Happy New Year, gods of the island.
In the summers from 2008 to 2014, Zhu Lanqing, a post-90s girl, traveled almost every inch of her hometown Dongshan Island with a camera on her back.
What she took photos of were the most common southern Fujian customs, the sea, fishermen, temples...
There were almost no standardized urban landscapes in the photos, but they were recorded with the gentlest brushwork. The next southern island has daily life as gentle as the sea breeze, and a sense of ritual as lasting as the tide.
In 2008, I left Dongshan Island and went to Beijing to study.
In my memory, the sea breeze blows all year round on the island. The area that is truly urban is actually very small, and most of it still looks like a village.
However, during my many trips back and forth to my hometown, I saw that the urbanization process, which was fast and sometimes slow, was changing the appearance of Dongshan Island little by little.
Originally, people in small places did not like to remember road names, and often referred to them in ways such as "by the big tree", "under the banyan tree", "beside the park" and "big market". But when I returned home a few years later, I found that the banyan tree was gone, the park had been demolished, and the big market was becoming increasingly desolate.
Places from the past become difficult to recognize, and the memories attached to them slowly fade.
All of this urged me to take photos of Dongshan Island as soon as possible.
The only remaining field in the village is planted with vegetables that farmers sell in the market every day.
Before I started shooting, I bought a map of Dongshan Island and studied its shape carefully to see if it really had the shape of a butterfly as mentioned in some introductions.
Well, maybe there are some similarities, but the name "Butterfly Island" is still a bit far-fetched. As for the "Oriental Hawaii" depicted in tourism advertisements, it is even more outrageous.
Next to the South Gate Seawall, a girl solicits tourists for a seafood stall.
Whenever they hear that I live on an island, my friends will ask, "You must take a boat when you go home, right?"
But in fact, you don’t need to take a boat back to Dongshan Island. For as long as I can remember, there has been a bridge connecting the islands called the Eight-foot Gate. Every time the bus passes the Bachi Gate and rolls down the window, the strong smell of the sea hits my face - I know I'm home.
A seafood restaurant on the beach at Bachimen.
The smell of the sea is the smell of the fishing village and the smell of seafood. It is not a pleasant smell, but it always makes returning tourists feel at ease.
As soon as you pass the Bachi Gate, the road ahead seems to become very fast, and home seems to be right in front of you.
Dad and grandpa were sitting in the yard of their hometown, basking in the sun. Grandma was taking care of the lush flowers and plants around them.
Southern Fujian is located on the border, and Dongshan Island is at the end of the border. Perhaps because of this geographical and political marginality, many characteristics of southern Fujian culture have been vividly preserved.
During the fishing season every year, in the fishing ports of Gongqian Village and Aojiao Village, fishing boats with "Mindong Fishing" written on them, amid the calls of seabirds and the sound of firecrackers, Sail to more distant seas.
Because of fighting in the unknown sea day after day and year after year, the people born here have a reverence for nature and gods engraved in their genes, generation after generation. inherited.
Several fisherwomen sitting on the beach to rest.
The village where I grew up is not very big, but it has no fewer than ten temples, large and small, including Tianhou Temple, Mazu Temple, Zhu Family Temple, Wuguwang Temple... and scattered at the intersection with The Tuigong Temple among the fields.
Smaller than the Tudigong Temple, it is a stone plaque on the roadside. It only needs to be engraved with a line of "Namo Amitabha" to make the incense burn.
Even a well in the village used for fetching water for washing, washing and cooking, someone put a brick beside the well and placed two oranges as a tribute.
Once I was taking pictures in the fishing village of Gongqian, and came across a very small temple next to the beach. There was no Buddha statue inside, just jars filled with jars sealed with red cloth.
Tua Pek Kong Temple.
I asked the old man at the door, what are these tanks for? The old man said that this temple belonged to the local landowner, and what was sealed in the jar were unknown corpses that fishermen salvaged from the sea.
These bones may have been fishermen who died in death. The locals enshrine them here to provide a resting place and hope to protect the tranquility of this sea area.
This is of course a kind of reverence for life, and also a kind of sympathy for each other's fate.
Every year during the Lantern Festival, the whole village will place tributes on the table and welcome the gods back together in the open space in front of the ancestral hall. Each family's firecrackers are taken in turn and can be set off for a full three hours.
In most of the southern Fujian ritual scenes, food is the protagonist. This is the best way for people in southern Fujian to communicate with gods. Probably, there is nothing that a meal cannot solve.
But I have a more romantic explanation for this: people dedicated the harvested food to the gods and begged him to bless the harvest in the coming year. Food, land, and gods circulate in this relationship, which has lasted for thousands of years. In the final analysis, what is preserved is still a sense of reverence for nature.
Some people may question that these foods dedicated to the gods can still be taken back and eaten by oneself. But a friend from my hometown once said that food that has been worshiped by gods will become unpalatable because the gods have eaten it.
Some of the sacrifices when worshiping gods, such as leeks, pineapples, pumpkins, ginger, loofah, etc., are placed in a bamboo basket.
If there is a micro hometown, it is the grandma who accompanied me when I grew up.
Over the years, she has still maintained her living habits. She fanned herself when the weather was hot, put on a quilt when the weather was cold, and wiped her body with a towel when taking a shower. She was actually more comfortable than young people like us.
When the flowers in the yard fell, she did not break them. She only waited for them to fall before picking them up and placing them on a small lamp before presenting them to the altar. Although the flowers are not as beautiful as when they are in full bloom, they still carry the fragrance of flowers.
Grandma wears a slanted cloth dress all year round, carries silver and jade bracelets, and wears her hair in a bun that has not changed for decades. This is what she looks like before dressing up.
Grandma’s bed is Laolao’s big wooden bed. Grandma's room seemed to be at a standstill, no longer moving forward with time.
From this point of view, my grandma should be a quite conservative old man. But she showed greater tolerance for many of my "outrageous" behaviors than other family members.
After the college entrance examination, I wanted to buy a SLR camera, but my father opposed it, but my grandma used her private money to support me. Although she didn't understand what taking pictures was for, she never let me point the camera at her.
I dyed my hair, permed it, had my ears pierced and wore strange earrings. My grandma would always scold me as a joke and then follow me.
In this way, what my grandma has experienced, felt and learned throughout her life has deeply affected me since I was a child.
There are always a lot of flies in rural houses. Grandma hated flies so much that she kept a lot of fly paper in her house.
Although grandma has never been to school, she is definitely a walking "Dictionary of Life in Southern Fujian". She keeps track of dates using the lunar calendar and is familiar with every birthday or festival of the gods. No matter how unwell she is, she celebrates their birthdays.
First move a folding table to the door of your home, put a pot of simmered rice, put a few incense sticks on the rice, add a few vegetables, and finally burn the gold paper.
Grandma held the incense and closed her eyes, and could talk to the sky for a long time. Her tone and speed were like talking to an old friend. I know that what she wants is not promotion and wealth, but the simplest wishes.
Grandma and mother burn gold paper at the door of their home, which is the last step in worshiping gods. The summer is hot, but fortunately there are longan trees for shade.
You must know that people in southern Fujian are full of imagination when it comes to worshiping gods. Sometimes the gods are close at hand, and sometimes they are far away.
Every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, grandma will hold an activity to worship the "Moon Girl". At this time, the god is the moon. The richness of the table setting on this day is probably second only to that of July and a half. The food is presented in a symmetrical form, and vegetables such as fungus and mushrooms are also added.
Every day on this day, my grandma, mother and I will put our hands together and look towards the moon, which is 238,900 miles away from the earth, to pray for peace in the new year.
Every year on New Year’s Day, grandma always wears a red headband on her bun. Such traditional head flowers can only be bought from an old lady setting up a stall next to the market.
At the beginning of the year, we will welcome the Lunar New Year with burned-out red candles and relays of burned gold paper. Even though her energy is not as good as before, grandma still makes brown sugar rice cakes and red turtle cakes by herself.
For this reason, an earthen stove and a large pot are reserved in the kitchen of the family, which are specially used for cooking New Year's food.
The countertop for making red turtle cake. This is a traditional pastry in southern Fujian. It is a rice cake filled with bean paste and has a red pattern printed on the outside.
When steaming pastries, grandma would bring a small bench and stay in the kitchen all day, constantly adding firewood and watching the fire.
In the past, I would guard the brown sugar rice cake that was just baked, waiting to take the first bite before it was formed. It was as soft and sweet as maltose. But after eating this spoonful, the rice cake can no longer be touched. You have to wait a few days to worship the gods before you can share it.
Although you can also buy rice cakes in the market, the taste is much worse than what grandma makes. Everyone is looking forward to this bite. Maybe grandma persisted for so many years just to satisfy us.
Grandma has finished wrapping the red turtle cakes. Each one is neat and beautiful, and the same size. When steaming rice cakes, she relied on this alarm clock to keep time.
However, when I grew up, I learned that in traditional Southern Fujian culture, all worship rituals during festivals are performed by women in the family.
Perhaps for the rural women of Grandma's time, such gender-based division of labor meant that each had their own duties to a certain extent. Grandma had been begging for good luck for her family for decades.
But today, many women in southern Fujian are working and taking on tedious housework and rituals. Tradition has become a shackles of inequality.
My mother and I plan to keep only the relatively relaxing parts of the ceremony in the future. And the rest, just remember it as a vivid piece of history.
As the number of photos increased, I slowly began to expect it to become a woven image archive.
I used "Bachi Gate", "Home", "Food, Land, God" and "Sea" as clues to reconstruct my hometown, and combined all the collected memories and fragments of reality into a book that can be read .
Through this form, it seems that these spaces, people, and objects can be condensed on these papers, and by covering and unfolding them layer by layer... it provides a space for the disappearing hometown in the memory. A time specimen that can be paused and touched repeatedly.
The book cover is cut from an old blue cloth found in Grandma's closet.
There is also a photo in the book of me wearing an old-fashioned cloth.
I found this old cloth dress in my grandma’s room. Grandma said that it was a wedding dress sewn by her sisters, and it had faded to a light pink after decades.
I use this photo as the beginning of the entire book.
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