Home tastes of memories

Updated: 2015-03-11 15:40

[Photo provided by 黄小姐]

By 黄小姐

I feel grateful that I am lucky to have a hometown. It is on this peaceful land that my mild temperament and kind personality was nurtured and shaped. It is a small village surrounded by mountains; one corner is for households, the other for farmlands and there is only one road going through to the town. My childhood was happy in this dreamland. Our villagers were kind and honest, yet not conservative and narrow minded.

With my love and gratitude to my hometown, here I bring back those Spring Festival memories for recording or for sharing.

Spring festival is the grandest one that I keep counting down the days when it is around the corner. My mother would laugh and say, “What a silly girl”. While actually, my parents were more eager to welcome this day. It seems that there is a detailed schedule for preparation to keep things on track.

Below is our journal.

1. The fifth day before is to do New Year’s shopping. To get permission to go along, my brother and I always actively behaved well. Our purchases included candies, biscuits and nuts, various decorations, new clothes and shoes as well as gifts.

2. The fourth day before is to buy fish from the pond site and butcher a pig, as it takes 3 days to make good smoked fish and pork. And it seems that a smoked dish is bound to spring festival because if the meat is smoked at another time, it doesn’t taste so delicious.

3.The third day before is for making tofu using a stone mill, firewood, gypsum, and natural water streaming down from the mountain. And when making tofu, we kids will joyfully playing around, wonder how beans can form into tofu, and wait for the tofu jelly. And we naughtily go from door to door. When seeing our greedy eyes, our neighbors would say, “It will be done very soon” with charming smiles.

4. The second day before, my mother would finish the food preparation, slice the meat, make niangao (a New Year dessert made of glutinous rice flour), because niangao means "higher and higher year after year” in Chinese, and make mildewed tofu and fried tofu and so on.

5. Then comes New Year’s Eve, the day to have the family reunion dinner. We never have dumplings on this occasion, because this dinner is to show the harvest of this year. We grow grain instead of wheat, and make good wishes for next year. So our own should be on the menu, together with some other dishes with auspicious meaning, like fish symbolizing abundance every year. (年年有余). We were taught not to eat the head and tail, which means we should never do things by halves (有头有尾). And before lifting chopsticks, we need first to offer sacrifice to the kitchen god. Food is heaven as Chinese people long believed. When I was asleep in the evening, my parents each would place gift money under my pillow with the wish to be safe all year around.

On the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, my parents would get up very early to finish decorating before our relatives came. They would paste Spring Festival couplets on the door panels, the Chinese character "福fu" (mean blessing or happiness) on the doors, normally or upside down, because in Chinese the reversed fu is pronounced like "fu comes". And I enjoy hanging big red lanterns. There are some taboos: we cannot do sweeping, wash hair, take a bath, and use bad words, as these were all seen to bring misfortune in the year ahead.

And during the Spring Festival, there is a grand activity, dragon dancing from door to door, three big different family name groups competing to get the dragon dance right, and the evaluation criteria included whether there was enough people to complete it - 19 strong men to dance the dragon, one to hold the flag, two for drum beating, and dozens to stand by, whether united, whether able to afford it, etc. And the decision is made by a village committee.

In recent years, our living standards rose rapidly, while some undesirable practices came along. The way of presenting gifts, for example. People feel ashamed if the gift seems to be very cheap, and people may gossip around, which can even make some families notorious. And actually, it is rude if the receiving party does not return it back.

Those joyful memories are from about 15 years ago. And I have to admit that I love all facets of my hometown, even the bad. There must be some culture behind it, and my fear is this culture may fade away with the aging of the elders, as we young people are all seeking development outside and can only go back once a year during Spring Festival.