The Lunar New Year will be celebrated immediately after New Year's Day in 2022, immediately after February 1.
I remember when I was a child, when I was a child, when I was Chinese New Year's Eve, my grandfather would paint an ink painting for the ancestor tablet on the mahogany table, and the ink painting had plants with leaves like orchids and green onions, embellished with small flowers, which was quite elegant.
Grandpa retreated to Taiwan in 1949 with the Kuomintang, and he was a manager hired by the army, not a soldier. After the army came to Taiwan to disband, Grandpa was dismissed, because there was no honorable status, Grandma and her three children followed Grandpa to work hard for life in the lower society.
Grandpa later engaged in shipping work, in fact, he has long been in contact with his friends in Hong Kong and his relatives in his hometown. When I was a child, a letter from my hometown often brought a happy smile to my grandfather for several days, which was sent by my uncle, and they were in contact for more than thirty years, until after the lifting of the martial law in Taiwan in 1987, the two places corresponded directly, and Grandpa would happily read the letter to his family. When I was in high school, the two sides of the strait opened the mainland to visit relatives, and my grandfather and grandmother, accompanied by their father, finally returned to their hometown to worship their ancestors.
By 2002, My grandfather was eighty years old and could not walk due to the degeneration of his foot joints. In September of that year, we transferred from Hong Kong to Hangzhou, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair out of the airport, saw my uncle with his family to pick up, considering my grandfather's physical condition, it was not appropriate to take a car all the way to my hometown Pan'an, so I decided to party in Hangzhou.
It was the first time I saw my uncle, aunt, aunt and aunt Shandan, and everyone had a number in mind at that time, knowing that this meeting might be the last time the family would get together. When they met, they had been talking about the situation in their hometown, and when they talked, they had a Zhejiang accent, and they only knew that the little white flowers that were full of mountains and fields in their hometown in the past had now disappeared with the construction and development, and only bare branches were left on the hills in winter.
After listening to the uncle's narration, Grandpa muttered to himself: Are those flowers gone? Are the flowers gone?
Later, I undertook the exchange work between the Tainan Cultural Association and the community in southern Fujian. In 2005, when I first went to Zhangzhou to see daffodils, I felt that the shapes were very familiar, very similar to the small white flowers painted by my grandfather when I was a child, but the daffodil bulbs here were skillfully crafted by the carvers, showing a variety of shapes, and they were not the same as the flowers in the paintings I saw as a child.
In 2006, the Zhangzhou Daffodil Association held a flower exhibition at the Wang Ancestral Hall in Yanping County, Tainan City. In the past, every Spring Festival in Taiwan, temples around the world would hold daffodil exhibitions, but after 1949, the source of daffodil bulbs was interrupted, and this folk custom was discontinued. Therefore, this exhibition attracts people from all over the world to come to enjoy the flowers, and many elderly people see the flowers and smile with surprise, as if they have been separated from their old friends for a long time.
That year, I took a pot of daffodils to the nursing home to visit Grandpa. Grandpa, who had lost his memory of personnel affairs, smelled the fragrance of flowers and saw flowers, he was first stunned, and tears flowed down, especially this time he actually called my name immediately, instructed me to take this pot of daffodils home for the ancestors to worship, and asked me to light incense and say sorry to the ancestors, I did not paint for several years to worship. At this point, I realized that my grandfather had painted daffodils.
Seeing that Grandpa was rarely awake, he couldn't help but ask, "Why do you want to paint daffodils to worship your ancestors?" Grandpa kept repeating: "Every winter, only this flower blooms all over the mountain in my hometown, white and fragrant, and at that time I take your uncle and aunt to the mountain to pick flowers." Your grandfather will take flowers to worship the ancestors..." It turned out that when I was a child, my grandfather painted the daffodils of his hometown and offered them in front of the ancestral tablets, presumably at that time, my grandfather was painting while thinking about his hometown in the distance.
In 2017, I did not return to Taiwan for the Chinese New Year, but came to Pan'an, Zhejiang. Walking into the living room, I saw that the patterns on the furniture and coffee table shocked my heart, is this not an upright daffodil pattern? The aunt said: "These pieces of furniture were left by Grandpa to give to Your Grandpa, and now that Grandpa is gone, it will be left to you." "I asked my aunt why she wanted the daffodil pattern? The aunt said that this was a family custom, because the Mountain of Pan'an was rich in daffodils, and it was used as a tribute to the gods and ancestors in the New Year.
On the first day of the New Year, under the leadership of Uncle Shan Qingtang, I went up the mountain to worship the ancestral grave. When I arrived at the cemetery to prepare for the worship, I found several daffodils swaying in the wind in the weeds pile behind the grave. When I stopped, it was as if I was telling me the meaning of the flower language "Pure love" of daffodils, that is nostalgia, that is nostalgia!
Daffodils connect the nostalgia of my grandfather's grandson for three generations of their hometown. Perhaps in the near future, because of the development and construction of Pan'an, the daffodils all over the mountains will disappear in this wilderness countryside, but the nostalgia of cultural blood will never disappear.
After 2017, I bought daffodil heads from Zhangzhou every year and sent them back to my hometown, and also handled daffodil activities in Zhonghua Street, Xiagang Street and Zhongshan Community in Songyu Street, Siming District, Xiamen. In Taiwan, from 2006 to 2020, the flower exhibition has not been interrupted, until 2021, due to quarantine problems, the Zhangzhou Daffodil Association could not find an export unit to undertake, could not transport daffodil bulbs to Taiwan, and had to suspend the daffodil exhibition that had been held for 15 years.
This year, the daffodil bulbs are still due to quarantine problems, can not find the export unit to undertake to handle the taiwan, during the Spring Festival to the Lantern Festival, Taiwan is not able to smell the fragrance of daffodils. The ancient poem has clouds: "A spoonful of clear water is clean, there is no breeze full of incense", I believe that the fragrance of daffodils will still spread around with a strong nostalgia, just like my family story told in this article.
Author: Zhou Zhiru Finished by: Straits Herald reporter Yang Siping
Zhou Zhiru, born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, with her ancestral home in Pan'an, Zhejiang, has served as the secretary general of the Tainan Municipal Cultural Association and the Anping Cultural and Educational Foundation for more than 20 years, and has been committed to cross-strait cultural exchanges, covering community building, rural construction, old city cultural reconstruction such as Nan'an Fengzhou, Xiamen Shabowei, training cultural relics advocacy such as Siming District Cultural Relics Advocacy and Taiwan Youth Innovation Base Such as Siming District Zhongshan Road Longwei Base. The cross-strait daffodil exchanges, Zheng Chenggong Cultural Festival and Lantern Exhibition have not stopped in Taiwan so far, and in 2018, they won the honor of "Best Ferryman" by the Provincial Taiwan Affairs Office. His books include "Meet Anping Toujia", "Meet Anping Artist", "The Border of the Sea Roar", "2021 Historical Images of Anping People", and "Wang Chengxi Picture Book".