🏡 Returning Home for Spring Festival
Two years ago, my parents renovated our old house in the countryside, and since then, our family’s annual return there for Spring Festival has become a tradition. On the first day of February, under overcast skies with rain, we made multiple trips loading our pre-packed clothes and New Year supplies into the car. We then took shelter inside and drove through the misty rain toward our hometown.
I thought about how I probably wouldn’t return to the city for quite a while. I would be living a semi-rural life, navigating spaces where the boundaries between people blur. Here, everyone shares some degree of kinship, and daily greetings are exchanged between neighbors who have lived alongside each other for decades. Windows rarely open here; instead, doors stay perpetually open. People sit leisurely in their living rooms, gazing at life unfolding through the doorframes across from them. The sounds of life, aging, illness, and death flow freely.
People are familiar and transparent with each other, inseparable yet living separate lives. This creates a peculiar mixture of politeness, pretense, and warmth, where friends can become as close as brothers, and brothers need not act like brothers. Everyone is related, and perhaps because of this, no one truly feels close anymore.
As the middle-aged generation moved away and returned with their flourishing families of children and grandchildren, familial bonds became confined to individual households. The doors remain open, but the flowing sounds have been replaced by comparisons of wealth and social status—whose family drives what car, who has made a fortune elsewhere.
As for family ties, disharmonious siblings maintain Spring Festival customs and traditions merely for the sake of external appearances, while relationships between younger generations naturally become less intimate than those with friends and classmates. Everyone pretends to be harmonious, waiting to return to their normal lives after the Spring Festival ends.
📝 memos
The Elders’ Demeanor and Tone
I should be wary of this top-down attitude and view people as independent and equal individuals.
Spring Festival is a Ritual
I’ve realized that Spring Festival is just a ritual, or an occasion. If family reunion is needed, why wait for Spring Festival? If connection is desired, why wait for Spring Festival? The cleaning, special foods, and new clothes are all preparations for this ritual—a ceremony that tradition has imposed on everyone.