What Chun Jie (Chinese Lunar New Year) Is in He Kou

What Changes and What Stays the Same:

Each year when we travel south from Kunming to Suli's village outside of Hekou we are greeted by memories of what used to be and introduced to how some things have changed (for better or for worse).  Along with the old and the new are the traditional:  things that most likely will never change.  The following are images of these categories--the traditions, the old, and the new.

 This is a shot of the entrance to Suli's childhood home.  The door on the extreme right of the photo is the entrance to her home, and the door to the left of the image is the entrance to the kitchen.  For the most part, this image has remained the same, including the rose plant in the foreground, over the twelve years I have known Suli.  Yes, the road from which I am taking to shot has gone from being dirt to being paved, but Suli's home and village really has not changed much.  That said, the air-conditioning unit over the entrance to the kitchen is certainly a new addition to her mom's home.  With summer temperatures reaching up to about 100 degrees (Fahrenheit) and the weather being generally humid every day, the air conditioner might help take some of the stickiness off of sleeping at night.

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This is a view of the "town square" in Suli's village.  Sticking out from the left foreground is a village common area where celebrations--marriages, holidays, new cars--can be shared with the entire community.  Also on the left, in the background, the building under construction is the new collection station for the rubber company, for whom the majority of the village works.  Most of the families in the village harvest rubber sap from the trees on the surrounding hills (like the trees on the hill in the background), bringing it to the collection station to be weighed.  While the common area and the collection station, even in their "new" condition, are not new to Suli's village, what is completely new is the garbage collection bin at the center of the photo.  No longer is garbage thrown over the side of the bridge (where I am shooting from) on the the embankment next to the creek.  Now, any refuse is brought to the bin, and the bin is emptied periodically by a garbage company.  And this has made Suli's village generally more clean than I have ever seen it!

Chun Jie always means yummy food, and it almost always means 腌肉--yān ròu, or smoked bacon.  Suli's mom knows what her daughters like, so she never fails in smoking a bunch of bacon, to be eaten during our stay and to be taken with us when we head back to Kunming.  This bunch of meat happened to be in the room where Suli and I slept, so the smoked scent of bacon also walked along with us in our clothing, but I am certainly not complaining about that smell.

 Another traditional dish at Chun Jie are 饺子 (jiǎozi or dumplings--steamed, boiled or fried).  During the twelve years I have known Suli, she has made it very clear that jiǎozi are not a tradition with which she and her sisters grew up.  As much as these dumplings are a Chinese tradition, they are not necessarily a Hekou tradition.  Even so, Suli and her sister are seen here wrapping these dumplings to be eaten for lunch.

 So what is new about all this?  Sadly, it was how much the boys wanted to play games on their aunties' phones, rather than help make their own lunch.  In all fairness to the boys, as simple as wrapping jiǎozi appears, the process is not actually as easy as placing a spoonful of meat/vegetable mixture in the middle of a wrap, folding the wrap, and pressing the edges together.  Well, come to think of it, the process is as simple as that, but that does not necessarily make it easy.  Suli and her sisters kept showing each other how to do it "correctly," and I took pictures to keep from being shown how I was doing it incorrectly.

 A food my wife and her sisters did grow up with and a food that they continue to enjoy as adults is 粽子 (zòngzi).  While this sticky rice concoction is used as part of the traditional 端午节 (duānwǔ jié or Dragon Boat Festival) and is used to commemorate the famous ancient poet 屈原 (Qū Yuán), zòngzi are eaten year around in many parts of China and in other southeast Asian countries.  Suli's mother often uses glutinous purple rice on the outside, with yellow bean and pork meat/fat in the center.  The entire mixture is wrapped in a banana leaf and cooked slowly over nearly twenty-four hours.  The need for a precise cooking temperature makes preparing this dish a long, labor-intensive process, that usually requires Suli's mother staying up all night.  The results are very tasty and can be eaten straight out of the banana leaf wrapper or can be sliced into sections and fried in a pan.  Both are wonderful and require my mother-in-law to take a long nap during the day following the making of the zòngzi.

In many villages, darkness reigns after sunset.  However, one of the new additions to many of these tiny enclaves has been government mandated and funded street lights.  During the last year, Suli's village gained three or four of these LED streetlamps.  The one very helpful change these lights have made is a much less treacherous after-dark walk to the town toilet.  These solar-powered street lamps have damaged the friendly glow of lights coming from the individual homes that line the street, but they have made socializing after nightfall much easier.

 Yes, Suli's village does have running water, but all of the indoor plumbing is still fed by a local spring that comes out of the hillside about three-hundred meters uphill from the village.  While the tap water is used for washing vegetables, washing clothing, and showering, the family still uses containers to fetch drinking water directly from the spring.  Here, Oswin carries the empty plastic bottles up to the spring (I carried the full containers back down the hill).  Then the water is boiled before drinking.  With six adults and two children in the home during the Chun Jie holiday, trips to and from the spring happened almost every two or three days.

Spring Festival would not be a celebration without 过年 (guò nián, the evening feast that marks the beginning of the new lunar year), and no feast worth its salt would be a feast without firecrackers to scare away 年 (Nián, the new year monster).  Oswin was so excited because second-uncle informed him that lighting the firecrackers would be Oswin's job from now on (see video at the bottom of this post for the real thing).

With the firecrackers out of the way, on to the feast!  This is a tradition that does not change much:  in Suli's home this feast always includes chicken soup (foreground), bamboo (white substance left-of-center), plenty of meat (in this photo, the table is far from filled yet), including fish, and plenty of homegrown or hand picked vegetables.  At least one of the vegetables Suli's family usually eats is a "weed" that grows on the rubber-tree terraces that surround the village.  Naturally, Oswin is thrilled to be eating, and the rest of us would soon follow him to our places around the table.

The evening tradition consists of playing 麻将 (májiàng, what we refer to in English as mahjong) and watching the nationally televised New Year variety show on television.  Actually, to me, the foreigner, it never really appears that anyone is actually watching the show when májiàng is being played.  In fact, the only other things that seem to happen during the playing of this game are conversation and eating--sunflower seeds, peanuts, fruit, and candies.  Be aware, most Chinese people will gladly teach a foreigner the basics of májiàng, but having learned the basics, the foreigner will then be encouraged to actually play the game, which almost always includes the use of money, even amongst family.  To be fair, when Suli's family plays with money, the game never ends until each of the members feels pleased with the amounts gained and lost, meaning that very little money actually changes hands.  However, for the serious májiàng enthusiast, serious amounts of money can be gained or lost in a single sitting, so be careful and be warned:  know the people with whom you may be playing.

 Now, the picture above is not necessarily presenting something old, new, or traditional.  Rather, it is simply showing a regular part of life in the village:  taking care of the garden.  With the rubber trees being the most important plant life on the surrounding hills, any ground not devoted to the rubber trees is then left open to other plant life.  This photo shows my mother-in-law's garden, and we are preparing to water her vegetables.  Obviously, this photo also shows banana trees (left), bamboo (right), and pineapple plants (top-center), which are also growing on land that cannot be used for the rubber trees.  In the case of the garden and the bamboo, they are growing on the banks of a creek (to the right, outside of the photo), land that is not conducive (too much water) and not safe (possible flooding) for rubber trees.  As for the banana trees and the pineapple plants, while it may not be easy to see in this photo, both are growing on ground that is much too steep for the rubber trees.

Because Chun Jie is a family festival, another traditional activity is meeting with family members that one does not always get to see during the rest of the year.  In this photo, Oswin is sitting down to eat lunch, flanked by his older cousin Xie Jing Yi on the right and his cousin's mother, Fu Xiang Yun (the elder of Suli's two older sisters).  Xie Jing Yi lives and works down in the Hekou area, so we really only get to see him during this time of year.  As for older auntie, she now lives in Kunming, but we still only get to see her infrequently, making Chun Jie our best chance to catch up with her.

Suli's other sister, Fu Xiang Lan, also lives in Kunming, and we get to see her and her husband Yao San a bit more frequently.  Even so, Chun Jie is still a great time to spend an entire week or so with her and her husband.  Here, Xiang Lan demonstrates just how big the pineapples are by holding one up to her own head.  We were picking a pile of pineapples to give as presents to extended family members--Suli's uncles and cousins--in another village we went to the next day.  By the way, these are the best pineapples I have ever eaten in my life.  Perhaps what made them so good was their freshness, but the flavor was also a wonderful mixture of sweet and sour, compared to the primarily sweet flavor I remember of the yellow, store-bought pineapples from my youth.

August, thought he was going to do his part to help carry the fruit, but in the end, I carried them in large rice sacks, using the same bamboo pole used for carrying the water containers in the earlier picture of Oswin.

 As stated earlier, visiting family is very much a part of Chun Jie.  Here, we have all traveled about four hours to the small city where Suli's uncles (mom's brothers) and cousins live.  The facing building is part of third-uncle's home.  Suli is wearing the leather backpack, her mom and Xiang Yun are in the center, and Xie Jin Yi is on the left.  The buildings that extend up the street and on the same side are owned by first and second uncles, who we also spent time with during this day trip.

One of the less glamorous modern realities of Chun Jie is the traffic.  With Chun Jie being one of the largest annual migrations of people in any part of the world and with the proliferation of automobiles, it only makes sense that a country of over a billion people would end up having snarled traffic.  The white car on the right is Xiang Yun's and is parked, but all the other cars are in some form of movement.  Also consider the number of first-generation drivers currently in China and one can understand how tangled traffic can become.  If you have ever been to India (where I hear traffic is even less controlled) or to places like Mexico City, you have a pretty good idea of what China traffic can be like.  It has gotten better, even in the twelve years I have been in the country, but it still is a challenged for anyone from the West.

(Sadly, all my efforts to provide a video of the firecrackers have come to nothing.  If anyone has some suggestions on how to get my videos to work on Blogger I would greatly appreciate it.  Until then, my sincerest apologies!)

I hope you have enjoyed this look at the old, the new, and the traditional, in no certain order, and I hope this gives you an idea of what Chun Jie celebrations look like in one small corner of China's vast cultural expanse.