Happy Lunar New Year!

Sweet Potatoes

My sweet memory. Photo by Zibow Retailleau

Hello there, lovely readers and new subscribers! I'm uncharacteristically posting on a Wednesday, in order to celebrate the Lunar New Year. I’d like to publish again a delightful story, written by my friend Zibow Retailleau:

Hello! I'm Zibow, a Chinese translator living in Mauritius. I am interested in the Great Wall as well as the Great Firewall.

You cannot tell now but I once was a superstar. I enjoyed an elevated status and had all my peers admiring me. I achieved that at a very early age too – five to be exact.

Leizhou, a coastal city in South China, is where my father comes from. He had lived there for the first part of his life until he was hired by a state-owned enterprise. The job relocated him to Guangzhou, another southern but much more developed city, where he met his first wife and had his first daughter: me.

We lived in Guangzhou but we spent Lunar New Year in Leizhou without fail because, traditionally, one should spend this festival in their hometown with all the family members. Thanks to the population we have, and the fact that many of us leave our birthplaces for big cities in the hope of having a better life, Chunyun, the largest annual human migration in the world, happens during Lunar New Year. Although technically my hometown is Guangzhou, we were outnumbered by the relatives in Leizhou so every year we would join this migration army and march back to our beloved ones.

The trip was a trial on the body and the mind. The two cities are less than 500 kilometres apart. Not very far. However, at the time, which was from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, no highways or railways connected these two cities. The trip would take 11 to 12 hours of bus ride, and we would be sitting on a measly-cushioned seat all the way. Not that it mattered, as I was rather occupied with the severe motion sickness that I had when I was a kid. I can't say, though, if the sickness was induced by motion, or by the sweat, feet and dandruff smell that filled the bus.

I particularly remember the year 1990. I was five. It was when I started to socialise with other kids. In my initiation, I was wearing a floral dress, white stockings and black dress shoes. My hair was tied into pigtails. The rubber bands were decorated with miniature pink hats. I'm not exaggerating when I say these accessories created a sensation. Kids there did not even have access to electricity, gas or clean water. Fashion sense was luxury. They murmured in Leizhou Min, a dialect spoken there, ‘Look at her dress’, ‘Look at those hats. Are they real?’ and ‘Look at her!’ Some reached out to feel my dress. The more daring ones tried to find out the authenticity of those hair ornaments by gently squeezing them.

I had a special status among the adults too. In Leizhou, at least in our village, Confucian ritual religion was still practised. When we dined there would be two tables, one bigger and taller than the other. Men would eat at the former, while women and children sat crouched around the latter. Father was a ‘worker’ in a big city, as opposed to a ‘peasant’ in a small village. His status was as high as a mandarin's. Being his daughter, I was therefore someone to be reckoned with: I ate with the men at the man table. At that age, I had yet to read Lu Xun’s A Madman's Diary. No, I lived the story first.

I soon blended in and became friends with other kids. There was one to whom I was especially close. I can’t recall her full name, only a character of it: ‘竹’, which means ‘bamboo’. Bamboo was about five years old too. She had chubby cheeks and a deafening voice. She always roared with laughter. She was a fountain of joyfulness, Bamboo.

Back then, most of the villagers were either peasants or fishermen. On the way to the beach were fields, where rice and sweet potatoes were grown. When Bamboo and I, as thick as thieves, passed by those fields we often helped ourselves to some of the sweet potatoes. To be fair, all the other kids were doing that. One time, on the way to join the rest of our little gang, we saw a peasant urinating in her field. ‘Perfect! Let's do it,’ Bamboo told me. Into the field we went and we started to dig out the root vegetables. When the peasant finished her business and stood up, she spotted the intruders. ‘Oi!’ she yelled. We immediately took what we had dug out, held them tight in our arms and ran for dear life. The peasant was coming after us two rascals, swearing and brandishing what I believed was a stick. I was frightened but could not stop laughing. This was probably because Bamboo, while running, was shouting, ‘That bitch was pissing in the field! That bitch was pissing in the field!’ The wind was strong so sound travelled well: That bitch was pissing in the field echoed and echoed.

Eventually, the poor woman gave up her chase and we arrived at the beach with the loot. Some of our friends got a few small crabs and shrimps from their fisherman fathers; those underdeveloped sea creatures would not sell. Bamboo and I showed off our spoils, and we decided to have a picnic. We constructed a ‘sand oven’ on the spot. A hole was dug in the sand, and logs and dead leaves were thrown in. A fire was then started in it and we let it burn out: that was how the sand oven was preheated. The next step was throwing in all the ingredients, burying them with sand and starting another fire on top. The baking time? While I waited for the feast to start I walked around the beach. There were some stranded jellyfish. Some of them were huge, maybe up to one metre in diameter. I didn’t know what these transparent bulges were so, naturally, I kicked one of them. To my delight, it was bouncy! I started to jump on this new-found trampoline of mine. When I got bored, I moved to another jellyfish and repeated the exercise. It must have been about 20 jumps on three different jellyfish each before the food was ready: this was the baking time.

I have to say I don't remember how the food tasted, but as it was fresh and, well, free, it must have been as delicious as this memory.

谢谢 Zibow, you are so talented and should start your own Substack! While you make up your mind, I'd like to share the links to another amazing story of yours – A Malaysia Trip, part 1 and part 2.

I'm fascinated by the Far East, and I've found some wonderful writers on Substack, whose interest and passion for the great cultures of Asia make for compelling reading: Jeffrey Streeter and Yi Xue, who co-authored an article about The Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese novel from the 18th century and one of the greatest literary works of all times; Hyun Woo Kim, a Korean writer, whose excellent translations in English of classical Chinese poetry provide solace when the world becomes unbearable; Gianni Simone, an Italian writer living in Japan, and his charming newsletter Tokyo Calling, which makes me so jealous, since Japan is the country I'd love to spend the rest of my life.

Do you have other tips for Asia-related publications on Substack? Please leave a comment and let me know all about them.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, you can share it, leave a comment, or buy me a tea. I'd be very grateful to you, I'd appreciate it more than I can express!