Spring Festival Food Memory
Yanming Yu
Spring Festival is undisputedly the most meaningful and significant festival for all Chinese around the world. The festival is always in either January or February, so that during the time, it's the coldest days in a year.
For most Chinese, Spring Festival is not only a symbol of family reunion, but also an obligation to fulfill. With the acceleration in urbanization in current China, increasing alien workers from the countryside and rural areas stay in the big cities to struggle for living. Every year when Spring Festival approaches, two hundred million workers embark for their home. They probably take entire two-day's train and one-day shuttle bus to get to the destinations. In some cases, homecoming people will get home by the Spring Festival Eve, so that the whole family will sit aside the round table filled with delicious meal, waiting for every family member to reunite.
During the old times of China, most people were living in hard lives. My father was an unconfident young man from poor peasant family country twenty years ago. His growing was filled with hardships. The family during the time was in an extremely deep poverty. My father had thin gruel for three meals, with the veggie grown by my grandmother in the yard. The veggie's type seldom changed, but was cooked in different ways like pickling. Every week my dad could get an egg laid domestically. And times in a year which could be numbered to eat meat -- each one could enjoy one piece of meat for five family members.
Under such bitter circumstances, you can imagine people's hungers for food. Yes, Spring Festival then automatically became the only chance to satisfy this terrible desire. Since the tradition of Spring Festival is to celebrate and reunite through having a big meal together, every family would try its best to accommodate the visiting relatives. My family during that time would get a portion of pork; that is the pig was butchered by the village administration, and then the pork was distributed to more than thirty families. Butchering a pig for Spring Festival was a great bliss to the villagers in poor times and didn't happen every year.
Foodsion/April, 2014 23