The Old Nanjingese (老城南人) went about their day as usual and were...
Buying vegetables from the vendors on tricycle-trucks...
Eating warm, fried vegetable dumplings...
Exercising in the park...
Staring at the foreigner wandering around and wondering why she was taking pictures of their vegetable trucks...
Selling fruit out of the back of a van...
And selling hot snacks to the kids that just got out of school.
In Old Nanjing, street food is a little scary in terms of hygiene, but it's especially delicious in the winter time, when a kebab or a fried potato cake is all you need to warm-up for a few minutes. The aromas of sweet hot dogs also waft through the air, and mix with the pungent odor of "smelly tofu" (臭豆腐), which has the unmistakable smell of a mixture of old socks, rotten eggs, and sewer.
It was business as usual. Demolition was underway...
Friendly fruit stand owners yelled out, "Nice to meet you," and giggled childishly when I responded with, "WOW, your English is amazing"...
Shop-owners tended to business in their second-hand clothing stores along the street... (Note: If you look closely, you can see the faded red character with a red circle graffitied on the wall on the right side. That is the infamous chai character (拆), which means "demolish," and is painted on houses deemed for tearing down).
Fish heads were being prepared for dinner...
There was just one thing that was unusual about this day, which was that people were burning small fires everywhere and kowtowing to them...
Do you remember Wang Xiaohong, my friend from an earlier post? She and her son let me take pictures of this important ritual while they explained the tradition of burning fake money for your ancestors on the winter solstice.
First, big bills of fake money are bought with yellow paper that is easy to burn...
Usually, you burn money at the entrance of the house of the oldest living member of the family...
You separate the money into piles, which represent a family member(s) that passed away. I asked them which family member represented each pile, and they wouldn't tell me, they just said, "That's something you decide for yourself inside your heart."
When you burn the money, you give it to your ancestors to use in the after-life...
As you burn the money, you say, "Grandma, take this money!" or "Grandpa, here's some money for you!" I asked them what they said, and they said, "You say whatever is in your heart. It's just like praying in a church. You tell your ancestors something, and you don't have to say it aloud." I love the way they said "take the money!," because they add an, "Ah" (啊) at the end for emphasis, which is like adding an exclamation point at the end of a sentence. It's used frequently in Chinese, especially when saying "thank you." You can add an "Ah" at the end to add an exclamation point. When they were saying, "Grandma, use this money Ah (奶奶，把钱给你的啊!)! they really enunciated the Ah. Maybe like 3 exclamation points...
When you are finished making the fires, you stand next to each one and kowtow (bow over and over again to show respect, a type of worship) a few times. Then all that's left is a few piles of ashes next to one another...
Afterward, they invited me to eat with them. Here's the final product of the fish head shown above, after the rest of the ingredients were added to the soup:
Here's my piece of fish:
Wang Xiaohong and her son eating together inside the clothing shop:
Wang Xiaohong and me eating dinner:
Done eating (吃完了)! Check out that beautiful fish bone, I ate all the meat around that sucker:
Wang Xiaohong's shot glass with baijiu 白酒, a type of strong Chinese alcohol. When she and her son were toasting each other, she laughed and jokingly said, "Earlier we gave our ancestors money, and so now we ask them to bring us good business for this upcoming new year."
All in all, it was a great day walking around and taking in Old Nanjing's flavor. It was a beautiful ritual, delicious fish, and warm friendship. After dinner, we had the usual conversation about how much money the average worker makes in the United States, and in turn, how much it costs to live in the United States. The reason for asking this, they said, was to find out how much money they could save up if they worked in America for a year. One conversation struck me. It went like this:
Son: "You Americans really look like the Soviets."
Me: "Yes, white Americans do look Russian sometimes. We also sometimes look German and English, or from other countries too. We're all immigrants, so we were all outsiders (外地人) at one time. That's why some of us look European, because our families originally were European. That's also why there's a lot of diversity in the US, there are white people and black people, for example. Because we all come from different places around the world."
Son: "Well, then what about people that are indigenous to America (本地美国人)?
Me: "We call them Indians. Do you know that term?"
Son: "Oh! Yes, I know. I understand now. That makes sense."
Me: "Yup, white people are really from other places (是外地人).
Son: "That's just like in Nanjing. There are outsiders always coming in and migrating from other places. Eventually they will start to replace the original inhabitants of Nanjing by sheer numbers. After one or two generations, they will start calling themselves Nanjingese too. Then the original Nanjingese will eventually die off, and we'll have a new definition of what Nanjingese are."
Gotta love concepts of place-based identity. How quickly our ideas of who we are and where we are from can change! We call ourselves American, but is that who we are? I think so. At least now I am. Then what makes a Nanjingese a true Nanjingese? Concepts of who Nanjingese people are and what makes them unique are changing just about as fast as the urban landscape is... My job is to find out how and why...
Chinese word of the day:
口水- kou3 shui3- literally, "mouth water," aka saliva.
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