Narrative Essay: Shadows on the Lunar New Year

Shadows on the Lunar New Year

Four years ago, when I was thirteen, we gathered in the Chua ancestral house in Malabon to celebrate the Lunar New Year. As we do every year, we gathered as a whole clan, and arrived ready for a special sumptuous dinner. That particular year, we decided to try catering services for a change, to help solve the huge dishwashing pile after everybody’s eaten their full. Even with the food from catering, some elements we still had to prepare for ourselves. My aunts had to prepare the popular Chinese dessert Buchi, with gelatinous rice mashed to a paste with red bean paste in the center and the ball covered with sesame seeds, fried to a golden brown. My grandmother too had to whip up her famous Cha-mi to satisfy everyone’s wishes, a noodle dish with her special blend of spices, seafood, different meats, and sauce. Everyone was required to attend the festivity wearing red clothes, the children consenting because of the eventual Ang-bao (red pocket of good-luck money) they would get from Granma and Granpa later at the end.
That year, we also tried to go even more traditional with the hiring of pyro-techinicans who would be taking care of the fireworks to set off the end of the night. With everything prepared before eight o’clock that night, the sons and daughters and grandchildren started arriving to join the celebration.
The festival started with dinner as everybody got their plates and lined up beside the long buffet table. Almost every corner was decorated with red cloth as I noticed them while waiting in line. When I was done with scooping up the dishes I wanted, which were as I remember them to be Lengua, Sweet and Sour Pork, Lemon Chicken, Beef and Brocoli in Oyster Sauce, Fried Spicy Crab, Fried rice, and Hot and Sour Soup, I made my way to the dining room which was for this occasion extended even to the living room for sheer lack of space. The whole clan was eating together, amidst roars of laughter and the clinking of spoons, forks, and chopsticks against plates and bowls.
When dinner was over, the whole clan gathered in the cramped living room to eat the Buchi my aunts prepared and the Mango Sago soup from the catering together as a sign of unity for the new year ahead. The living room was filled with filled mouths and bursting cheeks as we all partook the desserts.
Fireworks lighted up the sky from the expansive garden-walkway-driveway in front of the house. I can still see my cousin’s faces fill with amazement and joy as the lights came on and off the black night sky.
After the Ang-bao were given, some of us children went up the second floor to watch television and just hang-out on the huge bed in the wide master bedroom of our grandparents facing the garden below as the adults cleared up the mess below and chatted to themselves to check up on businesses. My cousins and my two siblings chose to watch a DVD movie on the wide-screen television in the room that didn’t interest me so I walked to the window to watch the other fireworks from neighboring houses. I was staring into the night, gazing at nothing in particular, when I saw a quick movement by the plants below. I looked at the dark shadows of the plants in the blackness of the night when suddenly a shadow of a man as though running, but now I realize it was more of gliding, past the potted plants and to the factory that stood open at the end of the driveway. I must have looked alarmed because some of my cousins asked me what the matter was but I decided to keep what I saw to myself. I went down as the movie they were watching reach about the middle part of the story and hurried to look for my aunt. She was busy with the cleaning so I decided not to disturb her. I thought that the question could wait.
A week later, I found time to ask my favorite aunt in her store about what happened. I didn’t tell her what I saw at first but asked whether someone was ever killed in our factory. She said there were no deaths in the factory that we have built beside the ancestral home, but there might’ve been some on the lot our house was built on because it was a pineapple plantation before they bought it. We never got around to asking our neighbors about it. She believed my story and promised to keep it a secret. The incident still bothers me until now.