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NewsvineMy landlady Xia Ayi has been bellowing up to me from the second floor for days now to go out to the markets and find a fuzi to hang on my door for good luck. Considering the quantity of explosives she has stored for this week, it would only be foolish to disobey. It’s the second week of the Year of the Rat; the Chinese Spring Festival kicked off over a week ago and still I can see through my window children and gleeful old men lighting bundles of red fireworks that send popping gunshots through the streets.
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I’ve been living in Yangshuo, China, a village about ten hours south of Shanghai by train and about ten hours north of Hanoi, Vietnam, for two weeks now and I plan on staying a few months. Until this year my closest interactions with the massive East Asian nation, the fourth largest sovereign territory in the world, involved one quarter of Chinese language instruction, dim sum in San Francisco with my Chinese-American friends and skimming the ubiquitous Economist and Times “the Asian tigers are rising again” titles printed in fear-inducing red ink that clutter newsstands these days. With a strong sense that my knowledge was insufficient, I decided to take a year off from university to study Mandarin Chinese and try and get to know firsthand this country that is changing the world.
Taking Xia Ayi’s demands seriously lest she consider me a Grinch of a tenant lacking holiday cheer, I am heading out to find a good fuzi, a Chinese character that means wealth, happiness and good luck that people hang on their doors as decoration for the New Year. This morning, my neighbors are creating a particularly noisy spectacle. They keep chickens in a little coop in the stairwell, and they are now selecting the choicest hens to prepare for tonight’s supper. Two of the chosen ones are lying in a heap of feathers and scaly feet on an edition of the daily newspaper, obstructing my path down to the road. The old woman and her husband kindly nudge the fallen poultry to the side and I wish them a happy new year.
Yangshuo is still small enough that I have only been out for about an hour and I’ve run into all of my new friends here. Officially, Yangshuo has a population of about 300,000, but this includes all of the surrounding outskirts and county villages. So in town, people’s faces get to be pretty familiar. Songs have been written and scrolls painted for this town for centuries in China. It has long been a home of renowned poets and is famous for the scenery known as shanshui, mountains and water, which it amply provides.
On the corner of Furong road where I buy fruit by the jin, or standard half-kilo weight, I am picking up a basket of qingzao, a small green fruit that tastes like an apple but has the core and size of a nectarine, when I bump into Tian Yang out walking with a little boy just old enough to attempt mastery of bipedalism. The English translation of Tian Yang’s name is “Sunny Day,” or, “Sunny Weather.” Tian Yang works in the hostel I stayed at for the first few nights in Yangshuo. She grew up farming wheat in Anhui province but moved here to Guangxi province to find higher paying work. She tells me she wanted to go home for the Spring Festival, but Anhui is buried under snow and the trains are all blocked right now. All over southern China for the past two weeks people traveling home for the New Year have been interrupted by pernicious weather, blizzards blocking train tracks and forcing a change of plans.
The Spring Festival in China is a time when families travel long distances to their hometowns to be together and celebrate the New Year. Universities close, people get time off of work and the trains are packed with travelers laden with gifts of fruit and cakes to bring home. People often pass these days strolling through town, buying vegetables and candies and just enjoying window shopping. This morning the sun has risen bright and high and for the first time in weeks, it is warm. It seems the whole town has stirred into life. Strolling couples are out walking with their children, whose hair is all freshly washed and tied up into ponytails festooned with bright flower bobbles. Mothers are buying last-minute supplies for dinner, and vendors are joyfully selling their wares — a relaxed holiday happiness is in the air. Tian Yang smiles as we part ways. She’s not too upset about not making it home for the holidays; she tells me she celebrated New Year’s Eve by making jiaozi, a pork- and vegetable-stuffed dumpling.
I know the place to buy myself a shiny new fuzi — on Pantao road just after the noodle shops, there is a massive market the size of a football field packed with fruits, vegetables, candies, nuts, rice, liquors, meats, fish and spices all carted in by peddlers from the villages up the river. Determined not to send my neighborhood reputation into Grinchhood, I am directing my jocund wandering south toward the market.
It is a madhouse. The market’s dirt aisles have been churned up into mud sluices run through with rivulets of runoff from yesterday’s rain dripping through the canvas roof. Long wooden tables stretch back into interminable aisles, sagging under the cornucopia of carrots, radishes, leeks, ginger, sugar cane, bamboo, turnips, hot peppers, potatoes, lychees, garlic and more that I am only beginning to be able to identify by name. Sacks of every variety of rice and spices and plastic bags of rice wine and salt fill up the dry spots of earth that are left, while chestnuts, sunflower seeds, candied lotus seeds and luohanguo tea fruits overflow wooden trays and cardboard shipping containers. Everyone is laughing, buying, selling and playing with their children — it feels to me like a Christmas market on Christmas Eve. I buy two kilos of red apples and one niangao. The plain niangao looks like a fat white roll of sugar cookie dough with a red swirl of a decoration on the top and comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, but I ask the seller and she explains that they actually grind glutinous rice into a paste, mix in a few other ingredients to hold the mixture together, then form it into the desired shape and boil it to set the mixture. The name of the cake has two parts, nian means year and gao means higher and better, so the name together signifies the wish that every year the family will become more prosperous and successful at home and in work. Sticky cakes like this are often offered during the Spring Festival as gifts to the kitchen god, so that it will glue his mouth shut and prevent him from speaking ill of the family to the Jade Emperor.
I work my way over to the far side of the market where the rivulets have grown into fishy-smelling streams. Here big red tubs and steel tanks are teeming with elephantine coy and scuttling turtles. I have arrived just in time to witness the purchase of a turtle, and the seller is hacking open its shell with a chef’s knife. Meat here doesn’t just show up on your plate — if you go out to buy dinner, you see the preparation process through from beginning to end. But after all this, I still haven’t found my fuzi, so I decide to walk back along the river where there are often small stands selling knick-knacks.
I’m following a woman pulling home a cart freshly loaded with goods from the market when I see the fuzi. Just beyond my view of her carrots, leviathan fish head sloshing in a half-filled bucket of water, chunk of beef wrapped up in a plastic bag, bushel of rice, bouncing bouquet of celery and a five kilo sack of dried hot chili pepper seeds, there is a flashy red stand. It only takes a minute of ruffling through the piles of red characters, money-giving envelopes and lucky red door banners to pick out a fine little fuzi, made of fuzzy red felt and outlined with gold glitter. The stand owner sells it to me for five yuan and laughs cheerfully, telling me I should hang it upside down, because the word for upside down also means to come or arrive, so through a bit of linguistic gymnastics, hanging the character for luck, happiness and prosperity upside down makes it all the more likely that this door decoration will indeed deliver on its promises.
It’s late afternoon now so I hurry back toward the quieter part of town where I live. A legion of bright red paper lanterns light up the sidewalks, and tall red candles and incense arranged on New Year’s Eve are still stuck in the ground in some places next to tidy little tables with fruit, rice, duck meat and paper made as ceremonial offerings to ancestors and gods.
The eve of the Chinese New Year in China was the most raucous display of fireworks I have ever been fortunate enough to witness. Hardly safe but certainly boisterous good fun, all along the docks on the bank of the Li river a cacophony of screeching and swirling golden, green and red sparks were flying out of the hands of five year olds, teenagers and couples pushing their seventies alike. At the time, someone zestfully dropped a five-foot long firework rod into my hand. I come from a state where the sale of most fireworks is prohibited, especially the fun kind. I stood there bedazzled, brandishing this magic wand as it shot off a thrilling golden stream of fireworks from its spout every three seconds.
Now, even a week later, at precisely twelve o’clock midnight, world war breaks out outside my window. I can’t hear anything but the wild drumfire of fireworks detonated all over town. The old story goes that this tradition started because people feared that on New Year’s Eve evil spirits and the animal of the last year would come into villages and eat the residents, so the village people would light off fireworks to scare off the evil animals. It has since become a tradition of sending away the old year and ushering in the new. These mornings when I step outside my door, the streets are paved with a carpet of rose-colored paper scraps from the fireworks. The luck ought to start rolling in at any moment.