Shengliver’s Note: A trip back to my home village in the summer made me keenly aware that the village now is not the village then. Most folk I met about the ancestral grounds were either kids whose grandparents I know, or aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles, who were in their sixties, seventies or eighties. Ways of life there are far removed from what I remember of the early 1970s, my salad days. In this blog series, Extinct Trade, the blogger will share with his readers about nine trades which have died out where his roots are.

Another family in the village was expert at making firecrackers. Actually, no other family around the neighbourhood could do it, so their business was exceptionally good, especially around the New Year, a time when every Chinese family exploded fireworks at festive and traditional rituals as well as for celebrations.

The Fireworks Man was my father’s great uncle, so he was my great great uncle. All members of his family pitched in to help with the process in the season.

He purchased second-hand books, which were sometimes difficult to come by in those hard times. I remember I sold some of my old textbooks to him. The pages were torn off the books and processed on a wooden roller, which consisted of two parallel planks, one over the other. The roller, simple as it was, was effective. A paper was wrapped around an iron pin before it was placed between the two planks. Then the top plank, pressed down against the bottom one, was moved to and fro. The pin was thus spun between the two planks. The resulting roll, with the pin pulled out, would be filled with explosives. The roll had to be really compact. Otherwise, the crackers would not give off a crisp loud bang when set off. The last step of the making was to fuse the crackers. A thin wire, the fuse, was inserted into the compact cylinder, after which the roll was sealed off with great caution, with a small hammer hitting a metal driver. This step was the riskiest part of the art. Miscalculated pressure, applied to the fuse, would have the device go off prematurely.

Firecrackers were seldom sold individually. They were strung by the fuses. A string of firecrackers was then packaged for sale. One string could have 100, 200, 500, 1,000, 10,000 crackers in it. The deluxe product, which claimed to have 10,000 crackers, did not have 10,000 crackers actually. A super-big cracker in the string was equivalent to 100 standard-size ones. Therefore, the most expensive string could have 50 super big crackers plus 5,000 normal ones. Its price was prohibitive enough to keep ordinary families away. Only some work units could afford it. Prices varied depending on the number of crackers in a string. When the fuse was ignited, the crackers in a string would go off successively.

The explosives were concocted by the Fireworks Man himself. He bought several ingredients from some shops, and one ingredient charcoal was prepared at home. I do not know the exact makeup of the stuff, but having watched him making the works, I remember that charcoal and sometimes fine iron powder were part of the mixture.

Their business, one of its kind in the farming community, was best around the Spring Festival. So, when most families were busy spending, they were busy cashing in on their craft. So pressed for time were they in the season that their Spring Festival was not properly observed in my memory. The week before the New Year, all the members had to stay up to meet the deadlines. And sometimes the mother even did not have time to do a proper meal for the family.

The Fireworks Man was worshipped by all the kids in the village, me included. Around the New Year, exploding fireworks was one of the few joys we could have in days of no TV, no radio and no cinemas. On the first day of the New Year, we would rush to his house when they started setting off crackers. While doing so, the Fireworks Man would toss some unexploded crackers to us. We were too ready to pick them up. Later during the festival, we would be playing with them. While scrambling for the crackers on the ground in their yard, we kids could not help exclaiming, “So many!” And this was what the man desired to hear from us, for “So many!” was considered auspicious on the first day of the New Year.