Free Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang Page B

went up to Heaven to report on the behavior of the family to the Celestial Emperor.  A good report would bring the family abundant food in the kitchen in the coming year.  So on this day every household would busily kowtow to the portraits of Lord and Lady Kitchen God before they were set ablaze to signify their ascent to Heaven. Grandmother would always ask my mother to stick some honey on their lips.  She would also burn lifelike miniature horses and figures of servants which she made out of sorghum plants so the royal couple would have extra special service to make them happier and thus more inclined to say many nice things about the Xias to the Celestial Emperor.
     
    The next few days were spent preparing all sons of food.
     
    Meat was cut into special shapes, and rice and soybeans were ground into powder and made into buns, rolls, and dumplings.  The food was put into the cellar to wait for the New Year.  With the temperature as low as minus 2o F, the cellar was a natural refrigerator.
     
    At midnight on Chinese New Year's Eve, a huge burst of fireworks was let off, to my mother's great excitement.
     
    She would follow her mother and Dr.  Xia outside and kowtow in the direction from which the God of Fortune was supposed to be coming.  All along the street, people were doing the same.  Then they would greet each other with the words "May you run into good fortune."
     
    At Chinese New Year people gave each other presents.
     
    When dawn lit up the white paper in the windows to the east, my mother would jump out of bed and hurry into her new finery: new jacket, new trousers, new socks, and new shoes.  Then she and her mother called on neighbors and friends, kowtowing to all the adults.  For every bang of her head on the floor, she got a 'red wrapper' with money inside. These packets were to last her the whole year as pocket money.
     
    For the next fifteen days, the adults went round paying visits and wishing each other good fortune.  Good fortune, namely money, was an obsession with most ordinary Chinese.  People were poor, and in the Xia household, like many others, the only time meat was in reasonably abundant supply was at festival time.
     
    The festivities would culminate on the fifteenth day with a carnival procession followed by a lantern show after dark.
     
    The procession centered on an inspection visit by the God of Fire.  The god would be carried around the neighborhood to warn people of the danger of fire; with most houses partly made of timber and the climate dry and windy, fire was a constant hazard and source of terror, and the statue of the god in the temple used to receive offerings all year round.  The procession started at the temple of the God of Fire, in front of the mud hut where the Xias had lived when they first came to Jinzhou.  A replica of the statue, a giant with red hair, beard, eyebrows, and cloak, was carried on an open sedan chair by eight young men.  It was followed by writhing dragons and lions, each made up of several men, and by floats, stilts, and yangge dancers who waved the ends of a long piece of colorful silk tied around their waists. Fireworks, drums, and cymbals made a thundering noise.  My mother skipped along behind the procession.
     
    Almost every household displayed tantalizing foods along the route as offerings to the deity, but she noticed that the deity jolted by rather quickly, not touching any of it.
     
    "Goodwill for the gods, offerings for the human stomachs!"
     
    her mother told her.  In those days of scarcity my mother looked forward keenly to the festivals, when she could satisfy her stomach. She was quite indifferent to those occasions which had poetic rather than gastronomic associations, and would wait impatiently for her mother to guess the riddles stuck on the splendid lanterns hung at people's front doors during the Lantern Festival, or for her mother to tour the chrysanthemums in people's gardens on the ninth day of the ninth