<
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/27/china/rural-china-lunar-new-year-covid-intl-hnk-dst/index.html>
"In China’s southern Guizhou province, there’s a tiny village in the southeast
corner, nestled deep within the mountains, called Dali. A wall of lush green
trees and bamboo surround this village of about 1,000 people, who’ve lived in
wooden homes with gray-tiled roofs for centuries.
It’s the Lunar New Year, and during the daytime, the doors are rarely closed.
People here say they’re all relatives, and the village is like one big family.
Almost everyone shares the surname Yang, except for a few families with the
last name Li or Wang. Most people I met asked me to call them “Xiao Yang” or
“Little Yang.”
We walked by a raucous group of young adults, sat shoulder-to-shoulder on tiny
stools around a short table packed to the brim with food. The men smoked and
ate at the same time, throwing tangerine peel and the hulls of sunflower seeds
on the ground. I explained to them I was a foreign journalist, trying to tell
the story of how they celebrate the New Year.
“We celebrate by drinking!” one man at the table said, before I could finish my
explanation. They invited me to join in, squeezing one more stool around the
table. A man handed me a plastic bowl, and another started filling it with
their homemade 60-proof rice liquor, pouring it from a massive clear plastic
bottle that looked like a gasoline container.
A woman said they all worked in factories in the cities. This was the only time
many of them could see their children.
“We go wherever we can make money,” the man next to me said. He typically
returns home only for the Lunar New Year, but for the past three years even
that has become hard due to Covid restrictions.
“Before, when we wanted to go home, we couldn’t, he said. “But now the country
is open, we can all go home. We’re happy.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
