My son has barely put on any weight this whole year. He’s hovered around 13 kg for months, and after a fever-and-diarrhea spell around Mid-Autumn Festival that sent him to the hospital for a few days, he dropped straight to 12 kg. That worried my mother terribly. His weight was already below par, and now it had gotten even worse. On top of that, he has always needed the family to chase after him just to get him to eat.
By common sense, a child who won’t eat should have some kind of stomach issue, so we had already tried quite a few appetite-boosting and digestion medicines. None of them really helped. He would still take only a few bites and say he was full.
Last month, my mother took my son back to our hometown together with another villager who had brought along his grandson, a boy of about ten. That child had the same problem and also refused to eat. They ended up going to an old man in a neighboring village who supposedly had a folk remedy for children like this. I wasn’t told about it at first; I only found out later. Honestly, I thought it sounded pretty far-fetched, but my mother believed in it completely. I wasn’t there, so I still don’t know exactly what was done, or whether it could have caused any harm. Seeing my son run around normally afterward and not appear to be in any trouble, I let it go.
I didn’t expect there would be a second round of "treatment." On October 31, before 6:30 in the morning, I was woken up again. My daughter-in-law wanted to come too. My mother carefully picked up my still-sleeping son and took him to Hengli in the early morning. The idea was that going so early would make it easier to spot the problem, I guess. I was curious all the way there about what kind of treatment this would be.
It was still early, so the roads were quiet, with very few people and vehicles. A trip that was supposed to take an hour only took about forty-five minutes. The place itself was a private courtyard enclosed by walls: a three-story house, with the first floor already renovated and the second and third floors still bare red brick. The yard was full of green fruits and vegetables, and a fenced area held quite a few free-range chickens. It had a very strong rural feel.
The part being treated was the inner thighs, the groin area beside the little boy’s private parts. The method was to light a nylon thread with a lighter, let the flame go out, and then use the remaining hot ember to burn the area a few times. And that was supposed to be it. My son either got scared or it hurt — he cried his eyes out. I couldn’t really put the local Hakka term into words, but my mother said many children had been treated this way before. I still don’t understand what that was all about.
I don’t know whether money was charged the last time. This time I didn’t see my mother hand over any red envelope or anything like that, but she had brought some dumplings she made the day before, along with a carton of milk, probably as a thank-you.
In the yard I also found a kind of chili pepper that’s pretty uncommon for someone from the south to see. It looked really beautiful — red, yellow, green, all kinds of colors. My mother had picked some the last time she came here. I put a few into the noodles I cooked for breakfast, and wow... they were really fragrant and spicy. After finishing the noodles, my lips were burning, and I didn’t even dare drink the soup. Way too hot. If anyone knows what kind of chili this is, please tell me.
In return, the host family dug up quite a lot of garden vegetables for my mother to take home. They also pulled out more than a dozen seedlings for her to plant on the rooftop, saying vegetables were expensive these days.
I had already dug up the old pit where I used to grow grapes and left only the dragon fruit. I removed the other two old grapevines completely. I’d been growing them for years and never once got a single properly developed grape. A total failure.
On the way back, we ran into one of my mother’s friends by the village road, digging sweet potatoes in a field. We stopped to chat for a long time, and she gave us more than half a bag of green sweet potatoes. They hadn’t been sprayed with pesticides or chemical fertilizer — grown completely the natural way, so they were supposed to be healthy.
There was also a chicken coop in the trunk, so I already knew we’d still have to go to the poultry market to buy chickens and bring them back to raise.
A few of us stopped in town for a bowl of the famous Hengli rice noodle soup for breakfast. It had plenty of toppings, was cheap, and tasted authentic. I don’t know if it was because I was too hungry or because I hadn’t had it in a long time, but it tasted really good.
By the time we got home, the trunk was packed full. At this point, it was less like taking my son for treatment and more like coming back from a perfectly successful market day: a sack of feed, several chickens, vegetables, sweet potatoes, and all sorts of other things.