Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [10]
“Dia, how can the dead people hear us if they are dead?” I asked.
“They know,” he replied with his usual brevity.
Just before we went home for our special dinner, we asked each of our ancestors to follow us there for the New Year’s holiday. Our dia and our fourth uncle poured out the bottles of water in front of each grave. On the way back we made sure our lanterns were brightly lit, so our ancestors’ spirits could see clearly the road ahead. We lit the firecrackers to wake up the ancestors. “Xing gan wo men hui ia. Lu bu ping. Man man zou.” Our dia and our uncle would ask our ancestors to walk slowly and not trip on the uneven road. They talked to our ancestors as though they were still alive. My brothers and I thought this was funny but we had to take this occasion very seriously. Our ancestors’ spirits lived on because they had been kind people before they died. They had the power to help us and influence our fate.
The meal that night was Niang’s favorite to cook, because this was the only time she had enough good ingredients. Cold dishes came first: marinated jellyfish with soy sauce and sesame oil; seaweed jelly with smashed up garlic and soy sauce; salty peanuts and pigtrotter jelly. Then hot dishes: fried whole flounder, and a delicious egg dish with green chives and rice noodles. There would have been at least ten eggs in it! It just melted in my mouth. There were vegetable dishes too, and they all had small pieces of meat in them. The aroma of all this delicious food, mixed with the Chinese rice wine, the incense and the pipe smoke, was unforgettable. And it only occurred once a year, on that special Chinese New Year’s Eve.
Everything was special and magical. Everyone chatted enthusiastically, but the one who talked the most that night was our dia. Happiness filled everyone’s hearts. We would forget hardship. We felt privileged. There were always too many dishes to fit on the wooden tray. How much could we eat in one night?
The meal always ended with steaming pork-and-cabbage dumplings. They looked precious and smelled exquisite! I always saved plenty of room for them. They truly were a labor of love. Our niang would put a one fen coin into one dumpling and whoever found it was destined to have luck throughout the year. One year nobody found that fen, even though our niang swore she’d put it in. Did someone eat it without even noticing? We swallowed those dumplings as if we were wolves.
The very first bowl of dumplings was lucky food, for the gods of the kitchen, of harvest, prosperity, long life, and happiness. The second bowl of dumplings was for our ancestors. Before our niang placed each of these bowls at the center of the table, with incense on either side, she would pour some broth onto the ground in four directions. “Gods, our kind gods,” she would murmur, “please eat our humble food. We are blessed by your generosity.” The square table was always placed in the middle of the room. Before Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution, we would have displayed a family tree and a picture of the god of fortune on the northern wall above the table. But this tradition was now considered a threat to communist beliefs. Any family doing this would be regarded as counterrevolutionary, for which there were heavy penalties, including jail.
Nobody was to touch those dumplings my niang left at the center of the table … yet they always mysteriously disappeared overnight. “The gods and our ancestors have eaten them,” our niang would say.
After the meal we would go from house to house to pay our respects and wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year. Every gate in the village was wide open. Nobody was supposed to sleep. We would play tricks on our friends if we caught any of them sleeping. After midnight, firecrackers could be heard everywhere. Thousands of small red and white pieces of firecracker paper splattered the streets.
On New Year’s Day