His parents were both in their forties, but they looked old and had endured a lifetime of hard work on the farm. They experienced a series of changes such as land reform, famine, and the "Cultural Revolution" (Liu Fuxing's father smiled thickly and embarrassedly, recalling those years when he danced the "Zhongzi Dance" to show loyalty to Chairman Mao: to write the word "Zhong" on the ground in a dance style). They don't know how to speak and speak with a thick dialect accent, so it's hard to get outside. The farthest place they left the village was the provincial capital of Lanzhou. Even this was a great adventure in the eyes of many of their neighbors.
In winter, there is very little farm work, and the men in the village just chat, drink tea, and eat melon seeds every day, just to pass the time. It was the first time that all the living people in the village had met foreigners, so I was treated as a VIP. Everyone wants to see me. A villager with a little bit of culture also wrote a poem for me. The women brought me elaborately embroidered insoles.
No one in the village had a camera. As soon as I entered the village with the old Olympus SLR hanging around my neck, the news spread like wildfire. The kindness and enthusiasm of the villagers was so overwhelming that I couldn't resist and agreed to take pictures of everyone.
In the courtyard of a villager's house, the old lady sat on a wooden chair, which was the center of the photo. The eldest grandson stands in her right rear, and the second grandson stands in the left rear. The five-year-old naughty little grandson was placed between his grandmother's knees by his parents, writhing impatiently. Then everyone fell silent, changed into a very serious expression, and I pressed the shutter.
I started by taking pictures casually, but soon realized that I was documenting a moment in the village's history, documenting the social hierarchy and the close-knit family units. The three grandsons of the old lady are, according to Chinese tradition, called the eldest, the second and the third. She also had several granddaughters, but as a woman, could not enter the family's genealogy. The brothers posed in front of the camera, and the sisters stood together on the edge of the courtyard to watch. They are not in the picture, just as they are not in the blood recognized by the family.
Grandma sits in the center of the photo, like a queen. Behind the curtain of the main entrance of the house behind her hung a black-and-white portrait of her deceased husband, a small spiritual hall that always reminded the juniors to respect the respected elders. According to the rules, the old lady's sons and grandchildren enter the door to kowtow to the statue, and give it to the ancestors every New Year's Day
。 After a hundred years of the old lady, the photos should also be hung. I followed Liu Fuxing's family door to door, yard by yard, and took very formal family photos of them: the young woman and her fiancé of her parents' orders and the words of the matchmaker; the infant boy who was still swaddled in open crotch pants, proudly exposing his "chickens"; the old people stood solemnly in front of my camera, as if painting portraits—this may be the last picture of their lives. The reason why they are so serious is because these photos are placed in the spiritual hall of the home for future generations to pay homage to and worship, and naturally need to sit on the front. Old people prefer to take black and white photos, perhaps they feel that this is more serious and majestic.
There are also some people I didn't make. There was a man who died his wife, and his lifelong "iron rice bowl" job was also lost, and he turned out to be insane. He crouched by the side of the road, shaking his body gently, immersed in fantasy; the bastard, whose mother, ostracized by the villagers, left him alone in the city; and, of course, the little girls.
As a female visitor, I was somewhat embarrassed. Liu Fuxing's mother and sister took care of all the housework. The men and I sat lazily on the kang, smoking and chatting; they were busy sweeping away the residue and melon seed shells we had thrown on the ground. In the kitchen, they make noodles, roll noodles, steam steamed buns, make noodles, or twist twist flowers. They cut firewood and made fires for stoves and kang. They always waited for us to eat and drink enough to eat leftovers in the kitchen, and then washed the dishes. I insisted on helping, but I was rejected and had to give in with guilt and accept my strange position as a "male VIP". The meals we ate were relatively simple and monotonous. This is not Sichuan, which is rich and delicious, but the desolate north china, or in winter, there is nothing else to do but wheat, pork, peppers and garlic. It is a luxury to eat rice occasionally. Sometimes the staple food on the dinner table is millet, a relatively old Chinese grain, and the people in the city feel that it is a low-grade coarse grain eaten by rural people. But even Xiaomi is rare there. I remember a teacher at Sichuan University who once said to me in a very disgusted tone: "Northerners only eat pasta." "We sat around the square wooden tables in the big room, sucking and sucking on noodles or nibbling on steamed buns, adding garlic or chili oil from time to time to enhance the taste. There is no difference between breakfast, lunch and dinner, there is almost no meat to eat, and the only fresh ingredients are onions, celery, garlic and apples grown at home.
Only when you arrive in the village of Liu Fuxing will you realize how general and shallow it is to use "Chinese cuisine" as a single concept. First, China is deeply divided between north and south: one side eats rice and the other side eats wheat; the residents of Gansu belong to the latter. From the east coast and Beijing to the west, all the way to the border of Central Asia or even farther, the staple food of such a large area is noodles and steamed buns, and Gansu is one of them. Some pasta shapes in Northern China bear striking resemblance to pasta: "cat ears", for example, are exactly the same in shape and preparation as Italian ear-shaped macaroni. The Italian explanation is that Marco Polo introduced pasta to the locals when he was living in China at the end of the nineteenth century, while Chinese felt that pasta was their gift to the world. In 2005, Chinese archaeologists announced that the dispute was over after they excavated a bowl of millet noodles from 4,000 years ago at an archaeological site along the Yellow River. But many experts agree that the flaky food should have originated in Persia further west.
In the days before the Spring Festival, I witnessed Liu Fuxing's family preparing for Chinese New Year's Eve meal. Liu Fuxing was responsible for writing the Spring League: he took a brush, wrote auspicious words on a ribbon of red paper, and pasted them on the door of each door of the house (sometimes a son who recognized words in the family could still be used). The fattened pigs have been killed and marinated in salt water. Liu Fuxing's father grabbed the boy chicken again, killed it with a kitchen knife, and let the blood flow directly into the dust on the ground. On the main road in the village, locals were practicing drumming; children were making wooden shelves, pasted with colorful paper, and beautiful lanterns; the girls were dressed brightly, red, pink, red and pink, as if to openly fight against the monotonous pale scenery.
Part of The Chinese tradition of respecting the elderly is because the elderly are the ancestors after that. A hundred years later, (they hope) future generations will place their portraits and photographs on the spiritual hall of the large house of their home and offer sacrifices to their souls. The large family with a long history in Liu Fuxing Village also has its own family tree, which has portraits of deceased ancestors, generation after generation, and is traditionally hung above the spiritual hall. During the Cultural Revolution, these statues and genealogies may have become statues of Chairman Mao, but now they are slowly hanging back, right next to Chairman Mao. Chinese families are inhabited not only by living people, but also by generations of ancestors.
Sharing food in China is a way for families to connect with each other, and certainly all over the world. But here, it's a ritual that connects loved ones inside and outside the grave. On the day of Chinese New Year's Eve, Liu Fuxing, a big son, from his ancestors to the youngest children, would come to the orchard to invite his ancestors to Chinese New Year's Eve dinner. They knelt on the ground, saluted incense, burned paper money, kept prostrating their heads, and poured high sorghum wine into the soil. The uncles set off a hanging firecracker, as if to shatter the air. Then everyone came to the eldest son, that is, The house of Uncle Liu Fuxing, the man prostrated his head in front of the small spiritual hall in the big room, and the woman set up a table for the ancestors Chinese New Year's Eve rice: a small bowl of meat and vegetables, a bowl of noodles with a pair of chopsticks, and tea and wine.
In the eyes of a foreigner, a unique feature of the Chinese concept of soul and ancestor is that it is very similar to the earthly world. The Chinese gods also established bureaucracies in heaven, considering mortal petitions, accepting gifts and bribes, no different from officials on earth (no different from the imperial officials who died before). The dead need the same things as the living: clothes, money, and now mobile phones. These things are all made of paper, and at the funeral, the relatives of the deceased burn the paper money and paper clothes and turn them into a wisp of green smoke floating to the dead in the sky. There are cars, washing machines, watches and mobile phones in the sacrificial goods specialty shop, all made of cardboard shells and colored paper.
In the past, the tombs of prominent figures were fully equipped with funerary items needed after their deaths. The most famous is China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who was great and tyrannical, and after his death had a whole army of terracotta warriors to protect him. My favorite Chinese tomb, however, is Mawangdui near Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, where a nobleman and his wife and children were buried in the second century BC. Mawangdui was unearthed in the 1970s and all the funerary items are miraculously well preserved. Among the funerary offerings of this aristocratic family were many wood carvings, servants who served them and musicians who entertained them, chessboards and dressers modeled of wood, musical instruments and costumes, profound pharmacology and philosophies written on silk, and many foods, because the dead still depended on food.
The noble lady's funeral offerings contained a lot of real food, placed on a lacquered plate as if it were the Last Supper: five dishes that must have been appetizing, plus a string of meat skewers, a bowl of staple food, a few bowls of soup, a few glasses of wine, and a pair of chopsticks. The lacquerware bowl has the inscription "Junxing Sake" (please drink this wine) and a very elaborate plate and a series of raw ingredients: many different grains, animals, poultry, melon fruits, eggs, millet cakes and medicinal spices such as cinnamon peppercorns. A scroll of bamboo notes (1) records various seasonings, such as dumplings (with sugar), salt, vinegar, soy sauce, sauce and honey; there are also a variety of dishes, more than a dozen cooking methods, including soup, searing, mahogany (boiled meat in the soup), boiling, steaming, cannon, wax, etc.
On the vast territory of ancient China, people paid attention to satisfying the appetite of the dead. At the Tang Dynasty Tomb in Astana, Turpan, on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, archaeologists dug up dumplings: it may be a little dry, broken when broken, but depending on the form and the like, it is exactly what would be eaten at noon in the same area today. There have been 1,200 years in between! When the European explorer O'L'Đìl Stein returned from this area in the early twentieth century, he brought with him not only priceless treasures such as Dunhuang documents, but also "jam pies" and other snacks from the tombs of Astana. The food is still housed in one of the British Museum's exhibition halls. Among the ming dynasty funerary items in Shanxi was a miniature porcelain table filled with models of dishes imitated from clay: sheep's head, whole chicken, whole fish, persimmon cake, peach and pomegranate.
For relatives who have recently died, contemporary Chinese the way of sacrifice also consciously or unconsciously emphasizes the close connection between the dead and the living. They would put small bowls of dishes on the graves of their loved ones, what bacon, beans, and a bowl of rice, and anyway, the living would eat whatever the dead ate, as if the dead were still eating with their families. For the long-deceased ancestors, the food sacrificed in the spiritual hall may be more "abstract": the whole smoked pig's head and the unpeeled grapefruit are not things that can be immediately imported. In China, the greatest disrespect for the dead is the dismemberment of the corpse: ghosts also need legs to walk and eyes to see; yes, the stomach must be filled.
On the first day of the Chinese New Year, Liu Fuxing and I continued to visit the door one by one, going to every household in the village to say hello and make small talk, from morning to night. Compared with weekdays, the villagers entertained us with luxury, but each family was similar, basically eating melon seeds, walnuts, persimmon cakes, peanuts, orange peels and candy wrapped in colorful cellophane. The main course is also very grand: lung slices, pork ear jelly, roasted ribs, celery shredded meat, meaty egg rolls, pearl meatballs, and of course, the whole river fish (fish must be on the menu for the Spring Festival, and the harmonic sound "every year is more than enough"). Staples are vermicelli, noodles, and steamed buns, served with pickles, peppers and garlic. Nine large bowls are placed at each table to form a square.
Book Title: Shark Fin and Peppercorns
Author: Fuchsia Dunlop
Shark Fin and Peppercorns 1: What does an Englishman Chinese eat? Break into the Nightmare's Eye of the Devil
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 2: Juntun Pot Kui, the cake is wrapped in minced meat and shallots, and the aroma wafts throughout the campus
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 3: Spicy Chicken - Stir-fried chicken nuggets on the outside and tender on the inside, buried in the caramelized peppers
Shark Fin & Pepper 4: The aromas of watercress paste, peppercorns and jasmine tea flow in the air in Chengdu
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 5: Each noodle is covered with a mixture of soy sauce, red oil and peppercorns
Shark fin and peppercorns 6: The bean blossoms are hot, like freshly cooked, and the taste is soft and smooth like caramel cream
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 7: Pork brain flowers are placed in a fragrant soup base and gently immersed in sesame oil and minced garlic
Shark fin and peppercorns 8: When Chengdu people peel rabbits alive, they can still leisurely smoke a cigarette and gag
Shark Fin and Peppercorns 9: The chef is namelessly guarded on the stove and cutting board, working hard like a servant
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 10: Chengdu's Hui Pot Meat Bean Sauce and Garlic Sprouts are generously added, spicy and delicious
Shark Fin and Pepper 11: Chengdu people say that in China, only poor people use potatoes as a staple food
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 12: Apple pie is served with chilled pork ear, camphor tea duck, and spicy chilled kelp
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 13: Bamboo steamers are piled high, and the steamed beef is waiting to soothe everyone's stomach
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 14: The sensory mind is blown away by the Tibetan landscape, and the taste is crazy because of the boredom of the food
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 15: Cooking method "hot", quickly stir-fry the finely chopped ingredients over high heat
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 16: Stir-fry the cut loin in hot oil and curl into beautiful little flowers
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 17: A true Chinese chef, not only a chef, but also a carving artist
Shark fin and peppercorns 18: During the Spring Festival, people began to marinate bacon, make sausages, and hang them under the eaves to dry
Shark Fin & Peppercorns 19: Sichuan chefs are adept at combining a variety of basic flavors to create a soul-stirring complex
Shark Fin and Pepper 20: Cooking is like archery, the fusion of yin and yang, and the flow of the four seasons
Shark fin and peppercorns 21: Fish flavor, containing salty, sweet, sour, spicy, onion, ginger and garlic flavors are fully integrated