According to our lunar calendar, this would be the last day of the year, the eve of the Chinese New Year. It was also the last day the Flower Market would be operating, so we decided to make another visit to that place before it wraps up, and one would have to wait for a whole year before the stalls operators would be back with their goods. In our case, we didn’t know when we would be back to Canton, so it only justified our purpose for visiting it even more.
It drizzled slightly the whole morning, and it was colder than usual, but we helped ourselves to warm street food which were being sold along the way. The rain did not seem to damper the festive mood a single bit, maybe only those who were selling their goods without a proper canopy or shade. We spent the whole morning walking around the huge stadium, until it was time for lunch, and headed over to my cousin brother’s house.
There’s something strange about home-cooked meals. When you have it too often, you begin to lament whose-ever cooking it is, in my case, my dear mother’s, would be bland, compared to restaurant served meals. It gets boring at time, seeing the same meal being served in front of you over and over again, and my mother kicking up a fuss over running out of recipes or ideas. However when you have not been having home-cooked meals for some time, you begin to miss that taste, that simple bland meals which you used to despise so much. Then you realised how much it means, to have a home-cooked meal being served on the table in front of you. You start to appreciate it, the effort which was put into it. For a healthier eating, or rather, the simplicity of life.
After we were done with lunch, we walked out to a huge bookshop in the area, and my oldest cousin brother insisted on buying some books for me. It was embarrassing because I rejected his offer at first, it wasn’t nice to keep having people buying you things, but he and his wife fiercely insisted on it. To an extend, his wife wrapped her arms around me tightly to prevent me from going ahead to the counter and paying for the book. It gave my cousin the chance to slip ahead of me with the book, and paid it for me. That expression on their face was priceless. They were grinning, like two mischievous kids who had just managed to bully someone weaker. But behind that, they wanted to show their appreciation for our visit, and this was part of their hospitality.
It was compulsory to have a reunion dinner, around a round table to show that everyone has gotten together, from near or far, to sit down to a dinner with your family members before the Chinese New Year tomorrow. Before our dinner started, we were handed jossticks, and we prayed to our late uncle who had passed away 9 years before, inviting him to sit down to dinner with us. While he can’t be with us here in person, we believed that his soul would come back. It might seem far-fetched, how could someone who is dead hear us when we do not speak while praying. It all leads down to belief. The belief that the souls would hear us speaking silently in our minds, the belief that they understood fully what we said to them, and the belief that, they do not really leave us, but merely in a different world, separated by an unseen border.
And that, was our reunion dinner, with my uncle.
この長い旅で 