二十八The Twenty-Eighth

Before the new year, I reckoned there’d be plenty of things to ramble on about here once the holiday came. Special as this year was — I didn’t go out much — not a single Spring Festival activity was missing. Told in detail, it amounts to gatherings with relatives, meals, and tall tales; the jokes traded at the table seemed quite funny at the time, but by the next day not one of them remained. So for something to practice my writing on, I have to dig back further — which brings me to the twenty-eighth of the last lunar month.

On this day we always go back to the old house, because it seems to be a special occasion — we must honor the ancestors: a square table, food set out as offerings, then incense and kowtows. Before each trip I always push the matter to the back of my mind. In the past it was because I found it shabby and didn’t want to go, and that whole pile of elaborate ritual — muttering and chatting and laughing at the empty air — was rather eerie; now each time I go back I only remember it as going to play, and if I stay away too long I even miss it. It began, I think, when I learned the little village was soon to be demolished: I started to feel that every look at the place was one look fewer, and the once poor, shabby houses and the cold, still lake became, of all things, endearing.

Honoring the ancestors calls for offerings of food. A large square table is set up in the living room, two stools on each of its four sides, and the small room is filled. Rather than a living room, I’d say it’s more like a Buddhist hall: on ordinary days, just inside the door, at the far end, stands an altar, the censer, incense, and paper talismans of the bodhisattvas all laid out in good order, and one of the candles, incense sticks, or the ever-burning lamp is always lit — so performing a ritual here suits the atmosphere well, except that, the space being cramped, setting out the food always means carefully stepping over the old wooden threshold, squeezing to the sides, and then reaching in to place it.

That table of food is always beautiful: four bowls — greens, wood-ear fungus, tofu, and pressed rice cake — the greenish-black, brown, and white plain and fittingly elegant, for every year it is prepared by my grandmother, a devout Buddhist, and the ancestors can only ever eat vegetarian fare. I don’t know whether they have complaints, but every time the rite ends and we ourselves eat, we grumble no end. The rice, too, is especially good to look at, served in small straight-sided bowls like teacups, each mound topped with a perfectly round dome; the peak of the rice always rises a bowl’s height again above the table, brimming full yet perfectly steady. The blue-and-white patterning of the green porcelain bowls and the white spheres above them make a still life in themselves, and only the heat drifting up reminds you that this is a bowl of rice. Last of all, one end of a pair of chopsticks is carefully lifted and laid shallowly across the bowl, and the table is set. Everything on it is so well aligned that a single glance tells you it was carefully arranged — anyone can see this is not an everyday scene of eating. Perhaps the trivia of daily life, with some deliberateness and design added, is elevated into something beyond the everyday: exquisite pastries and coffee laid out before eating may be called afternoon tea; the same bathhouse, with a robe and a sofa added, may be called leisure; a broken bicycle’s handlebars, sawn off and set upside down, become a work of art. Speaking of art, I can never forget a line I once heard: a work of art is an object that has lost its use value. By that reckoning, this table of food — no, even the table itself, in this mysterious setting — could be called a kind of art; and then, having taken part in this ceremony while doing nothing at all, haven’t I become a work of art too? I was staring blankly at the table, sensing that whatever was bubbling up in my mind was about to carry me off somewhere strange again, so I hurried off to look in the mirror and dispelled the thought.

After the small rituals are over, the last step is always to go outside the door, burn the remaining paper ingots, and mutter some words. In the past I rarely followed along to watch; even when I went out, I’d run off to play in the back-garden vegetable plot or by the lake, paying none of this any mind. The back-garden plot was always interesting — I remember tasting wild strawberries and mulberries for the first time there as a child, and seeing my first mantis and grasshopper. Rain or no rain, the plot’s soil was always turned to soft mud by watering, and one trip across it doomed your shoes; as a child I didn’t understand this and was always scolded for it, and now that I understand the reason I still can’t resist the pull of the things in the field and stride resolutely in all the same. This time I’d meant to run out and play too, but at the door I heard them saying: “All you foes and creditors, come and take your money; take the money and be rid of your grievance, take the money and be rid of your grievance…” — and only then, with an “ah,” did I understand where the paper money burned at the door each year “goes.” Listening closely, there was more: “All you foes and creditors, bless us with a peaceful and happy new year,” which set me worrying. Whether or not our family has enemies and creditors — if it does, it’s sending some grief to those foes who have passed, for even an enmity is a kind of bond. But it’s one thing that the enemies don’t come to our door seeking revenge; to have them take the money and then bless the whole family with happiness seems rather too much of a stretch. I don’t know how those ghost-spirits feel on hearing it — perhaps they’ll have a scuffle down in the underworld with our own ancestors, or perhaps they’re secretly plotting how to trip us up in the coming year, or perhaps, unlike my petty guessing, they simply accept the goodwill and depart. That I can’t see, so I don’t know; I just ran off to the riverbank to scoop up water weeds and pretended not to hear.