Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
What did Spring Festival mean to a child like me, growing up in rural China in the early 1970s, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution? Chocolate? Not at a time when even table sugar was a luxury good. We hadn't even heard of chocolate. Candy? Impossible. How could a poor family like ours, which was never even issued the official ration coupons, purchase it? Rice, then? No, not even that.
In those years, folks like us, living near the banks of the lower Yangtze River — a so-called home to rice and fish — barely scratched out a living, feeding ourselves on sweet potatoes, beans and tulip bulbs all year round. A bowl of rice was a luxury meal. Rice, white crystalline rice, was never to be had, except in our dreams.
One Spring Festival, which marks the Chinese New Year, left an indelible impression on my mind, and taught me a lot about the world. It was 1972, if I recall correctly, and I was 6 years old.
It was three days before the festival, and the weather was unusually cold. Cracks formed in our frozen water jugs, and the spoons in the kitchen felt as if they were made of ice. By midafternoon, ominous clouds began to form, and the wind, blowing in heavy gusts, kept all children indoors. Just then, two little girls from nearby Anhui Province knocked feebly at our door.
Mom let the girls in. They were about 7 or 8 years old and spoke a kind of dialect peculiar to Anhui. It was hard to follow, but at long last Dad made out what they were saying. Their parents were so poverty-stricken that they left their daughters to wander off, begging for food. Mom spread some dried bean stalks on our mud floor, over which she added a small mattress and a quilt. She prepared some warm soup with minced tulip slices and carrots for supper. I felt a little disheartened, for two more mouths meant less food in our stomachs that night, but sympathy for the girls prevailed. They ate with us, in silence.
The next morning, two days before the festival, some faint light leaked out of a crack in the sky. Later, snow began to fall. Something deep in the recess of my mind was triggered. What caused it, I don't know. I only know that an unspeakable impulse coursed within me, and all of a sudden I began to hallucinate the white flakes of snow as grains of white rice!
In no time, I brought into play my talent of commanding my peers, by ordering the two little girls to help me carry out buckets, basins and every container we could get hold of. I forgot they were strangers. We aligned these containers in one straight, neat line, waiting for the grains of snow to fall into them. I began to jump around, and my excitement infected A-huang, my dog, who shot out of the house like an arrow off a bow, and joined me, wagging his tail. Seeing this, the two little girls joined as well. They mimicked us, jumping around for a while, but before long their little legs grew tired. They must have been exhausted, and unbearably hungry. They continued to watch half-attentively.
The more densely the snow fell, the more intensely I jumped. Below the gray, sullen sky, I raced from one end to another of the alley before our door, all the while crouching as if I were weaving through bushes of rice stalks. I imagined myself on a bright rice paddy, a merry rice paradise. Then I opened all my pockets and my mouth, and stood there, ready to receive the grains.
This was an extreme yet natural reaction for children in those days, a demonstration of extreme longing, of the painful rounds of expectation, frustrated expectation, renewed expectation, disappointment and, ultimately, despair. I was like the children who, on midautumn nights, opened their mouths toward the full moon and howled, "mooncakes, mooncakes!"
When the snow turned into bigger, whiter flakes, I suddenly realized that it was time to harvest the crop. I ordered the two girls to help collect the vessels, and brought them into the house, for Mom to cook our New Year's Eve dinner. But when I finished, and looked down into the buckets, all I could find was pools of water. I was dumbfounded. "Where is the white rice?" I asked Mom, drenched and exhausted. "It has been eaten by heaven," she replied wryly.
By now the warmth from my body had melted the grains of snow on my clothes. The mud floor below my feet was dimmed by the water drops. I sat down on a little wooden stool, gasping. My dog, with his wet fur, cuddled slavishly at my feet, at times sniffing my shoes, at times my trouser bottoms, as if he, like me, were searching for something to put in his stomach. My eyes grew tired, as I stared out through the crack of the doors into the snow-filled world. The two little girls looked at me for a while, perplexed. I felt water running down from my head into my mouth, with a salty taste. Was it melted snow, or tears? I don't know.
When Spring Festival came, it meant nothing at all to me. Once again, we had tulips and sweet potatoes. Probably I stayed indoors reading storybooks with pictures of sallow-faced American children going hungry in the streets, their disheveled and thickly mustached fathers carrying bowls begging from house to house. Seeing those children, I felt more at ease, for we were relatively happier and merrier than those poorer kids from the capitalist world.
One day, after many years, I chanced to look up the definition of the English word "mania" — "an irrational but irresistible motive for a belief or action." There is no exact word for that feeling in Chinese, but I understood deeply what it meant. As a 6-year-old boy, overcome with extreme hunger, I had known it. Today, I still wonder: Was it "snow mania" or "rice mania," and what caused it?
Haiming Xu is a professor of applied linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University.
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