oil in a wok and when the oil is smoking add the eggs, moving briskly until they are golden and crispy. Add to the pork mixture with 2 tbs of soy sauce, 7 tbs of sunflower oil, 3⁄4 tbs of rice wine, three pinches of salt and a drizzle of sesame oil.

To make the skins take a handful of dough, make it into a sausage 2.5 cm in diameter and cut into pieces 2.5 cm long. Form each piece into a ball, then flatten, making a disc about 3.5 cm in diameter. Then roll them (all 100) into circular dumpling skins about 7-8 cm in diameter (you can buy these if you must). Put 1 1⁄2 tsp of stuffing mix into the centre of each skin and press the edges together to form a half moon shape with the middle pushed together and the ends open. Seal the corners by creating little concertina-like folds as you press the edges together: it is crucial they don't open during the cooking process.

To make suan zhi chop the garlic and add to the dark rice vinegar with a drizzle of sesame oil. I also add a tsp of brown sugar, 1 tbs of soy sauce and 1⁄2 tsp of chilli oil.

To cook the dumplings boil a pan of water and carefully add 20 at a time - they will sink. Using a spoon stir the water (not the dumplings) to create a whirlpool which will encourage the dumplings to float. When they are floating put the lid on and let them cook for 2 minutes. When the water is really boiling add a little cold water and bring it back to the boil. Do this twice more then add a final drop of water. Remove the dumplings with a slotted spoon. Eat with the sauce - pick up your dumplings with chopsticks and bite off the end to let out the steam.

· To order a copy of Music Food and Love (Portrait Books, £14.99) for £13.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885