No one wanted to wake up
early this morning. And though I threw
open the shades at six after my shower to let some gentle morning light in, all
I got was the glare of the hotel parking lot lights, and darkness. Outside a wet, salty fog had descended on the
land for the second day of this horse year.
Someone had the streetlights off at this hour. We wiped the inside of the window and the
out, we tried brights and defrosters, but the view was never more than a few
feet. Slowly we crawled up along past
darkened towers, local government offices, to the rendez vous with my brothers in law and their families.
The dull thud of fireworks, everywhere at once, off in the
distance this morning. Wetness now, such an overdue blessing. Without the rain, some rain, 青黄不接[1] The
crusty, dusty polluted ground is bathed finally and the colors change. I don’t know if the same mist settled across
Beijing to the north west. I hope
so. Everything outside is now a striking
ochre mud. There are man-made reds and
blues on cars and on signs but they can only slightly off set the dominant
yellow. It is everywhere. Everything
seems made from it.
Arriving at the village we are greeted by my wife’s aunt and
various extended family. Come
inside. “A Happy New Year” “Wishing you well.” But then, immediately the men begin fixing to
go to the grave site. They rise and
go. I follow. Into my brother’s Audi with my two brother in
laws. Sitting beside me enough fireworks
to destroy a small bridge. My older
brother lights a cigarette. Perhaps you
could put that out.
The ancestral grave has been moved to make way for a road a
few years back, it is explained. We used
to be able to walk to the site. Now we
must drive. And we go for a few
kilometers off the main road out to a dirt road. It’s a one-way dirt path. We are late.
Traffic is piling out. So
everyone pulls over and gets out to let the traffic out. Everyone seems to know one another. Tractors pull wagons and three wheeled trucks
struggle with the mud hills. But no one
gets frustrated. People jump out and
offer to help. And after a 10-minute wait, our line gets to move forward.
We park out next to what I’m told is an enormous bauxite to
aluminum factory. This part of Shandong
have overbuilt three or four such plants to make them the largest producers for
aluminum smelting in the world, and they struggle to import raw bauxite from
Indonesia and purer still from the Cameroon if they can get it. Complete surprise, my ladies have decided to
come out too. They will be the only
women at this ceremony. I’d thought not
to rock the boat this year, but two points for my wife who’s braved the offence
of tradition and brought them along. One
year, my wife warned that her presence at the ceremony would be cited if any
inauspicious things happened during the year.
Men send the ancestors home.
I trod over behind an in law with a box or two of explosives
and am directed to the family mounds. Two
of the nearest mounds are people who I knew when they walked the earth, my father
in law and his younger brother. Behind
them, near the family tombstone is the altar of their father and the ancestral
remains. The nephews and cousins and
uncles and assortment of men are streaming over with boxes and crates of
explosives.
I try to explain to my girls what I know of the ceremony and
the significance. We are symbolically
scaring away evil spirits so the ancestors who were welcomed to join the family
on New Year’s eve, can now safely return to the netherworld. First paper money is burned and food is
offered and fires now smolder over the various mounds. Boxes of fireworks that shoot straight up and
explode with a thud a pinwheel of light are set up to go thirty yards in either
direction. My little girl is scared and
I try to comfort her, but I also want to be honest. It’s gonna get a lot louder, soon.
Men now stand over the actual graves holding a stick
extending it out over the tomb and now hundreds of commanding explosions
begin. The noise is remarkable, and
completely overwhelming. Keep your wits
about you. There are piles of fireworks
everywhere and fires burning all about. One
cousin, “Old Number Six” holds the stick with so much gunpowder out over the
grave and now, suddenly seems to have been hurt. An abrasion on his face. But they continue.
To my side an enormous crate is unpacked and slowly a long
rope bridge worth of a thousand or more index finger sized explosives in red,
is rolled out, over the broad grave area culminating in the main tomb. My brother in law has a stick with a burning
ember but struggles to light the fuse.
Again he tries. Now his cousin
lifts the near end of this dynamite weaving and throws it on to a smoldering
fire. Well, I think, that’ll do it. And it does.
Capstone, crescendo, surreal explosions now. They knew and saved the most uproarious bit for
the end. There is an odd rhythm to the banging
and smacking, picking up and slowing down and then, perhaps a knot where all at
once some fifty or more combine to explode.
Then it ceases and everywhere is red paper and fumes and the explosions
from further off return into earshot.
Heading back to the car my cousin breaks off to a different
site a good two hundred meters from the main grave area and repeats the
process. At first I figure he had extras
he just wanted to set off for fun.
No. My wife explains. He lost a wife to brain cancer two years ago. She was not his wife long enough to merit
being buried with the main, family line.
She has her own site that he is now paying homage to. He has been remarried and is one of the few
people his age now with two children.
Back home, as bragged about, the most remarkable jiaozi or dumplings in the world. Dozens spinning in the enormous big pot with
the straw covering. The skin made from wheat grown locally. The xianr
juicy and fresh. To relieve yourself you head to the small adjoining daub and
wattle construction, that holds the outhouse and the store room for coal. I summon my daughters who reluctantly come
and I try to show them what daub and wattle is in the main house and how there
is real straw in the roof and that the house is heated with coal, that warms
the kang bed in the other room that
is otherwise always chilly. And I ask
them to imagine for a minute what it was like, for their mother to grow up
here, as she did.
Debates, barely intelligible in thick local dialect. Who to visit, what to bring, and people head
out and people come back and food is laid out and nobody eats it though I and
others are encouraged to eat, eat. We
eat some. Then we are told we’re
going. We’re going to visit my mother in
law’s family now, in the adjoining village, Liu Pu. Back in our car there is a disc playing the
classic OKeh Ellington numbers from 1927 to 1930. http://www.amazon.com/Okeh-Ellington-Duke/dp/B00000274L We have “The Mooche” on now and it sounds
wonderfully appropriate, creeping, lurching along through this time warp,
slowly, moving along the thick muddy roads, up and down past all this remarkable
yellow, yellow soil.
[1] qīnghuángbùjiē: lit. yellow does not
reach green (idiom); the yellow autumn crop does not last until the green
spring crop / temporary deficit in manpower or resources / unable to make ends
meet
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