When John Z inadvertently bragged to me that his Yi friend had invited him to spend their most important, buckwheat-centric holiday, the Torch Festival, in his home village, I invited myself along. This was several weeks ago and I put it on my calendar with a grain of salt, because these things don't always work out. Well, this past Friday I set out from Lijiang to meet the guys at a village somewhere between Tiger-Leaping Gorge and Shangri-la. Sounds pretty cool, right?
The bus dropped me off at a shopping center on the side of the road in the rain. There were a couple guys on bicycles riding from Shangri-la to Dali who had stopped to have a smoke and get out of the wet. No helmets or real bicycle gear besides those big ponchos that flow over the handlebars. They set off eventually, and then the village head, who happens to own the roadside store, came out and invited me to sit by the fire and chat while I waited for my peeps. When the guys arrived we walked down to Han Jingquan's village, about half an hour away through fields of buckwheat, potatoes, and surprisingly, oats. Jingquan works for a hotel and met John in an interview about a training program he had been through. He's a young, ambitious guy building his family a new house with his wages at the hotel. The house is still under construction but John and I slept there on futons on the clean wooden floor.
When we got to the village we had tea with the the family, with a snack of yogurt and oat flour zanba mixed with sugar. We had time for a little walk up into the hills and then came home as Jingquan was killing a special chicken in our honor. The torch festival is all about slaughtering animals and drinking, and so it began. The next couple days were a blur of sitting by the fire, eating meat and buckwheat, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beer and liquor. We went to a cousin's house and ate roasted corn with barley wine, and to an uncle's house and ate mutton and potatoes and drank Dali beer. The highlight came when Jingquan's family killed their pig, first massaging it and saying goodbye, and then tying it up and slitting its throat in the house. Before it was killed, Jingquan's father lifted it up and then placed it on a pile of pine needles, that were then set on fire outside the door, to make peace with the pig's spirit. Then the whole family crouched in the doorway while the dad, carrying the squealing pig, walked circles around them, seven in each direction. He brushed the pig's back over their heads and then laid it down on plank on the floor, and they held it down and killed it. John and I sat there by the fire and watched. Just wild.
At five in the afternoon yesterday the torch-lighting began, and all the kids carry these bunches of burning bamboo and branches to their family's fields. They plant a few burning twigs in the field to bless the harvest, and then throw the rest of the branches onto a big pile. Then they play games in the field by the school. Totally cute if you don't think about the whole "don't play with fire" thing.
Our host seemed very proud to have brought us there, the first foreigners to ever stay in his village. Most of the folks seemed to understand Mandarin but were too shy to speak it, for fear of saying the wrong thing. Pretty weird I thought considering I sound like a slow kindergardener, but whatever. We were surrounded by the Yi language which has a cool word for booze I think that goes "bbbbbbb" like when you blow bubbles underwater.
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