Around 9 pm on July 4th, I went to the Soldier Field of the Presidio of Monterey to watch fireworks display. As a rule, every year on this day, the place is open to the public for watching the fireworks show. The Presidio overlooks Monterey Bay and serves an ideal location for watching fireworks.
When I entered the High Street gate, I could not see or hear people. The parking lots along the Soldier Field however were all taken, which indicated that many people had arrived earlier. When I parked my bicycle at the stairs leading down to the wooden platform, I could make out in the darkness small groups of people on the lawn, as well as those sitting on the review stand. There was even a BBQ stove with the twilight of remaining fire. “You guys must have been here for a long time,” I said to a man picking up a sausage from the stove. “Since three,” he said.
I could not understand the zest. Even during a fine day, it is cold after sunset. There was no light there and I could not imagine what fun there was to wait hours for the 20 minutes fireworks show.
It was dark already and yet the show had not started yet. Above the bay the sky was painted with a hue of dark blue, with some lines of whitish blue that was the receding light of the day. I asked a woman sitting there with her man what time the show began. She said it should be 9 but now it was 9:15 already. A man approached and she asked the man. The man had no idea.
But the fireworks started just at that moment. A single shot into the sky, all of a sudden, without the mannerism of celebration. It caught everyone off guard. At the same time, sparks of fireworks set off by individuals in residential neighborhoods can be seem across the bay, in the city of Seaside, very tiny outbursts of light, like novae in the vast, dark universe.
The whole display lasted only about 20 minutes and there were not a large variety of fireworks to see. Most people watched silently, clapping their hands only when something extraordinary came up, such as smiley faces. This made me feel odd: silence in darkness while watching a festival fireworks display.
One year I spent July the 4th in Las Vegas. I did not realize it was the Independence Day until in the evening, among the colorful lights of the gambling city, there suddenly in the sky appeared the brilliance of fireworks. People in the crowded street stopped and looked up to watch and with every explosion there were shouts and the clapping of hands. It was very renao, lively.
A colleague neighbor lives above me and from her window she has a good view of the bay. She had told me the day before that someone had suggested a small party in her apartment to watch the fireworks together. I was in my first floor apartment from 5 pm on, watching 15 episode Korean love story DVDs while waiting for her to call. When it was 9 pm and no call came, I decided to go to the Presidio, which is only a few blocks away. As I left my apartment complex I noticed the light in the sitting room of my colleague’s apartment but heard nothing. I assumed she must have cancelled the plan. Later she asked me why I did not come up to her apartment. She said there were six people.
When I was little I lived with my grandma in a one room compartment in a Beijing yard. We had a large window facing the yard, divided into smaller frames, and a small prinson-cell-like window high in the opposite wall for ventilation. That window faced the direction of Tiananmen Square, where fireworks on the October 1st National Day were launched. Every time when there was a fireworks display, we kids would either climb up to the roofs of the houses or go to some cross-sections that had an unobstructed view of the eastern sky. We could not get close to Tiananmen because there were celebrations on the square and all the roads were closed to unauthorized people. The fireworks were spectacular. What we kids wished most was to be able to catch a parachute made of white (silk) cloth. I never did since I never got close to the square. We had heard stories about people getting the parachutes. It was something to envy, because the thing was both fun and good material, if the family could make good use of it. In those years when economy was not good, it was a free pie from heaven.
Sometimes when it was very late my grandma would not allow me to go out, so I watched a glimpse of the fireworks from the back window of my compartment. The scene was pitiful yet it was better than none.
Now I do not know if it was true, that fireworks at that time could spell out words in the sky, such as “Long Live Chairman Mao” or “China” or “10.1”. I remember there were talks about it. One sure thing during the Cultural Revolution was that we believed that a print of an oil painting Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan Coal Mine was made of paper that recorded voices. If you roll the painting into a tube and put it to your ear, you could hear roars of “Long Live Chairman Mao”. I tried. All I heard was a rhythmic shouting of weng weng weng weng weng! weng weng weng weng weng! I believed it was magic paper.
Also at that time, we were told to discern anti-Mao slogans in the strokes of Chinese paintings or cartoons as the evidence of the artist being a counter-revolutionary. You had to turn the paintings this way or that way to find the evil words. Thanks to the graphic nature of the Chinese characters, we indeed could find such evidence and were convinced that class struggle was more complicated than we thought.
Of course there is no such conspiracy in the fireworks here at Monterey Bay, except the clear smiley faces that I saw for the first time this year. Anti-government slogans did exist during the American National Day. Those were the signs held by peace groups in the July 4th parade. There was no need to hide the message in seemingly harmless paintings. There was no need for those people holding the signs to dress neatly. In the paper, they called for people to come in their pajamas.
