LUCAS DE LA CAL Longkou
Longkou
Updated Saturday, February 10, 2024-19:02
Global Patio Fortune and the significance of being born in the year of the dragon
The 84-year-old grandfather has a serious addiction to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. During dinner, he only takes his eyes off his cell phone to pick up some
turtle meat, fried cicadas with soy, or a piece of pork blood jelly with his chopsticks
.
The grandmother complains that the old man, whose hands are very worn by a lifetime working in a coal mine, wakes her up almost every morning because he starts watching videos of girls singing, monologues, or at full volume in bed. cooking tutorials.
The eldest son, an accountant in a cardboard factory, excuses his father by remembering that the man is deaf and that, unable to participate in family conversations, he entertains himself with his cell phone.
The little son, a worker at a fish processing plant, takes his mother's side, but his brother reproaches him that he was the one who bought the patriarch a high-end cell phone and taught him how to use all the applications.
The daughters-in-law - one works in a real estate agency and the other is a housewife - take the opportunity to take advantage of the mother-in-law, reminding her that she is also hooked on the mobile phone, in her case to an e-commerce platform.
A moment of the homemade preparation of one of the dinner dishes.L. OF THE C.
The two granddaughters, cousins between them, defend their grandmother. The oldest works for a multinational that imports Italian wines. The little girl is studying vocational training. In the background, the television is on with
the colorful New Year's gala, which lasts more than five hours
. In the street you can hear the roar of firecrackers and fireworks. But Grandpa remains oblivious to all the noise. He is engrossed in the videos of him.
Living with an ordinary Chinese family at the beginning of the Lunar New Year, that of the dragon, the most auspicious sign of the zodiac, is a unique experience to absorb from within the traditions of a rich ancient culture in its most important festival. In Longkou, far from the bubble of large modern cities, everything is more authentic.
Yuan, the eldest granddaughter, refers to Longkou as
a "town where everyone knows each other
. "
She does not even grant it the rank of city even though we are talking about the home of around 600,000 people. The dimensions in the Asian giant are something else. And even more so for a twenty-something that the last two cities she has lived in have been Beijing (21 million) and Shanghai (26 million).
Tasting of traditional Chinese New Year dishes.L. OF THE C.
Longkou, meaning
dragon's mouth
, is anchored off the Bohai Gulf off the northeast coast of China. Yuan's father explains that 20 years ago this place was a poor fishing village with no roads. He and his wife, when his daughter had just turned three, went to look for a life 900 kilometers inland, in the province of Henan, where they opened a DVD store.
The girl stayed with her grandparents, who are the ones who really raised her because the parents did not return until she was a teenager and then they sent her to a high school student residence. This is common in deepest China:
kids usually become independent at the age of 15
, when they go to live on the same campus where they have school, in their hometown, even if they are 10 minutes from their parents' house. Later, Yuan has been the only one in her entire family to have gone to university.
The economy of Longkou, a land rich in natural resources (oil, coal and gold, as well as a large port), has developed greatly in recent decades. There is no lack of work, salaries have increased and life, in general, is very cheap. Families of very humble origins like Yuan's have prospered to position themselves in the comfortable middle class, increasingly stronger in China.
The New Year's dinner starts in mid-afternoon with a large banquet of traditional delicacies. There are
up to 23 huge and different dishes
for nine people: prawns, eggplant salad, pig's head and blood, knuckle, gelatinous rice, potato
noodles
with mushrooms and chicken, sweet sausage, meatballs the size of a hand, ribs, cabbage with soy, fish, turtle, cicadas that look like cockroaches but taste like crispy bacon...
Grandma doesn't stop looking at the foreign guest throughout dinner. It's the first non-Asian face she's seen in person in her entire life. In fact, no one at that table, except the granddaughter who sells Italian wines, had ever seen a Western boy so close. They are curious to know how he holds chopsticks, what he eats and how he tries to interact in Mandarin.
Before the lavish dinner, Yuan's family
thoroughly cleaned the house and car, a tradition to sweep away the previous year's bad luck
. They also burned several pieces of paper in the street with their home address written on them so that the spirits of their ancestors would visit them during the holidays. So that they do not get lost along the way, all the streets are illuminated with red lanterns, the auspicious color. On the doors of their homes, families hang couplets with warm messages of welcome.
Setting off firecrackers and fireworks is another great custom
to scare away bad spirits, although this fun ended due to environmental restrictions years ago in large cities such as Beijing or Shanghai.
The most watched program in the world
At the end of the banquet, the family squeezes onto the sofa to continue the New Year's gala. The public channel CCTV has been broadcasting it live since 1983. It is the most watched program in the world, with an average audience that exceeds 1.2 billion viewers.
The
live show
is a mix between a more successful version of José Luis Moreno's Noche de Fiesta and a Communist Party rally performed by the most famous artists in the country. There are more than thirty diverse shows: opera, Kung fu, monologues, dance, ethnic dances, trapeze artists, military parade, astronauts from the Chinese space station reviewing the most important technological achievements of the last year.
With midnight the end of the gala approaches and it is time for
the traditional 'jiaozi' dinner
, small steamed empanadas filled with meat, shrimp, leek and tofu that the family has prepared in the morning. The equivalent of our grapes on New Year's Eve. Grandparents leave three bowls of
jiaozi
by the window for the spirits. After this second banquet, the patriarch distributes
hongbao
, red envelopes with money,
to the sons and granddaughters .
The next morning, on the first day of the year of the dragon, it is time to take the
route through the houses of neighbors, more family and friends
. On some visits they drop more
hongbao
, tea, sweets and unsalted pipes. The foreign guest is paraded around Longkuo like a monkey at a fair. Local people, not at all used to these visitors, continually stop him on the street to take photos with him. The police, upon learning that there is a
laowai
- a colloquial term they use to refer to a foreigner - roaming around the city, also go in search of him to find out where he is staying and the purpose of his trip.