One month baby
(Crowd around the one-month-old baby: Suzhou)
Last night Ying and I attended a One Month celebration for a new baby, invited by the new father (in the white t-shirt), one of his work colleagues. During the course of the dinner, I gleaned that the one month celebration is traditionally the most important of a baby’s young life. It’s the first time the mother (not present in this image) really socialises again after the birth and generally all the friends and family come together to celebrate with them. The mother is from the Sichuan province in central China, so the food was all very spicy indeed; so much so that from the hubbub of chatter, the Chinese word for spicy, ‘la’ kept appearing above the noise.
You can see from the table that there was a mountain of food that we hardly got halfway to demolishing; our hosts were incredibly generous, but I heard that such a surfeit is not uncommon. Traditionally it is customary to provide enough for all so they will prove themselves good hosts. China still seems to be a very traditional country, yet when I researched the one month celebrations, there were so many other customs that were not practiced at this dinner, I imagine because for some young Chinese couples, some customs have become outdated and that this couple are sharing in tradition whilst embracing the changing conventions of an evolving China.
But then, basically it was a delicious dinner where everyone was able to meet a new person; the usual exclamations were made about her tiny features and how ‘new’ she looked. There is something enduringly surprising and unbelievable about seeing an unblemished little person for the first time; she looked as if she has just been finished, she was perfectly quiet and astoundingly beautiful. And tiny.
