Zhongshan said that | she made it a career to keep the memories of the Spring Festival
The food of the hometown is the mark of people's connection with their hometown, and this connection will not fade with the passage of time. Near the Spring Festival, Zhang Yongyu, a native of Sanxiang Town, Zhongshan City, began to prepare ingredients for tea fruits, and eating tea fruits every New Year's Day has become a memory that she has carved into her genes.
Not long ago, 35-year-old Zhang Yongyu became the representative inheritor of the seventh batch of municipal intangible cultural heritage representative projects in Zhongshan City, the younger inheritor in the list released this time, and the youngest of the three selected inheritors in Sanxiang Town, and the non-genetic inheritance project she represents is the custom directly related to the festival diet - zhongshan municipal intangible cultural heritage Sanxiang tea and fruit traditional food customs.
People who enjoy hometown food abound, but not many people do "inheriting hometown food culture" as a full-time job, and Zhang Yongyu is doing such a thing. Eight years ago, she resigned as a teacher and joined the team of guarding the food culture of her hometown to help more people retain the taste of childhood.
Zhang Yongyu. South + Lu Ziheng shooting
Guard the taste of food in your childhood hometown
Located in the southern foothills of Wugui Mountain in Zhongshan City, sanxiang Town, with beautiful mountains and clear waters and rich products, the ancestors moved from Fujian to Zhongshan during the Northern Song Dynasty, bringing the salty tea food customs of southern Fujian to the three townships, and at the same time, combined with the local reality, created a very regional characteristics of the three townships tea and fruit diet consumption customs.
Every year during important festivals such as the Spring Festival, the people of Sanxiang will make tea fruits and worship their ancestors before eating them. The varieties of traditional Sanxiang tea fruits include Three Bitter Tea Fruits, Bamboo Leaf Buns and Dumplings, Kan Cakes, White Dumplings, Taro Cakes, Radish Cakes, Horned Fruits, Leaf Cakes, Bean Fishing, etc. These traditional foods also grew up with Zhang Yongyu, leaving her happy memories about the food of her hometown.
Zhang Yongyu, who has been making tea fruits with her grandmother and mother since she was a child, has a natural love for tea fruits, and the time of making tea fruits with her family has left her with many warm memories. Since 2001, she began to learn the sango tea fruit making technique more formally with her mother, and now she has mastered more than ten kinds of sango tea fruit making techniques such as sesame powder, leaf boy, and bean fish.
Zhang Yongyu teaches students in tea and fruit training classes.
Compared with the past, only important festivals can eat tea fruits, and the people of Sanxiang Town after the improvement of living standards also have tea fruits to eat on ordinary days, but there are not many young people who can make Tea Fruits in Sanxiang. Zhang Yongyu heard more than once the older generation say that "not many people can make tea fruits now", she heard this sentence in her heart and began to think about what she could do.
At that time, her brother Zhang Huasen had resigned to join the team of guarding the culture of his hometown and made some explorations, and he is still running for the inheritance of the Sanxiang puppet show. With the encouragement of his brother, Zhang Yongyu quit his job as a kindergarten teacher and joined the Zhongshan Shanggu Traditional Culture Promotion Center, and began to concentrate on inheriting the tea and fruit making skills of Sanxiang.
Explore making tea and fruit cultural and creative products
On the road of full-time inheritance of the traditional food customs of Sanxiang tea and fruit, Zhang Yongyu is not easy to walk, she frankly said: "The food customs are mainly through experience production, tasting and other ways for everyone to understand, but also to consider the storage period of tea fruits, how to better promote tea fruits is a problem we have been thinking about." ”
In 2016, Sanxiang town held a hand-painted tea fruit production process competition, a total of 255 works were received in the competition, and finally 10 works were selected and printed on the Sanxiang Cultural Tourism Brochure, through which many people had a preliminary understanding of Sanxiang tea and fruit.
This also gave Zhang Yongyu inspiration, let her begin to focus on the production of Sanxiang tea fruit cultural and creative products, soon after, with "bitter and sweet" (to describe the three bitter cakes), "fishing for the sake of the three bitter cakes" (to describe the bean fishing) and other beautiful meanings of the Sanxiang tea and fruit theme cultural and creative products were born, there are drawstring bags, keychains, cultural shirts and other products.
Tea fruit and tea fruit theme cultural and creative products. South + Lu Ziheng shooting
There are ingredients for making bean fishing in the drawstring bag, which is a must-eat food for the first day of the New Year in sanxiang people, because the meaning of bean fishing in Cantonese is "fishing and fishing", which means that there is a good harvest in a year, a good income for business, which is deeply liked by the people of Sanxiang, and everyone takes bean fishing as a way of praying for blessings.
In order to better promote the food consumption customs of Sanxiang tea and fruit, Zhang Yongyu also deeply studied traditional techniques and excavated and restored the traditional production methods of Sanxiang tea fruits. Among the three township tea fruits is a tea fruit called "Kane cake", whose traditional raw material plant is commonly known as "hedge boy", which has almost disappeared in the local area. Zhang Yongyu visited the old artists everywhere, and finally found this plant with the help of the old medicine farmers, and applied it to the tea and fruit making according to the ancient method. The traditional taste of "hedgehog cake" has returned to people's tables.
Cultivated a team of 18 people
At the beginning, Zhang Yongyu mainly organized the Sanxiang tea and fruit research activities through the platform of the base, and later with the support of the cultural departments at all levels in Zhongshan City, she opened the research activities to the school, so that more children became the main body of traditional culture inheritance.
"These kinds of activities are very popular with students, everyone is very involved, and once they are recognized, we are more motivated to do it." Zhang Yongyu said.
In order to make the tea fruit production method more familiar, Zhang Yongyu and the teachers and students with cooking experience in the tourism school jointly opened the Sanxiang tea fruit production training class, and designed the tea fruit production method hand-drawn, launched the tea fruit production teaching video, clearly and vividly showed the whole process of tea fruit production, which detailed how to do each step, how much to use, it can be said that "cooking white" can watch the tea fruit.
Zhang Yongyu said that many Zhongshan people who are far away from overseas have learned to make tea fruits through teaching videos, and also told her through various channels that "the taste of her hometown cannot be lost", which makes her feel very happy.
Zhang Yongyu teaches children to make tea and fruits.
So far, she has cultivated a team of 18 people, both retired and very young, but everyone has one goal - to pass on the traditional food customs of Sanxiang tea and fruit. Every time there is an event, the team members actively participate in it, sparing no effort to promote the custom. At the same time, Zhang Yongyu also led the team out of Zhongshan and came to Guangzhou and other places to promote, so that everyone could understand the Sanxiang tea fruit through the way of experience production.
"We want to build cultural confidence, and if these traditional things slowly disappear, it's a pity that our descendants won't be able to see them." When we have the ability, we should do our best to do something and not let ourselves have regrets. Zhang Yongyu said.
At the same time, at a time when more and more young people are joining the team of intangible cultural heritage protection, there are more modern elements in intangible cultural heritage, and intangible cultural heritage can also be very "trendy". In the future, Zhang Yongyu hopes that he can inject more new elements into the inheritance of the traditional food customs of Sanxiang Tea and Fruit, so that more people, especially young people, can appreciate the charm of this intangible cultural heritage.
【Written by】 Yuan Shimin
【Photography/Video】Lu Ziheng
【Author】 Yuan Shimin; Lu Ziheng
【Source】 Southern Press Media Group South + client