Yesterday was the Festival of Lanterns here, a holiday which is apparently tied somehow with the Chinese New Year in that I guess it is celebrated at the first full moon of the first month of the lunar calendar year. We saw the big rabbit "lanterns" up in Taichung last weekend that were on display in preparation for the upcoming festival, and here in Tainan part of the celebration includes a big fireworks show. Now fireworks, as I remember learning as a kid, originated in China (as far back as one or even two thousand years ago), and I guess they have been using them ever since in rituals or celebrations to ward off evil spirits. Marco Polo is credited with bringing the basic ingredient -- "gunpowder" -- back to Europe with him after his travels to the Far East, and sure enough the Europeans figured out a way to use the stuff to kill people instead!
Yungnane asked me if I wanted to go to the Festival of Lanterns fireworks celebration at another local Matsu temple, a different one than the one we visited earlier in the week. I learned that Matsu is the name of a woman who, as legend has it, miraculously saved some fishermen once upon a time, or maybe even on multiple occasions, such that she is now sort of a deity, or maybe a saint -- his wife suggested she was sort of equivalent to Mary in the Christian/Catholic religion. Temples are erected in her honor, usually near the coast since she is still revered as the protector of fishermen.
They picked me up at 5:30 and we first stopped for dinner at a Cantonese restaurant. Canton refers to the part of China were Hong Kong is located, and folks from there speak Cantonese rather than (or in addition to) Mandarin, which in the 20th century was established as the primary oral form of the language used throughout the country as well as places influenced by the Chinese diaspora. I learned awhile back that, whereas the same characters are used throughout the various Chinese provinces for writing, the pronunciation of the characters varies. Thus those who speak only Cantonese cannot understand those who speak only Mandarin, although they could both be able to read each others' writing. In Taiwan, many people also speak Taiwanese, which is a dialect derived from, I think it is, the Fujian province in southeastern China. Taiwanese sounds different enough from Mandarin that, if I pay attention, I can usually tell which of the two is being spoken.
As with the languages, the different provinces of China have different styles of food, and while Chinese restaurants in the US typically mix a few of these together on their menus, I think it is more common here for restaurants to be more differentiated, although Yungnane seemed to indicate that the Taiwanese have created their own style too -- probably a "mash-up" of lots of mainland Chinese styles -- and that may be what dominates the restaurant scene here. In this case the dinner consisted mostly of a variety of small pieces of meat, not all entirely identifiable, but including some tasty chicken cooked with the dried hot red chilis (my favorite, given my penchant for spicy food), likely some pork, maybe some beef, and a dish of little oysters cooked with thin slices of cucumber marinated in vinegar, which we dipped in a sweet (rather than the clear-your-sinuses kind) wasabe sauce. A veggie dish, a sort of egg-drop soup, and a nutty-tasting reddish tea complemented the rest of the meal, which ended with the obligatory orange slices and a nice little roll with a lightly-sweet "icing" you could put on it.
A few observations on eating meat here. Over the years I've gravitated towards a much less meat-based diet, so while I don't mind eating it here, I'm not really sure it's the best thing for me, in a more metaphysical sense than simply physical. But so be it, much of it tastes pretty good! There is, however, for me anyway, the mental barrier that comes with eating meat that comes in very different forms than I'm used to, especially when it's really fatty or it comes chopped in small slices that include bone, ligaments, muscle, etc. and the normal thing to do is to eat everything around the bone. In Chinese culture, to their credit, there's not much that's edible that goes to waste. I feel a little silly at how much of all that I leave behind on my plate. But given that, the one utensil I miss most here is a knife, not a fork. I can eat just fine with chopsticks, and the absence of knives and forks is the obvious reason why the tendency is to serve meat in small chopped-up pieces. Fine when all you gotta do is hold a piece between the chopsticks and eat everything other than any bone that's there. But when you want to separate parts that your prefer not to eat, chopsticks aren't as useful.
After dinner we stopped to pick up son number two, who's English nickname is Eric, from "cram school." Both boys -- the older is Jack -- are taking English classes in the early evening, and I guess it is common in Taiwan now for students in such classes to take on English nicknames. These two tried to find one that approximates their Chinese name. That process can work in reverse too. They take my English name and convert it into Chinese characters that sound a little like my name. Jose did that a few years ago and had a coffee mug made for me at a local pottery place with the three characters inscribed. I'll be curious to see if Jose's translation matches the one the folks at NCKU have used to make me "official" here. Anyway, Jack was sick and so was staying home with grandparents, but Eric wanted to come along to watch the fireworks.
Earlier in the day Yungnane had indicated that there was some kind of "risk" associated with this event, so that I should wear more casual clothes -- that was my interpretation anyway. When they picked me up they started to say things like there could be some danger there from the fireworks so we should wear helmets that night. I'm thinking, hmmm, that sounds a little weird, what could that mean? Driving towards the temple, away from the city, the traffic was pretty heavy and they said that it was from all the folks heading to the display. We got off the main road and headed down some smaller neighborhood streets that were filled with people walking in the direction we were heading. Suddenly the temple came into sight and it was huge -- much, much bigger than the one we went to on Tuesday. We parked in a nearby field, and sure enough, the three of them grabbed raincoats and bicycle helmets -- they offered me a helmet that I declined. Really, how dangerous can this be, I'm thinking. We then joined the throngs heading toward the temple.
The big plaza in front of the temple was pretty full already, but we made up our way past a bank of loudspeakers through which some guy was yelling something very loudly, to a point where there wasn't much open space in front of us and we had a clear view of the stage.
We got there at about 7:50 and Yungnane then told me the show was supposed to start at 8:00. Sure enough, right on time, fireworks started shooting off the temple roof into the air, first sort of a short pyrotechnic prelude followed by what they then announced would be a seven-minute display. My attempts at photos of those didn't turn out so well, but I guess everyone knows what fireworks look like anyway. When that display was done, we all turned around to watch the big bamboo structure back behind us light up.
Then the man at the microphone talked a little more, and all of a sudden Yungnane told me we needed to move now, we needed to go further back to a safer place! As we head back, we see people getting out their gear, lots of big sheets of plastic that they're holding up in front of them, Yungnane points out some fireman as we walk by them, and now I am starting to wonder what's going on -- what could this possibly be?! Before too long, back in the direction from which we had just come, above the crowd we could see a large box-like structure getting moved into place, pretty much smack dab in the middle of this plaza area, surrounded by people, at least some of whom seemed pretty well-prepared for whatever was going to happen next. By now, I was guessing there must be at least ten thousand people in the vicinity, and Yungnane thought probably even more. You could feel the excitement building, there was nervous laughter in the crowd, people were huddling together. As Chinese pop music began blaring through the loudspeakers, the firemen stepped up to the box to begin the show, lighting the fuses through some slots in the side.
Fireworks started bursting out of the top of the box in rapid-fire fashion, shooting toward the sky, the sharp pop of firecrackers exploding at the apex. In the next moment, more fireworks started flying out the sides of the boxes just over the crowds' heads at a slight angle, making a sound like a thousand screaming banshees as they whistled by overhead! While most of them flared out before they could land in the crowd, that certainly wasn't true of all of them. Yungnane then explained that in a previous year someone had been blinded by getting hit in the eye. They were shooting out in all directions, and you never knew when one might head towards you, so you definitely wanted to keep a lookout in case one did. Here are a couple of pictures, to give a sense of what this was like:
For what must have been three or four minutes the box produced a steady stream of screamers coming at us and firecrackers popping above us, with the backbeat of the music thumping away in the background. It finally slowed to a stop, things quieted down to just normal crowd noise, and we all relaxed a bit. OK, I'm thinking now, that was a little crazy -- I didn't really feel in danger, but at least it all made sense as to the warnings and preparation.
Four or five more boxes came and went, all doing essentially the same thing. It became clear that the people with the plastic sheets were standing right up close to the boxes, and given the rather sporadic angle and directionality of the screamers coming out the sides of the boxes, there was some chance that one would aim right at them, and without the plastic it could easily do damage. One box sent more of them our way than the other ones had, and in fact one of the screamers hadn't flared out before landing, still in flames, in the hood of some guy's hoodie just a few feet away from me. I finally figured out that the people up close didn't bring their protective gear just to keep them from having any accidental landings, but these were the thrill-seekers who were standing up close for the excitement of having the screamers coming right at them!
The fact that this whole event could happen seems pretty remarkable to me, with people allowed to put themselves at risk this way, with public and private organizations providing the money needed to make it happen, with government employees on hand to literally start the fire, with someone getting blinded and not filing a multi-million dollar lawsuit, with the decision to keep holding the celebration even though someone was injured in the past -- if nothing else it gives one pause as to what we mean by "freedom" in the US. This celebration reflected a kind or level of freedom that we have lost in America, given our heavily-regulated and even more heavily-litigated society. Whether that's good or bad depends on one's ideology, of course, but I appreciate having had the opportunity to watch this fireworks display and experience a bit of the thrill of the danger it presented!
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