Now I have a deeper feeling about the New Year, that is, I think the meaning of "Chinese New Year's Eve" and "the first day of the first month of the new year" lies in knowing and understanding your family.
Our family name is Fish, yes, it is a very rare but very old surname, but in our village, the fish surname is one of the big surnames. Every year on the first day of the first lunar month, our new year's greeting team is always very large, even if many people affected by the epidemic this year have not gone home for the New Year, but the size of the team is still not small.
Where did such a family come from? Why settle here? This is a very esoteric and overlooked problem that you will find when you think about it.
Now our family is already four generations together, and now I belong to the third generation of them. It is necessary to Chinese New Year's Eve worship the ancestors to go to the grave, and it is also necessary to worship the New Year on the first day of the Chinese New Year. Because in a year, probably only these two times, people will seriously comb the family relationship.
In real life, our understanding of ancestors actually goes back to no more than five generations, up to six generations... Earlier, it was blurred.
As in many places, my grandfathers once told me that our ancestors came from "under the big locust tree in Shanxi." But when exactly it will arrive in the present county, and when it will arrive in today's village, is not clear enough.
But it is still clear that almost the entire three teams in our village today, the five or six large veins of the Yu family, dozens of households, hundreds of people, go back up, there is a common fifth or sixth generation ancestor... I probably calculated the time, that was at least 150 years ago during the Qing Dynasty... Considering that the castle of our village was built during the Tongzhi Hui Rebellion of the Qing Dynasty, it can also be considered that only one family surnamed Yu fell on this land at the earliest, and accompanied the birth and development of this village all the way to this day.
This is a story of family inheritance that takes place everywhere in China. Five thousand years of Chinese civilization has been passed on to today like a baton from generation to generation.
Every New Year, I like to listen to the elders talk about their past and talk about the family history they know. Not every family has a perfect genealogy, because you know that before the founding of New China, illiterate illiterates were the vast majority in real history. Therefore, the history of word of mouth determines that in fact, we can only understand the stories of three or four generations of ancestors in the past hundred years.
But this understanding is still important enough – even today, traditional rural clans have inevitably been dismantled and diluted in the process of urbanization.
Our family, my grandfathers and grandfathers, lived in a village at that time, and they lived in a cave dwelling; when they arrived at my grandfather's generation, several brothers went to far away places, some took root in Qingyang City, Gansu Province, next door, some fell in Jinchang City, Gansu Province, because of their work relations, some moved to Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, and some did not go far, but also fell in other villages; and when it came to my father's generation, half of my greater ones left this village, some worked and lived in the county town, and some were in other places Now in my generation, all brothers and sisters work in distant cities, and a considerable proportion of brothers and sisters buy houses and settle in Xi'an or Xianyang.
The village is often empty, and this year's New Year is no exception, with ten rooms and five empty rooms.
This makes all the homecoming and reunions precious.
The countryside in winter is much colder than the central heating city, and if it were not for the fact that there are still old people at home, many young people may not have a reason to go home for the New Year.
A new era is coming inexorably, and on the other side of the country, the city is a world with no "neighbors" and fewer "relatives", and even less the concept of "family".
How to preserve the family vein and family emotions under the increasingly distant spatial distance of the new era is a common problem faced by countless rural clans, including our fish family.
But you ask me what the answer is, and I don't know.
The answer is blowing in the wind, and we can only walk into the wind.
Perhaps we can only use our own personal experience, on the long road of life, step by step to discover the answer given by the times.