A couple of days before the Chinese New Year of 2004, my friend Fan Qun, her husband and I travelled by bus, minibus, boat and, finally, foot, to her family’s remote village in the hills of Hunan province; her two brothers, migrant workers in Guangzhou, had also returned for the festival. On New Year’s Eve, we rounded up a rooster from the paddy fields outside and her father dispatched it quickly with a cleaver, while the meat of a fattened pig that had already been slaughtered was smoked above the kitchen fire. Fan Qun’s father made offerings to his ancestors at a domestic altar laid with the pig’s head, a whole smoked fish and a block of tofu, as well as enamelled mugs of rice wine and homegrown tea.
All day, Fan Qun’s mother and sister-in-law laboured in the kitchen. A chicken stew hung in a blackened cauldron over the fire; another pot filled with dried radishes sat in the embers. Steam billowed from the woks as the two women sizzled meats and vegetables on an old-fashioned, wood-fired range. Mid-afternoon, they brought out the feast: sweet, golden fritters of glutinous rice, home-cured bacon and carp, Cantonese roast duck brought home by the brothers, a magnificent rooster soup with medicinal herbs, dried squid with jujubes, smoked pork intestines, dishes of tofu and homegrown vegetables and a potful of rice with sweet potatoes. The young nieces, dressed in festive scarlet and pink, sang a song. Then we drank toasts of grain liquor and Coca-Cola and ate. At midnight, we all went outside to light firecrackers that snapped, sputtered and echoed up and down the valley.
The New Year’s Eve reunion dinner (tuan nian fan) is at the heart of Lunar New Year celebrations all over the world. Traditionally, family members return to their ancestral homes for a sumptuous banquet of home-cooked dishes, followed by a week or two of idling and visiting relatives and friends. In rural areas of China, home-reared pork is often served, along with chicken and a whole fish, the latter because the phrase “a fish every year” (nian nian you yu) sounds the same as “a surplus every year”. But as the Chinese world is on a scale to rival Christendom, local festive food customs vary as much as global Christmas dinners. In the wheat-eating north of China, people traditionally prepare jiaozi dumplings, while the Sichuanese steam fat slices of pork belly in clay bowls packed with salted vegetables. In many parts of the country, families gather around bubbling hotpots packed with meatballs, quail eggs, chunks of pork belly and other delicacies.