松糕 or Relaxed Cake

Yesterday morning when I woke up I tried to go back to sleep, but was interrupted, as is not unusual by unnecessary amounts of fireworks. When it became painfully clear that sleep was not an option I did the next best thing which is go out and have a look. There was a huge procession and lots of balloons which had been set out the day before. I couldn't tell at a distance whether it was a funeral or a wedding procession. I thought from all of the marching band music that it was a funeral. I took a couple of pictures and went downstairs to get something to eat. My mother in law informed me that the fireworks and balloons were to celebrate the new bridge, a very small affair that can just barely be made out in the right hand side of the first picture. Evidently the first people in the procession were five generations of married couples all from the same family. You need harmoniously married couples for bridge ceremonies. I expressed my surprise that there were five generations of one family all married and living at the same time. If they were all of the same clan, but not directly related, that is the younger generation being the son of the previous generation all the way down five generations, then it is much easier to believe. For example, my uncle in law has a friend from junior high school (about 40 now) who he always delights in telling me over and over again is one generation younger than my wife (in her 20s.)

This reminded me about an interesting anecdote I read in an academic article about Qing dynasty queue clipping cases and bridge building. Queues were a legal requirement during the Qing dynasty. If you cut off your queue, this was tantamount to not recognising the sovereignty of the dynasty and was punishable by death by beheading. For a time there was a scare of thieves and magicians clipping people's queues, I believe during the Kangxi reign. One of the supposed uses for a queue was in bridge building. The queue, which when clipped would contain the soul or vital forces of the victim was attached to the bottom of wooden pilings to make them easier to drive or buried beneath stone bridges to ensure the longevity of the structure. Evidently, in some areas, soul magic was rampant in large important engineering projects as a way to ensure lasting work. The victim would quickly weaken and die his soul being forever attached to the edifice.

When I had finished daydreaming about bridge building magic, my mother in law offered me some sort of cake made with glutinous rice. When I typed the name into Google translation it came up with Pine Pudding. Maybe I'll stick with that nomenclature. Relaxed cake is another pseudo-translation of the ilk my favorite teacher always told us never to perpetrate. At any rate, the pine pudding is pictured to the left. I included the picture with the somewhat dirty surroundings to help you understand what an evil and dirty thing pine pudding really is.

I ate about 2 small bowls or one full bowl. It had just come out of the steamer and was very soft and extremely sticky. After I choked it down and hurried back to the computer, I began to feel sorry I had. The phlegm started to build up in my throat and didn't abate for about 20 minutes which is when the pain in my abdomen started for real. First I felt as though the pudding was trapped in my esophagus and wouldn't sink into my stomach. Then for the next few hours I felt cramps travel through my digestive system. So of course I had to begin eating medicine, the first of which is pictured to the left. After drinking this which is a bunch of grass stems ground up and boiled in water I did not get any relief. I lay in bed not moving until I was called to lunch. I moaned loudly and shamelessly. I was made to eat two more medicines (not pictured) and even after that I could only eat a half a bowl of rice for fear of further upsetting my various organs. I fortunately survived this ordeal, but it proves that Chinese food should not be fooled around with. This, naturally, brings to mind another anecdote from the movie (or book for those of you who still use them) To Live by Yu Hua (a fictional work) where the doctor is rescued from the red guard because the daughter is bleeding a lot while giving birth, and the doctor is too dizzy to be of any help because they haven't been feeding him. So the family run out and buy him a bunch of steamed bread of which he wolfs a whole lot. He then demands water which is of course steaming hot and he drinks more than he should which causes the steamed buns to expand and his stomach to burst and he dies and then the pregnant daughter dies too because there are no doctors left alive. Thank God I had had the pine pudding and not the steamed buns.

I almost forgot. I was telling an inspired version of my sufferings today at dinner, and my mother in law laughed the whole way through. She then mentioned that they had received more Pine Pudding and it was much better when it wasn't steamed, and hurried to cut up a couple pieces and offered it to me. I refused at which point she cut up the entire thing, put it on a plate and set it in front of me. My wife refuses to touch the stuff and protested violently when it was set before me. She is a dear. Its not such bad stuff, but sometimes I am too zealous in my endeavours to try to help my mother in law finish all the food so its not wasted. I am struck by the fact that people in the US who lived through the great depression are still much more affected by it refusing to waste food, and people here who lived through real famines much more recently will waste food when most of the population still has to struggle to get enough. Some people here are still conscious of it. One of my friends fathers always scolds his children if one grain of rice is left in the bowl or dropped on the table. I was kind of a fan of that. I don't like it when people's memories are so short they forget about famines in their own lifetime.