Festivals in Mingde Village

Mingde Village was a small dependants’ settlement—only forty households. As soon as day broke and doors opened, you could see every home busy.

At that time (the late 1960s) the oldest children in the village were only in junior high; most were still in primary school or the kindergarten attached to the primary school. Some couples had younger children still in swaddling clothes.

We wives on the third row were among the older ones, a bit like elder sisters looking after the younger wives. In time we felt like one family, without standing on ceremony. For anything—including the three big festivals each year—we discussed and helped one another.

From a month before the Lunar New Year everyone began preparing sausage and cured meat. Only the mothers from other provinces knew how; we several Taiwanese wives learned from them—Mrs Xie from Hunan, Mrs Ma from Beijing, and Mrs Li from Shandong. They were all enthusiastic; curing meat and making wheat foods were their specialties.

For the Lantern Festival we made tangyuan. Each household put in money for one or two jin of rice; someone was sent to buy glutinous rice. I washed the rice clean and soaked it overnight in a pot. The next day I took the soaked rice and a clean flour sack to Sister-in-law Chen’s place outside the village to borrow their stone mill; we ground the rice into slurry, put it in the sack, and used their press to squeeze it dry—you could not take it back until past three in the afternoon.

I cooked a small piece of the pressed slurry in the pot and kneaded it into glutinous rice flour, working hard until the dough was springy and chewy—that meant success. The sisters who joined in were delighted, crowding into my house; we divided the dough fairly on the scales and each carried her share home happily to make tangyuan.

On Lantern Festival evening the children carried lanterns in a procession halfway up the hill by the sea. Older brothers and sisters led younger ones—ten or twenty children, each with a lantern on the dark hillside path, very lively; the little ones had a wonderful time. Leading the fun then were my eldest son and several children in Year Four or Five from the Li and Fan families; the smallest were only five or six.

For the Dragon Boat Festival, only two or three mothers knew how to wrap zongzi, so those who wanted to learn prepared materials and learned alongside the women who could wrap.

At Mid-Autumn we went to Tamsui to buy mooncakes. Families with many children could not afford good cakes and had to buy cheap ones with sweet potato filling instead of red bean—two dollars each.

Each household needed perhaps forty or fifty, because the children ate heartily, so everyone brought a flour sack to carry the cakes.

The squadron leader understood us dependants living in a remote area; at every festival he sent a large lorry to the village so the wives could shop in Tamsui. Everyone was grateful to him.

At Mid-Autumn we went to Tamsui for mooncakes, pomelos, and fruit—one person per family and the lorry was full. Riding on the big truck, everyone chatted and laughed all the way—such fun.

In those days there was no large market in rural Laomei for ready-made food, so for New Year and festivals, tangyuan and zongzi were not something you could buy if you had money—you had to cooperate, buy ingredients, and make them yourselves. Troublesome and tiring, but the joy is something people today cannot taste.