Fire in the Streets

On Sunday I left Joe’s apartment rather late at night to walk home. I had tried to translate a Chinese poem into English, and then we had telephoned our parents. It was nearly midnight now, and Joe needed to rise early for work in the morning.

As I left his apartment I noticed that the balmy air smelled strongly of incense. Even the wind carried traces of smoke. At home I associate incense with hemp and tie-dye, but here I associate it with prayer and offerings. In the near and far distance I could hear fireworks booming and crackling. When I turned the corner onto Xinming road, I saw a bonfire. The fire was in a sort of bucket on three legs, and the walls of the container had shapes cut out of it so the body of the fire was visible.

The bucket was placed along the side of the road in the parking lane. A shopkeeper stood in front of the fire, feeding it offerings of paper money. (Paper money, which is currency that wouldn’t work in the shops but is of substantial value to deities, is manufactured and sold in tight bundles and is a common offering in temples and shrines. Yesterday I saw handfuls of it crumpled up and stuffed into the mouths of two stone tigers guarding a temple.)

As I approached, I saw that the shopkeeper had a small folding table set up between his fire and storefront. The table was laden with pyramids of fruit, bouquets of flowers, tall candles, and burning incense. Inside the open storefront and against the very back wall I could see another shrine, this one was larger, ornate, permanent, and I guessed it might be home to a resident deity.

Walking further down the street, I passed more and more fires, some nearly extinguished, some only half built and not yet lit, but all accompanied by a table piled high with offerings. Some shrines were being tended by families, and some just by a single person. In some places I noticed rings of water on the ground, and I saw that during the ritual the people would pour circles around their fires. In front of some shops, the ring of water was the only evidence anything had taken place.

When I got home, I unloaded my arms in my room and took to the streets again. I walked west this time, into a smaller, narrower part of town I hadn’t entered before, where the houses were lower and older and the streets were darker and quieter. Peering down the alleys I saw scattered rows of glowing fires. Passing a large nightclub, I saw several men at work filling an enormous wire can with paper money; their fire would be huge. Three folding tables were joined behind them to hold an enormous spread of fruit, flowers, and incense. Women in short dresses wandered back and forth hanging onto the arms of suited men.

Now and then I saw fireworks explode over the rooftops. Firecrackers snapped and popped like gunfire, sometimes down alleys, sometimes in the main street, sometimes at the base of a bucketed fire. If I hadn’t known the sounds were fireworks, I would have been frightened.

I walked for an hour through the smoky fragrant streets, wondering if I would find my way home but at the same time too mesmerized to try. At some eventual point I found myself on a grassy and treed median with a path running down the center and it felt familiar and so I took it in a roundabout direction and walked until the houses began to feel right again and--sure enough, as I knew I would--I caught a whiff of osmanthus and I knew I was across the street from Joe’s school and that my door was just there in the darkness… and it was.

P.S. Don’t get the wrong idea… the streets don’t usually smell so fine: this was a special occasion.