Happy New Year of the Dog, 1994 (Part 1)
As the Chinese New Year of the Ox approaches, I think of other Chinese New Year holidays I celebrated. This excerpt is taken from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.
It is Chinese New Year’s Eve day in the countryside. Bill and his wife are playing mahjong in the winter sun along with relatives they see only once a year at this time. Little four-year-old Chi-Chi watches me intently as I write English words. I can hear the rather continual frustrated and bored “baa” of the sheep as it tires of its small 2 x 4 enclosed life. The 85-year-old grandfather energetically cooks for the New Year’s Eve feast while the 81-year-old grandmother chainsmokes as she feeds fuel into the back of the quaintly beautiful and always hungry countryside stove.
This morning I watched a duck bathe in the fishpond just beside the house. It enjoyed itself as much as I do when I’m in the water. It stood on a slab of rock slanting into the water and dipped its head, throwing the water over its back as it came up. It pecked and picked and rubbed its wings over its back very much like hands. When it got out of the water, it raised its wings like arms and fanned itself dry.
Next to the bathing duck, a woman patiently washed her clothes. She pulled them across the scrubbing-board rock and kneaded them like dough. A woman squatted near her, cleaning a freshly killed chicken. She dipped its insides into the muddy water and cut open the intestines with an efficient Chinese scissors. Not very far away, another woman squatted while cleaning out a large wooden chamber pot. When the chicken cleaner left, the mother of the family I was visiting came out with a basket of glasses and washed each one thoroughly in the pond. I looked upon the peaceful countryside scene and couldn’t help wondering if my hepatitis A gammaglobulin protection would be strong enough to balance the mixture in the water. I was slightly reassured when I found out that our food and dishes were rinsed in well water.
Last night I slept like Empress Dowager CiXi in a bed beautifully crafted by the grandfather, whose hands are still slender and agile enough to do carpentry. Nights in the countryside are as cold in the winter as they are hot in the summer. In summer, I like the multitude of frogs and crickets serenading. In winter, I like the warmth under the quilts that provides an environment so totally different from just a nose-poke outside the quilts.
Bill spoke to me with such animation and love about how glad he was to share his new wife’s family with me. He was raised as a city child in a small family, and even looked down upon the countryside people. But last year he had come to be inspected by his intended’s family and found a lifestyle and family-style he had never imagined. The warmth of the large family and the peace of the countryside combined to enchant him.
I felt him relax as this usually tense boy allowed the same sense of serenity and well-being he had experienced at their home last year to calm him once again. I felt the love with which he had brought me into it. He said, with an unaccustomed gleam in his eyes, that he had nothing else to put his mind and attention to over the holidays except enjoying and relaxing, talking and eating. And so we have talked and eaten and relaxed and walked the village, feeling the pleasure of togetherness and acceptance.
It is good to see him at ease because he has also felt the heavy burden of responsibility as an already married, yet still about-to-be-married man. It is a particularly People’s Republic of China predicament — they are considered married by law as soon as they receive the unceremoniously handed-over government certificate. But the actual wedding party, which sometimes includes some kind of ritual ceremony, can be many months apart depending on several factors. This husband will only feel like a husband when he has decorated and furnished their partially-government-subsidized apartment (a recent change in China from being totally given by the work unit). They will have a countryside wedding for relatives eventually, and a city wedding dinner for friends. We of the west have only one ceremony that changes us from unmarried to married. And so, he and his bride sleep together in the city, but here in her home this year, they are not considered married and must sleep separately.
I find myself taking pictures of things that might be considered either worthy of the trashcan or a museum. It is like having traveled backward in a time machine to an era of long ago and unknown to the modern age. But yet it is only part of the time warp and confusion that China finds itself in. The educated children want a modern, wealthy life. Some of the houses in this village are of relatively rich peasants and bear a definite architectural resemblance to open, spacious Arab homes in Israeli-Arab villages where I’ve been. And yet, next to the newer cement home is the charming hand-built home of earthen floor with the warmth of wood walls.
A cousin in the family talks about negotiating for a more highly paid job in southern China which would probably sink if all the Chinese people who want to move there were allowed to. My friend, Bill, has been to Indonesia for a month through his job and has had four university years that filled him with a broader worldview. The father asks his daughter to dye his white hair black because he wants to look younger. Why? I can’t imagine because he rarely goes far from the confines of his many-walled house. And I have yet to find a mirror on any of the walls that would make him notice his “youth.”
They wash clothes and dishes in a muddy pond, use a chamber pot for a toilet, and recommend to an uncle deteriorating from a liver disease to eat several apples a day to cure it. The push and pull of China today, the race toward money, the pain of its recent past, the weight of such severe overpopulation, the dedication of its highly-motivated students, the pervasive corruption in contrast to the purity and depth of children raised by parents who were once under the spell of Mao, the delicacy of its ancient artistic culture and the crudeness and rudeness of some of its social behavior — all this is China as it enters the Dog year. I am no fortuneteller, but I predict another chaotic year for China — one of progress and regression, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares.
To be continued…..
Tags: Chinese New Year of the Dog; China in the 1990's; moder, Travel
