Birthday is a big deal for kids; cake and present are not enough, inviting friends to their birthday party sounds better. Usually kids always have fun at a birthday party, and birthday party pictures record their special moments of growing up.
When you grow older, you don’t care so much about having a birthday party.
My brother, sisters and I were all born at home in a village, no clinic, no birth certificate. Villagers keep their children’s birth date by a lot of interesting ways. Like: planting paddy rice season, peach blossom season, mushroom season; rooster’s first crow in the morning, cooking smoke rose up from houses in the evening, group of villagers came back from field. You see, how accurate our birth date could be, we just take our parent’s words. Nobody seems to really care about it, every one has a birth date on their ID.
My family didn’t do much for birthday, lucky if my parents cook a couple of meat dishes for birthday occasion. I was the one who always remembered my birthday and would remind my mom in time. So my mom would boil an egg for me, the whole hard boiled egg just for me.
At that time, most family’s were poor, meat was a rare dish on the dinning table. Lucky we grew up in tropical area, people collected wild vegetables for themselves or livestock on the way home from working the field, we kids picked wild veges by the stream or paddy field on the way home from school. Every year’s rainy season my elder sisters went to the jungle looking for bamboo shoots, they always came home with a full sack of shoots on their shoulders. Bamboo shoots were made into dry bamboo shoot or preserved bamboo shoot, both ways are ideal to store the shoots. But stir fried fresh bamboo shoots are delicious, we ate it a lot during the season. At wild fruit season, my friend and I went 2 , 3 kilometers away to hunt wild fruit, that’s how we dealt with our sugar cravings.
My family had 6 children, 4 kids still in school, only my dad had a job ( My mom couldn’t speak Chinese and she was close to retirement age when we moved to Han community, so she didn’t get a job). My dad’s small salary fed the whole family.
In the community there was a crazy man, who originally came from Shanghai, an educated man. I only remember his last name was Li. During the Culture Revolution, the horrible treatment drove him crazy. Even after the Culture Revolution, he didn’t go back to his home, he lived alone with filthy clothes wondering around the community, looking for cigarette butts. I’m not sure, did he have a place to live, can’t imagine he had 3 meals a day. He always carried a dirty big mug around, some times people gave him food. Wonder, did he ever beg for food?
He didn’t do any crazy things to frighten kids, most time he was quite OK and had common sense. Even though, he got money every month from government. I know one way he spent his money. Many times he bought a kilo of pork and gave to my mom, asked my mom to cook for him, he only took less than half of this meat, left the rest to my family. My mom cut the meat into small bite size, fried with home made preserved soy bean; salty and strong taste, very good with rice and lasted longer time too. That’s how my family got special treat from Mr. Li. I don’t know why Mr.Li picked my family to cook for him. Maybe he felt easy to ask my kind and humble parents; or he felt pity for my family, that was his secret way to help us. We’ll never find the answer for this quiz now, I heard he went back to Shanghai and died many years ago.
That’s a side story my mind led me to. It is amazing, even in my life time, I have experienced so many changes. I usually hear more bad news than good news about the Chinese government on media here, and I agree there are lot of problems in China. But I have to say, the Chinese government did a pretty good job to feed their people, the most populated country in the world.
Birthday party, I never dreamed about it before I came to Hawaii. I had my first birthday party on the first year I moved to here. Terry wanted a party for me, he made it happen. Friends, lots of food, music, and cake. That was first time I had Chantilly cake, a local favorite cake, became my favorite cake too.
I didn’t plan for a birthday party this time, Terry ordered a roasted duck for lunch, we just wanted a easy day. On the way home from store, Terry stopped at a bakery, said” buy a small piece of cake for your birthday”, I didn’t even get out from car.
When we get to home, there is not one small piece cake, but two cakes. Look the picture, they are not only pretty, but also very yummy. Our friend made them for me, and Terry helped to keep the surprise. If I knew it, I would rather have a small party to share with friends. There is no way to eat them all by ourselves, even Sonny said ” I can eat them all” before we started, he couldn’t even finish the first piece.
I phoned my friend, thanked her for the wonderful cakes, and asked her family to help eating some cake.
Getting older, I’m still smiling to my life.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
TO ME
