Folk Art and Patriarchy in the Richest and Poorest Regions — A China Travelogue During the Spring Festival Part.2
Read Part.1 here.
Though the first leg of my journey didn’t end on a high note as expected, I stayed hopeful because I got a fair understanding of the second leg that would bring me to a richer, better-developed coastal region 1,000 miles away. To celebrate the Spring Festival in Teoswa and Hakka fashion has been on my bucket list for a long time. Since the year of Dragon is culturally and historically dear to the Chinese, 2024 has set the stage for even more spectacular celebrations. It’s a once every twelve years chance I couldn’t miss.
Another friend of mine and I met in Jieyang Teoswa Airport to kick off our third adventure in two culturally rich regions in southeast China. As we already did most of the sightseeing before, our targets were two back-to-back ceremonies of the Lantern Festival, usually the last day of Chinese New Year celebrations.
But first things first, I can’t emphasize enough the magnificence of Teoswa and Hakka cuisines. If you savor Cantonese food, chances are that a lot of it is either from the two neighboring regions or inspired by them. I’m not exaggerating when I say food is the real reason I keep coming back to the area.
Our first dinner blew my mind the second the foie gras reached my tongue after a quick dip in the simmering master stock. I’ve had countless hotpots my whole life and this was by far the most unique and satisfying. You simply couldn’t put a price on the delicacy. I was so impressed by the freshness, the mysterious spice combination, and the dedication of the chef, who personally helped us handle the boiling because the cooking time of each ingredient differed and there’s nothing she hated more than her creation being spoiled. I ended up ordering an extra plate for myself since my friend was already full, then the chef’s face lit up with a proud smile.
We got ready for the first night of the celebration in the country’s most populous village by arriving hours early. For comparison purposes, Yongzhi, the last village I visited, has approximately 300 residents. And our destination of the day, Dachanglong, is home to nearly 40,000 people, and more than 200,000 Chinese immigrants all over the world reportedly consider it their hometown. At first glance, it’s an affluent suburb just a few miles away from Puning (a county-level city under Jieyang) with a typical Teoswa style ancestral shrine safeguarding the village in the middle. And a reservoir, larger than any village pond I saw before, is neatly located in front of the shrine, a good architectural arrangement Feng shui-wise. Shui literally means water in Chinese, and it’s believed the bigger the reservoir is the better fortune it would bestow on the villagers. More water, more wealth, can’t argue with that.
An influx of spectators, tourists, and street vendors was growing in the village’s public square next to the shrine as we took a stroll. And local residents already lined up at the far end of the reservoir, each holding a pair of lanterns, the defining emblem of the Lantern Festival. Each lantern was painted one giant Chinese character Chan in crimson, the shared surname of the entire Dachanglong demographic. At dusk, the reservoir turned red by surrounding lamps, decorative lights, and the modern battery/LED-powered lanterns. Soon the lantern bearers began to tread methodically towards the shrine like an endless marching band and move in a spiral once reaching the square.
By endless, I really meant it. During our stay for nearly two hours, two lines of new lanterns, stretching across the whole village, were joining the spiral non-stop from opposite directions. I started getting some safety concerns over the maximum capacity of the square to which all paths connected were pretty narrow. How many was too many? Would there be potential risks of stampede? What’s happening inside the spiral? To get a bird’s-eye view, I almost elbowed my way to the peripheral area then climbed to the rooftop of a nearby abandoned building. From above, the sky-lighting ritual, magnified by its enormous scale, dare I say it, morphed into a scene from some cult movie — an on-going bloodbath, or a red, buzzing beehive. It’s hard to tell if it’s monumental, or creepy. And there wasn’t much going on inside, just thousands of Dachanglong natives pacing in circles with their Chan lanterns.
However, what ultimately drove us away was something we learned on the ground. Again, women were barred from the ceremony for the second most significant date of the Spring Festival. In contrast, little boys were walking with impish glee alongside their fathers and paternal grandfathers, as if what they were carrying was not lanterns, but their bloodline. I saw men carry their baby boys on one side and have lanterns raised up on the other. In fact, we were told it had to be baby boys — only families adding newborn boys from the last year are allowed to carry smaller add-on lanterns in addition to a pair of regular size lanterns. Because in Chinese, 添燈 (tiān dīng)/adding lanterns sounds just like 添丁 (tiān dēng)/adding men. What a way to show off the succession of patriarchy. Imagine being a member of a family with only one or multiple daughters in a tight community where everyone knows everyone and being excluded from its largest gathering of the year, it must be difficult, even humiliating.
I know for a fact the Teoswa region and Guangdong province in general are best known for its unhealthy obsession with having sons. Yet this was the first time I saw it firsthand, how suffocating and obstinate the traditions are and everyone has blood on their hands when it comes to the notoriously lopsided human sex ratio in China. According to the latest National Population Census conducted in 2020, Guangdong “led” the country in human sex ratio imbalance at 113, compared to a global average of 105 boys to 100 girls.
Not only the lantern parade was a male-only act, it also irritated me with eight characters written on the back of every single lantern — 萬子千孫，財丁興旺, which roughly translates to “With tens of thousands of sons and grandsons, both fortune and population will prosper.” Obviously it’s the village’s unanimous decision to marginalize women in such a brazen manner.
The night was still young and there might be more exciting actions to come, yet we didn’t want to spend another minute in the largest women-hating frenzy I’ve ever witnessed. We just left, heading back to town for some quick stress eating at Puning’s highly acclaimed night market. I wasn’t sure how I could live with this kind of cultural and social woe, but stir-fried beef and noodles and abalone soup with bitter squash tasted like a good start.
I lowered my expectation for the next day’s itinerary and instead was more focused on the food. My friend and I enjoyed a lavish lunch at an old seafood restaurant. Fortunately, we made it during the eatery’s limited business hours during the Lantern Festival. It wouldn’t open for dinner or the next day, a well-deserved break and a tradition still honored by the industry. On our way back to the hotel, the streets of the entire Jieyang city were almost empty — a scene resembling New Year’s Eve. Apparently the Lantern Festival has been a huge deal for locals.
Nevertheless we headed to Puzhai as scheduled, a nearby Hakka town that lures tourists with its annual one-of-a-kind fire dragon dance performance on the fifteenth day of the lunar new year. The good news was there would be more and bigger dragons at the festival to celebrate the year of Dragon. Yet we were more concerned about bottlenecks and traffic control, which meant we had to walk a mile or two to reach the venue, a town square situated on a gentle slope.
It turned out this was a ten times larger event than the lantern parade with at least 30,000 attendees and patrol officers were everywhere. To avoid possible stampedes, we carefully examined the square and its nearby territory and settled for a spot next to the emergency exit route. It’s not the best spot but the situation flipped once the first and longest dragon parted a sea of spectators like Moses. As we were distracted by the firecrackers and fireworks, the 100 ft long fire-spurting dragon started running. Not just running in circles within the square, the gigantic legendary creature sprinted towards the crowd, leaving a trail of its own fireworks in the dark night.
My heart almost stopped beating when the twelve feet tall burning monster carried by a topless crew ran so close to us then took a sharp turn like a tease, dangerous, in your face, and inviting. It’s a truly mesmerizing dance of fire that got its audience engaged in an unimaginable manner. I was temporarily blinded after the close-up exposure and my vision was taken by brightly burned fireworks in every direction, some even swirling. This wasn’t a drill. The unforgettable, adrenaline-pumping, and near-death experience was definitely not on my 2024 bingo card. Suffice to say, it’s very gratifying to wrap this long journey with Puzhai’s fire dragon dance.
Kudos to my friend who kept me sane (and recorded the whole dragon dance and my scream with perfect composure) throughout the madness. To beat the traffic, we decided to exit after seeing six dragons burn. On our way out, more dragons were standing by, snaking through tightly packed alleys one by one. It’s when our attention was drawn to the dragon carriers and the supporting staff, including some women, daughters, sisters, wives and moms. Some formed a human shield to keep the crowd away from blazing torches and meticulously-installed explosives, others recorded the parade on their phones. Few was actually involved in the fire dance by holding braided bamboo kindling and putting the dragon on fire later when the entire squad reached the square. Most of them followed their male family members on the sidelines, as they just watched the men walk to the most important and shining stage of their village life. It saddened me.
It surprises no one that carriers, again, are all men, though I firmly believe women are equally capable of carrying the heavy load of dragon puppets made of bamboo after proper training. Would women go topless for it? The act men practice to glorify their manhood (and avoid any garment catching fire during the performance) that applies to men only, as defined by men. I don’t doubt the courage they demonstrated by dancing in close proximity to fire, half-naked. In my opinion, women would be able to achieve the same goal with suitable protections. In other words, going topless is an option, not a necessity.
Fire dragon dance isn’t the lone festivity that bar women’s participation in the name of physicality. Yingge dance, another popular folk art originated in Teoswa, has presented the same obstacle to women for centuries. This rich, supposedly more open (to foreign trade at least) region never witnessed a single female Yingge dancer before 1949. Even after that, women dancers were extremely rare and not allowed to join male dance groups. And up to the present time, no matter how rigorously women dancers work or how many accolades they receive, they wouldn’t be able to continue to dance after getting married, who are then deemed “impure”, as GQ China reported earlier this year. Women’s sexuality has long been stigmatized, used against them and impacting their everyday life while men got to brag about theirs all the time.
If one just reads the GDP numbers of the two separate regions (For 2022 GDP per capita: Yunnan made an unimpressive amount of $8,695 and Guangdong nearly doubled it at $15,151) I visited throughout the journey, they would likely make assumptions that there must be significant differences between them. Yongzhi, a sparsely populated Tibetan settlement hidden in the East Himalayas, couldn’t be economically, ethnically, and culturally more divergent than Dachanglong and Puzhai, densely populated areas neighboring China’s most advanced trading and manufacturing hub.
However, something is shockingly similar — the persistence of patriarchy and the atrocious way women are marginalized in every aspect of both public and private life. Even with outstanding economic development over the past four decades, systemic structural gender inequality remains an insurmountable obstacle. No doubt China’s ranking on The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index fell from the 63rd in 2006 when it’s first published to the 107th in 2023, a downward spiral it shared with its Confucianism-influenced neighboring countries, namely South Korea (105th in 2023) and Japan (125th in 2023).
Epilogue
I didn’t summon up the courage to write this down until recently spending a few weeks in an all-female dive club in Shenzhen. Hidden on the maritime outskirts of the colossal city, it’s loosely run by a group of veteran divers and their associates, one of whom is my childhood buddy. They’ve managed to build a small yet resilient and trustworthy business over the years, and more importantly a dynamic and safe haven for women who want to pursue all kinds of diving activities. Besides full-time instructors, they also have guest instructors with specialties and seasonal visiting instructors — all are women from their 30s to 50s.
It’s the very first time I got to live in an all-female environment and see how smoothly everything runs, how loving and caring everyone is, and how strong their connections are without being related by traditional marriage. They do have their concerns and headaches, for example some told me they are way more comfortable doing business with women but this is still a male-dominated industry, and others need to deal with the pressure of getting married/bearing children from their parents. It sucks, as most women feel the same way, but they are in this together. Their bond won’t be sabotaged by opposite-sex marriage. Knowing that there are women out there creating this little hideout, not perfect — it’s as close as anyone gets to a women’s utopia in the real world, comforts me dearly. I’ve learned a lot more than my open water scuba diving certification from them. Salute, my fellow superwomen.
