“The young know nothing of sorrow; for the sake of writing a new verse, they force themselves to speak of it.”
At some point, foreign holidays began finding their way into our lives. Christmas, treated almost like an imported Spring Festival, was perhaps the most conspicuous of them all. In the streets, thin Santa Clauses shivered in the winter wind while crowds wandered about in noisy celebration, many of them seemingly unsure why they were there except to follow the movement of everyone else.
I once heard someone say on the radio that Christmas had been promoted mainly for the sake of business. How many Westerners, after all, celebrate the Chinese New Year? Look at it another way, though: in an age of globalization, cultural symbols with enough influence will inevitably travel across borders. Christmas is one such example. If we insist on searching for another explanation, perhaps it is that we have gradually let go of parts of our own culture.
The New Year is almost here. After New Year’s Day comes the Little New Year, then New Year’s Eve and the Spring Festival. When I was a child, my grandmother was still alive, and the Little New Year meant making offerings to the Kitchen God, cooking meat soup, and baking oil flatbreads.
The soup was always steaming hot. Sometimes it was made with carrots and mutton, sometimes with ribs, and sometimes with pork bones or scraps of pork. Ten or so members of the extended family would gather around a huge pot set over the earthen stove. Thick logs were fed into the fire, while dry sesame stalks saved from the previous year were used to get the flames started. That fierce fire seemed to contain the whole spirit of winter, glowing red beneath the clay stove.
Before long, the soup would be bubbling and filling the kitchen with fragrant steam. I would crouch beside the slop bucket while my grandmother skimmed the white foam from the surface. Then, without making much of it, she would fish out a long pork leg bone, blow on it, and hand it to me. I would receive it like a precious treasure, holding the still-scalding bone in both hands and gnawing away happily. A neighbor’s little mongrel, already drooling with anticipation, would follow close behind.
When the flatbreads were ready, everyone gathered around the table. The dishes were ordinary home cooking, generously slick with oil. My father enjoyed a drink, and after taking a few sips with his two brothers, he would become slightly tipsy and start playing finger-guessing games with them. We children ran around with greasy little hands, clutching at our mothers’ clothes, sometimes earning a mildly scolding remark.
My grandfather’s teeth were no longer strong. He ate by tearing the flatbread into pieces and soaking them in a bowl of meat soup. Once the flavor had seeped into the softened bread, he would stir it around with the few teeth he had left and slowly put it into his mouth.
Most of my memories of those years are connected with food. My grandmother had been born into a well-regarded family in Xiangfan. After marrying my grandfather, she moved to this small place, where her cooking gradually became famous throughout the village.
One of her specialties was youmo, a thick, oily flatbread from our hometown. Many people today no longer know how to make it, especially the kind baked on a round iron pan over an earthen stove. It is entirely different from the layered pastries sold nowadays. Machine-baked bread may offer a brief burst of fragrance, but the old flatbread was thick, filling, and substantial.
Making it was hard work. This was not a matter of leaving dough in a frying pan. My grandmother had to keep turning the bread again and again. She held a spatula in one hand and sometimes gripped the bread directly with the other, swinging and flipping it over the fire. My grandfather sat by the stove, adding wood to the flames. The large Chinese catalpa tree in front of the house had once been scarred by a tractor, and its fallen leaves and broken branches provided plenty of fuel.
The outside of the flatbread would emerge golden and crisp on both sides, while the soft interior was what we called the “heart.” When it was done, we would tear a piece from the edge and break through the crust. A cloud of fragrant heat would rise straight into our faces. Taking a bite while it was still hot was one of the greatest pleasures of childhood. We did not have many snacks then. A large piece of this flatbread, or a steamed bun, was enough to keep us happily chewing through the entire day.
After the Little New Year, we began looking forward to the main festival. Near the end of the twelfth lunar month, the whole family would sweep away the accumulated dust. The house was cleaned from inside to out with a broom made from sorghum stalks, a cloth fashioned from a dried loofah, and a feather duster. The courtyard was still bare earth in those days, and there would be chicken droppings and duck manure scattered about. My grandfather would lift them all away with a shovel and toss them into the ditch.
By winter, the catalpa tree had lost most of its leaves. Once the cleaning was finished, if there was still time before dark, we would carry a wicker chair into the courtyard and sit in the sun. Winter sunlight always had a particular gentleness to it, a small comfort that made the cold easier to bear.
Then New Year’s Eve would draw near. My grandmother prepared all the festival food in advance. Next came what we called “putting down the fried goods”: frying twisted dough sticks, thin sheets of dough, crisp fritters, sweet-potato balls, and mahua, the twisted pastries that rolled and hissed in the oil.
As a child, I waited impatiently for the first batch to come out. The food would still be sizzling, with hot oil sparkling on its surface. I would carry over a small bowl, spear several pieces with chopsticks, and eat them without caring how badly they burned my mouth.
At last, New Year’s Eve arrived. The three younger children would sit close to the television, gathered around a charcoal brazier while watching the Spring Festival Gala. We ate sunflower seeds and candy. My favorite were the boiled watermelon seeds seasoned with salt and spices. Before cracking them open, I would suck on them for a while, letting the flavors of star anise, cinnamon, and the other seasonings circulate in my mouth. The only problem was that they were so salty. They made us drink glass after glass of water, and sometimes left little blisters around our lips.
The adults played mahjong or cards. Relatives would occasionally drop by, sit down, and chat for a while. If someone brought a small child, we would tease them with candy and enjoy the laughter that followed. Then, almost without notice, midnight arrived.
My grandfather would take out a long string of firecrackers and light it with a cigarette. The sharp, successive explosions filled the night. It felt as if all the gloom of the past year could be scattered and burned away in that noise.
Meanwhile, my grandmother cooked dumplings and tangyuan. Once a bowl was placed in front of us, the chill of the New Year’s Eve no longer seemed so severe. Every light in the house had to be turned on. The brightly lit rooms symbolized the hope that the coming year would shine. After the New Year’s Eve meal, those who were tired went to bed. I waited for the first day of the new year, then fell into a deep sleep as well.
The festival seemed to be everywhere. Early on the first morning, children dressed in new clothes and carrying fresh little cloth pouches went from house to house in the village to offer their New Year greetings. Their bags gradually filled with candy, sunflower seeds, cigarettes, tea, peanuts, and other dried snacks.
I would get up and make the rounds too, walking from one end of the village to the other. By the time I returned, my pouch was full. I gave the cigarettes and tea to my father and kept the rest as my own small reserve.
Lunch on the first day was just as important. Every prepared dish was brought to the table, as though the abundance of the meal could give the coming year a strong beginning. It carried different wishes for different people: that children at school would succeed in their studies, and that adults at work would have bright prospects. We younger ones took turns raising our glasses to the elders. Nearby relatives sometimes visited and shared the meal, filling the house with easy conversation and cheerful disorder.
That is the rough shape of my childhood memories of the New Year. I had not thought about them for a long time. Then, on Christmas Eve, my father called me, and suddenly all those scenes returned: the smoke-darkened stove, my grandmother’s hands, the hot pork bone, the firecrackers at midnight, and the sunlight in the winter courtyard.
I have written so much about food and celebration without mentioning sorrow. But was any of that sorrow? We did not know what sorrow tasted like. We drifted through our days, spent our youth without restraint, and chased lives we did not truly want. Yet we kept asking ourselves why we were no longer as happy as we had been as children.
Real sorrow is leaving one’s hometown and traveling toward places that never quite become home.
It is leaving one’s parents, handing one’s heart to someone else, and wandering wherever life carries you.
It is leaving the village behind and finding that your soul has been dropped somewhere you cannot name.
Perhaps that is homesickness. In our twenties, we parade our loneliness through the glittering world, dressing it up in a few melancholy sentences online and feeling empty after nights of bright lights and drinking. None of it reaches as deeply as those old memories—the ones that have settled, quietly and permanently, at the bottom of the heart.