I have just come back from the Chinese countryside, where I spent two weeks with various friends during the Spring Festival.
The weather here has been pretty cold, but the people couldn't be warmer.
First, I visited my friend Li Yihong's home and celebrated the new year with his family, including uncles, aunts, and cousins. I travelled an hour and a half by train, and then another two hours by car to get to his village, but it was well worth it to witness all of the traditions that are still rife there. Li Yihong practices Chinese calligraphy, so he wrote the 对联 (auspicious banners) for his house and also for some neighbors to hang around their doors. I was awakened by the noise of firecrackers around 6am every morning, and the bangs and pops of these auspicious firecrackers continued sporadically throughout the day. I also got to watch the adults pay their respects to the various gods of their village, and on the 3rd day after the new year, the men of each household brought a chicken and a kettle of homemade rice wine to the village entrance to make an offering to the special god at their village temple. People in the village often visit each other's houses to chat (串门) or visit relatives and stay for a meal (走亲戚). I have never eaten so many watermelon and sunflower seeds or drunk so much rice wine (水酒 is warmed up in tea kettles) in my life! One morning, I think I had 5 or 6 bowls of rice wine. During a reunion with Li Yihong's middle school friends, I also got to visit the village of Sanliao, which is "China's premier feng shui culture village" (中国第一风水文化村子)。
Afterwards, Li Yihong and I spent a few days at another friend's house. Like Li Yihong, He Maohua's family are also 客家人 (Hakka), so Li Yihong could communicate with them in their native dialect, but I could only speak Mandarin (普通话) with them. We got to meet lots of Xiao He's middle school and high school friends. I was also treated to a local specialty that is served in copious amounts to guests: 泪茶 or 盐茶 (salty tea). It is a savory drink often made without tea leaves, and resembles soup more than it does tea. Some families make it with crushed sesame and various other indeterminable ingredients. The leicha served at one household was made with bits of pork and cilantro, and had to be eaten with chopsticks. People are extremely hospitable--sometimes overly so. Bowls of leicha are generously ladled out for guests, and they refill your bowl almost as soon as you have taken one drink (and the same with 水酒 or beer), so you can never finish your bowl, or you have to vigorously and politely refuse the refills. People have been known to resort to concealing their bowls underneath the table to avoid refills. When I left Xiao He's house, his family entreated me to stay a few more days.
My last stop before returning to Ji'an was my friend Minnie Sun's house. She also lives quite far from the city roads, and we had to walk for about 45 minutes (after a 40-minute bus ride from the nearest town) to get to her house. You know you are in the country when you wake up to the sound of roosters crowing at sunrise each morning. One thing that definitely impressed me was that all of the Chinese countryside villages that I visited had electricity and running water or easy access to a hand-pumped well. Minnie's cousin got married yesterday morning, so she and I had quite a busy morning filming the wedding festivities in the rain. Her village is quite unique in that everyone who lives there shares the last name Sun (孙), and they are all descendants of Sun Quan (of the Three Kingdoms period). All of the girls must marry outside of the village, and all of the wives of the village are married in from outside the village. No males can marry into the village, so the male Sun lineage is kept pure, and all births are carefully documented in the village records.
I just got back to Ji'an this afternoon. All of the trains and buses are completely packed with people during this time of year (春运) because all of the workers return home to celebrate the spring festival with their families, and then return to their faraway workplaces to resume work. On the bus from Minnie's village to town today, there were at least 45 people squeezed onto a bus with about 25 seats. I had to lean against someone's suitcase and hold on to the overhead handlebars to keep from falling over, and an old man sat on my lap because there was nowhere else to sit.
After all of that excitement, I am happy to be back at my apartment at Jinggangshan University in Ji'an to spend some quality time with the cat, enjoy a few days of peace and quiet, and catch up on some work. There's lots more to say about my first real Chinese New Year experience--my first time on a motorcycle, what Chinese peasants think about the US, the preservation of traditional (funeral, wedding, birth, etc.) customs and rites in Chinese villages, and the "New Socialist Countryside" in China, among other things--but I'll elaborate later and leave it at this for now.
