Recollections of Chinese New Year

Updated: 2015-03-11 16:23

[Photo/People.cn]

By Li Dehuai

I never think of Chinese New Year but I think of how I ate 23 pieces ( 3 cubic cm each piece ) of pork fat braised in brown sauce at a family reunion dinner on the eve of Chinese New Year. Believe it or not, I was 12 then when I did it. Some people would ask ‘Why did you eat so much?’ and “Didn’t you know the pork was high in cholesterol?” I have to admit that they are right from today’s angle.

To make a long story short, it happened during our three-year difficult period (from 1959 to 1961) when our national economy suffered serious setbacks due to natural and man-made calamities. People my age would remember we didn’t have enough to eat then, much less meat to eat. My Mum had just entered the city from the country then and was known to my Dad’s workmates for raising pigs, so several workmates proposed jointly breeding a pig with my Mum looking after the pig every day and the workmates seeing about buying the pig’s fodder. At the end of that year, the pig was butchered. Mum got a chunk of pork , 2 kg or so. Seeing that we hadn’t eaten meat for quite some time, Mum braised all the pork with brown sauce so as to let us eat our fill on the eve of Chinese New Year. So there I was, gorging myself on it .

Gone are the days when we didn’t have enough to eat. Now we always alert ourselves not to eat more than enough and to eat wholesome food every day, especially during Chinese New Year. We should attribute all the changes to the reform and the open policy and our government that puts bettering people’s lives before everything.