Appendix II: New Year in Mingde Village

In the seaside dependants’ village of Mingde in the 1960s, children on the brink of winter holiday looked forward to New Year—for chicken, duck, fish, and pork they seldom tasted, for new clothes and shoes and red envelopes, and even more for gambling and firecrackers.

When neighbours began stuffing sausages and curing bacon, the children knew New Year was near. Then under one eaves after another appeared strings of sausages and strips of bacon on bamboo poles. Before New Year’s Eve the adults hurried to buy holiday goods, steam New Year cakes, and cook festival dishes. Everyone welcomed the year in high spirits.

Usually we lived frugally; on New Year’s Eve the whole family could sit round a table heaped with chicken, duck, fish, and pork—a happiness hard to put in words. Our household’s usual dishes included pork hock, stir-fried three delicacies, lion’s head meatballs, egg dumplings, braised platter, red-braised fish, whole chicken soup, hot pot, and longevity greens.

Though we lived by the sea and sometimes had cheap fish, chicken, duck, and pork almost waited for New Year and festivals. A table of delicacies like this was surely once a year only. I remember one year before the reunion dinner was finished I saw my second sister, about eight, flushed red, lying on the lower bunk beside the table—she had unknowingly drunk too much sweet plum wine and was drunk.

We had no custom of staying up till midnight, and on New Year’s Eve nobody outside set off firecrackers, so after dinner and a little card play the children went to bed early. From the moment they lay down they waited for the red envelope that would appear under the pillow in the morning.

So the first thing at dawn was to lift the pillow and take out the envelope in excitement. Inside were usually two red ten-yuan notes—our stake for gambling those few days and money for firecrackers.

The first thing after the envelope was to get up, wish father and mother a happy New Year, then hurry through breakfast and put on new clothes and shoes. Father turned on the radio; festive New Year songs at once filled the air. Then he took a long string of firecrackers to the door, held them up on a bamboo pole, and set them off crackling. You could hear firecrackers at every corner of the village, one household after another—very lively.

After breakfast father and mother took the children from door to door among the neighbours to pay New Year calls. Some neighbours gave us sweets. After the calls the real show began—gambling.

In forty-household Mingde, not counting the adults’ mahjong tables, there were at least seven or eight gambling circles. Usually older children or adults banked while a crowd of big and little children bet together. Most often they played poker games like “ten and a half” and “three public cards”; some threw dice in “eighteen la”. Thus the Zhangs opened one table, the Lis another, and gambling spread everywhere.

I often moved from one household’s game to another to see where luck ran best. Once everyone was playing “three public cards” at Uncle Huang’s next door; my eldest sister, about ten, and I were both there.

I was timid and bet only one yuan each time. I noticed my sister also started at one yuan, but after losing she raised to two, then after losing again to four… however many losses and however high the stake, in the end she won a round, won back everything she had lost, and was one yuan ahead. I never thought my usually quiet, inward eldest sister could gamble so boldly—it made you see her in a new light.

Perhaps she had a gift for probability, knowing that however much you lost you would end one yuan up. Boys mostly loved firecrackers; a few bolder girls joined in.

We most often set off sky rockets, “mandarin ducks on water”, and throw-down crackers. I remember one New Year, kids from Laomei town and kids from our village stood about thirty metres apart at the road by the village gate and shot sky rockets at each other—with no protection at all. Thinking back, it was more dangerous than Yanshui bee-hive rockets.

Another game was to cover a small dragon cracker with an empty tin can, leave the fuse out, and light it. With a bang the can flew high, then clanged down from the sky—thrilling and fun. Once I played the hero, held the small dragon cracker in my left hand and lit it with incense in my right. Before I could throw it, it exploded in my hand. My left thumb hurt fiercely. I looked down: grey powder coated the skin and it swelled fast. It took days of ointment to heal. After that I never dared play with small dragon crackers again.

Something even more outrageous: one New Year I think I was in third year of junior high and my brother in first. On the empty ground beside Uncle Huang’s we test-fired a homemade rocket. I had collected gunpowder from firecrackers we picked up, stuffed it into a fountain-pen barrel, put in a fuse from a firecracker, sealed the powder with mud inside the barrel with a length of fuse showing, and made three legs from thin bamboo. I imagined that once lit the rocket would shoot skyward.

After we set it up we lit the fuse, excited and nervous. “Fizz—” then the rocket let out a earth-shaking “Boom—”. Smoke filled the air. Ten metres away at the neighbour’s we heard a loud clang—probably a wok falling from the kitchen shelf. Then the neighbour mother, mahjong half played, came out cursing in a thick accent: “Which damn kid is messing about…?” My brother and I knew trouble was brewing and dived into the screw-pine thicket. Only when it seemed safe did we come out to inspect. The pen barrel had shattered into pieces scattered everywhere. One shard had slit the left leg of my trousers near the outer knee—a crack about two centimetres long. Then I understood I had built not a “rocket” but a “bomb”.

(Note: Father and mother learned of this only decades later. By then beating and scolding were past any statute of limitations.)