Paradox Blog

Among those delicious foods we have for Chinese festivals, have you noticed many of them are made out of the sticky kind of rice? The sweet rice balls we ate for Winter Solstice as well as for the Lantern Festival, the "nien gao" for New Year's Day, the turtle-shaped red rice cakes for the birth of a son, the sweet porridge for the winter months and the sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves for Dragon Boat Festival. We know for one occasion we offer the sweet and sticky goodies to the gods so that they will be busy negotiating the stickiness in their mouth than reporting any misbehaviors we may have had back to the almighty Jade Emperor. For the rest, we are the ones that are negotiating the hard to digest sticky foods.

It used to be we work hard but ate poorly all year long so starting with the Winter Solstice, we boiled sweet rice balls to rid the chills on the darkest night and mark the beginning of another cycle of lights. Moving on to the sweet porridge we ate for the winter months, stewing together the dates, peanuts, red beans, lotus seeds, dried "longan", sweet sticky rice and brown sugar for a feast that would strengthen our "chi" to ward off old man winter all through the cold months. On New Year's Day we ate "nien gao" and hoping for "elevated" good fortune all though the year. For Lantern Festival we had one more bowl of sweet rice balls. Then, occasionally, we had the red-turtle cakes. And we had the bamboo wrapped sticky rice on the fifth day of the fifth moon.

If you are laboring all day on the fields it is not hard to benefit from all these "good foods". When you are sitting down most of the day and eating well every meal, all the sweet goodies only adds to the excess fat you already try to get rid of. No wonder these foods are not as popular among young people today. For one thing, on the taste level, they cannot compete with the western sweets of butter and sugar, like ice cream and cakes. For another, these traditional foods take time to prepare. Even though all of them are now available commercially, having sweet porridge out of a can or buying bamboo wrapped sticky rice from a supermarket freezer does not give the same taste as the ones that slow-cooked by your mother or the same fragrance as the aroma of the bamboo leaves steaming in your grandma's kitchen.

For each special occasion, I still brought home loads of the sticky goodies in the name of celebrating the festivals. After too much of a good thing, I was left with heartburn once again. Then it dawned on me it is not the food that I missed, it is the memory. It is not the taste that I tried to re-visit, it is the time and place forever lost.