Making Tofu, Growing Mushrooms, Steaming Rice Cakes, Milling Yam Starch: Endless Joy

Because of the pandemic, we reduced contact with the outside world and gained a lot of extra time. To add pleasure to life and to lower the chance of catching COVID-19 at supermarkets and markets (we have not been to a supermarket for seven months, and once my own vegetables were enough, I rarely went to the wet market either, saving a good deal of money), we now make many things at home that we used to buy.

I never expected that the various skills I learned as a child in the countryside would come into use this year.

When I was small, every year in the twelfth lunar month, every household busily prepared the New Year goods: making tofu (called da doufu in our local speech), steaming rice cakes, milling yam starch, roasting crispy twists (a sweet made from sweet potato), and frying peanuts. My wife and I are from the same region and both took part as children, so we still remember how. My father once grew and sold mushrooms, so I still know how to make spawn bags and cultivate them. And so, during this period, I set to work.

As children, preparing New Year goods before Spring Festival was the happiest time, because it meant a better diet. These treats, once reserved for festivals, have long since become everyday fare. We still eat them, but we no longer feel the childhood excitement of awaiting them, and the festive atmosphere is gone.

For a country child, joy was simple; a small delight in life was enough to excite us for a long time. I remember, when making tofu and steaming rice cakes, we children trailed after our parents to the village tofu shop and cake shop.

Usually one or two households in a village owned the equipment for making tofu and steaming rice cakes. They ran it as a business; before the New Year, people paid a small fee to use their equipment and premises.

We would stay up late with our parents just to drink a bowl of fresh tofu pudding straight from the pot. Sugar added to the steaming, tender pudding was wonderfully satisfying. Because things were scarce, we country folk did not have tofu pudding at every breakfast as city folk did; we only had it at New Year, so we cherished it. Fresh rice cakes straight from the steamer were also delicious; we dipped them in white sugar and ate until we could barely move.

There were queues before the New Year, so sometimes we did not get to eat until nearly midnight. Though we were supposed to stay up with our parents, we usually fell asleep on the woodpile in the shop. When the tofu pudding and cakes were ready, Mother would wake us to taste them, grinning and teasing us for being too weak to stay awake.

We ate not only our own family's but also our uncles'. When my uncles made tofu and cakes, their wives would send a portion over to us nephews and nieces so we could enjoy it. So once the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month passed, our mouths were never idle.

Back then every household also slaughtered a New Year pig, and fish were nettled from the village ponds, which the cadres distributed equally by household size. At the pig-slaughter we feasted on various pig offal; at the fish distribution we feasted on fish heads and offal.

Today the New Year atmosphere is gone from the countryside. People no longer bother making their own cakes and tofu, buying them instead at the market. Few raise pigs, so no New Year pig is slaughtered. The village still occasionally distributes a few jin of pond fish per household, but it can no longer rekindle the old festive spirit.

What I did not expect was that, after leaving home for so many years, I would pick up these crafts again and that they would bring me endless joy. Our hands-on ability is probably beyond the imagination of city-raised people. There is hardly anything we cannot make, and home-made food tastes far better than what one buys at the market or supermarket. We added no equipment; the kitchenware we already had was enough.

Unexpectedly, my son has also found joy in this slow "do-it-yourself, feed-yourself" life; he has taken to making all sorts of "dark cuisine." I am unimpressed by the boasted success of so-called successful people, but I am full of enthusiasm for living happily. I love Li Yu's Xianqing Ouji (Casual Notes on Idle Life) and admire that cultured, pleasure-loving writer and dramatist.

Among the patients and families I see, about two-thirds have depressive moods. With an ill person at home, low mood is understandable (though positivity is better for recovery), but among my Beijing friends and colleagues, few are free of anxiety—which is regrettable. People pin their hopes of happiness on the future, on some moment when a wish is fulfilled, while the present is either busy or anxious. The future is a ridiculous thing; it robs too many people of present happiness.

I am actually an utterly ordinary person, but among my relatives and friends I have become an oddity; they admire my detachment—though I do not know what I am detached from. I simply never grew up; in my wife's words, I am a big child. My son often tells people, "My dad is childish; his IQ stays at the level of a schoolchild." I only had a year or two of anxiety after university; since then I have rarely lived in anxiety.

I have no secret. I have simply kept a child's heart. Everything in life easily satisfies and delights me. When my mother was alive, she often told people, "My second son never worries about where his next meal is coming from." In our hometown this sounds like a criticism, but to a person who "does not worry about the next meal," it is the finest philosophy of life.

If a person habitually dwells in worry, something went wrong in his growing up—and too many people are like that. Worrying never stops: after today comes tomorrow, after the house the car, after oneself one's children. The anxious worry all their lives; the unworried do not worry even if the sky falls. I fall asleep fast—head on the pillow, asleep within a minute—because my heart has no care.

When my mother was alive, she once had a fortune teller read my fortune. The blind fortuneteller said, "Your second son is a 'July lamb.' In July the grass and water are lush; even on the green stone slabs he will not starve, and he will never worry about making a living." My mother was delighted; given her nature, she must have beamed on the spot.

Unfortunately I do not know who that blind man was and cannot find him. If I could, I would thank him properly. Because my mother believed in fortune-telling, his words put her at ease about me and she never worried about my survival. To have lifted one care from my mother—the blind fortuneteller deserves credit for that.

Only those who love life have wonderful lives. Whether life is wonderful is like drinking water—you yourself know whether it is warm or cold; no one else needs to judge. If we feel it is wonderful, then it is. My son aims to enter the mathematics department of Peking University. I praise his ambition but do not demand that he achieve it. I tell him to strive for the dream, but not to care too much about the result; success or failure is no great matter.

Life lasts but a hundred years, yet desires and sorrows are myriad. If a person can savor life and find pleasure in every present moment, that far surpasses achieving some grand ideal. As for so-called life ideals, I prefer to treat them as by-products of living.

Humanity's greatest wisdom, I think, lies in the delightful ways of life we have invented—not in high tech that reaches heaven and earth, still less in the bloody glory Qin Shi Huang and Emperor Wu of Han built through war. If anyone tells me to my face how great all that is, I want to shout back: to hell with it.