Here is a short story that originally appeared in Rhoda Yee’s 1975 cookbook, Chinese Village Cookbook.
Dinner was eaten early in the village, usually around four-thirty or five, and bedtime was around seven or a little later in summer.
Often families would sit out in front of their houses and visit with neighbors. My grandmother was a marvelous storyteller, and we kids used to sit by the hour listening to some of her hair-raising ghost stories.
Her stories were made even more scary when the night was dark, the only other sounds were cricket songs and frog mating calls, and the only lights were faint glimmers from dancing fireflies.
The women liked to get together and cook, sew, quilt, or embroider. But, best of all, they love to play mah jong, a form of gin rummy using carved ivory tiles instead of cards. The men, too, enjoyed mah jong, but they preferred fan tan, a game similar to dominoes. They’d often get together at the one and only general store in the village for their bull sessions.
We kids didn’t have any ready-made toys to play with. They all were hand made. For instance, the girls would use two ends of burned incense sticks to make a cross. We’d pretend it was a doll, and we’d cut out scraps from leftover fabrics to make tops and trousers for our dolls.
Another popular homemade toy was the swallow, made with three chicken wing feathers tied together. We’d stick the feathers through the centers of small stacks of tissue paper cut into 1-inch round circles. The bottom was weighted with a coin. The idea of the game was to kick the swallow with the inside of one’s foot as many times as possible without having it land on the ground. Some kids were so accomplished, they could keep it going 100 times or more! When we became more advanced, we’d try different kinds of kicks or switching kicks between the left and right feet.
Many of the games we played were similar to the ones kids play in the U.S. We’d often go into the hills to hunt tigers and pick wild berries, or we’d go to the rice paddies and catch field mice and water snakes. Like kids everywhere, we were mischievous little devils.
Mah Jong, Ghost Stories, and Kicking the Swallow