The 1st and 15th
My grandmother kept two days a month: the 1st and the 15th of the lunar calendar. Not Sunday. Not Christmas. Two days that didn’t appear on any American wall calendar.
On those days, she didn’t eat meat. She lit incense, and she went to the temple if there was time. She kept the practice the way Chinese Buddhist women had kept it for two thousand years.
My mother did not.
I do now.
The 1st and 15th of the lunar calendar are called chu yi and shi wu, first and fifteenth. They mark the new moon and the full moon. In Buddhist practice across China, Vietnam, Korea, and the diaspora that scattered from those countries, these are the days you eat vegetarian. Some practitioners go to the temple. Others chant. Some just keep meat off their plate and call it enough.
The reasons are layered. The practice predates Buddhism in China and goes back to early agricultural calendars, when farmers tracked the moon to know when to plant. Buddhism arrived from India in the first century and absorbed the lunar calendar into its observance days. Eating vegetarian on those days is an act of compassion. You refuse, twice a month, to participate in the killing of animals.
That’s the official explanation; it’s the one you’d find in a book about Chinese Buddhism written by someone with credentials.
The lived explanation is smaller. The lived explanation is about a Hakka woman in her sixties, in a kitchen in Malaysia, cooking dinner for her busy daughter’s family. Curry chicken, rice, and fish in soy sauce. It was the meal she cooked every day for the household she had moved into when her daughter needed help running the home. On most days, she ate from her own cooking. On the 1st and 15th, however, she ate only the rice and the vegetables. She did not announce the day, and she did not ask anyone else to keep it. She just ate from her own plate, beside us, while we ate the chicken she had made.
She was my mother’s mother, pure Hakka Chinese. Born in the late 1920s, she was a girl when the Japanese occupied Malaya from 1941 to 1945.
She moved in with us when I was fourteen, sometime in 1991. My mother was a school principal by then, leaving early and coming home late. My grandmother took over the kitchen the way Asian grandmothers do, without being asked, without making a ceremony of it, just by being the person who was home when food needed to be made. From then until she died, she cooked our lunches and dinners. I ate more of her cooking during my teenage years than my mother’s.
She kept those days the entire time she lived with us. I knew the practice; I had been born Buddhist. I knew what the 1st and 15th meant. I noticed when she ate only vegetables on those days while she cooked chicken for the rest of us. I just didn’t keep them myself. I was a teenager. I was hungry. I ate the chicken.
My mother told me a story about her once. I want to hold this story carefully because I don’t want to overstate what I know.
When the soldiers came, women in some towns wrapped their chests with cloth to flatten them. They cut their hair, and they wore their brothers’ clothes. The Japanese were raping women, and the only protection was to not look like one.
My grandmother, my mother told me, dressed as a boy through some of those years. She would have been thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, the age when a girl’s body announces itself whether she wants it to or not.
I don’t know how long she did this, and I don’t know when she stopped. I don’t know if my mother told me the full story or only the version a child could handle. I know only this. The woman who cooked our chicken and ate her vegetables on the lunar days had spent some part of her girlhood in occupied Malaya disguising her own body to stay alive.
When the war ended, and she became a woman, built a household, raised a daughter, I think she was reclaiming something the war had tried to take. The right to a body. The right to eat from her own plate on her own day.
She didn’t say any of this to me. I am putting words she never used in her mouth. I know.
My mother knew about the practice; her own mother had kept it for sixty years. Her own mother lived in the same house as us, cooking the meals, eating only vegetables on two specific days a month.
But my grandmother kept the practice quietly. She didn’t impose vegetarian meals on the household. She didn’t ask my mother or me to keep the days. She just kept them herself, on her own plate, while she cooked meat for everyone else.
My mother was a school principal. She left the house early, and she came home late. She ate what was on the table. What was on the table on the 1st and 15th was the same meat dishes as any other day, because the woman cooking refused to make a household statement out of her own observance.
So my mother kept eating meat, not because she was rejecting her mother’s practice, but because her mother wasn’t asking her to do otherwise.
I want to be precise about this. My mother wasn’t anti-Buddhist. She lit incense at the altar and kept a small statue of Guan Yin on her dresser. She would have called herself Buddhist if you had asked her on a form.
She just loved fried chicken. And nobody ever told her not to eat it on certain days.
For most of my childhood and into my adulthood, my mother ate what she wanted on the days she wanted. Then, in her sixties, she got cancer for the first time. Ovarian. She survived it. After that, she started watching what she ate, including less red meat and more vegetables. It was not Buddhism that fueled her decision; it was just a body that had been frightened.
She still didn’t keep the 1st and 15th. The dietary restraint after her ovarian cancer was about staying alive, not about practice.
Then, in 2019, she got her second cancer. Pancreatic. She had four months from diagnosis to death.
She died not having kept the days her mother kept. She died loving fried chicken.
I don’t say this as criticism. My mother had every right to her own appetite. My mother kept other things: her sons, her teaching career, and the political networks that helped her oldest get to America.
She didn’t let the days fall, exactly. They fell because my grandmother had carried them so quietly that there was nothing visible to inherit. When my grandmother died, the practice died with her.
For me, it started with the bargain.
I sat in a parking garage in 2014 and made a promise to God I did not expect to keep. He upheld his end. I upheld mine. I went thirty days without meat.
When the thirty days ended, something had shifted. I had spent a month paying attention to what I put in my mouth, and the attention had done something. After thirty days of refusing meat for the sake of a promise, I no longer felt like the man who had made the promise. I felt like a man who had been carrying a practice his whole life without ever putting it down on the floor and looking at it.
The 1st and 15th were already in me. I had been born Buddhist. I had eaten beside my grandmother on those days for years. I knew what chu yi and shi wu meant; I had simply never kept them.
Something in the thirty-day fast asked me a quiet question. You know about these days. You have always known. What would it mean to actually keep them?
I decided to try. The practice had been waiting in me. Picking it up was less like learning something new and more like remembering a language I had not spoken in years.
That was probably 2015. I’m not sure of the year, but the decision didn’t feel large at the time. It feels larger now.
I keep them now because I decided to.
That sounds smaller than it is. Most religious practice in the world is inherited automatically. You are born into it, raised in it, and you continue without much thought. My grandmother was born into the practice and kept it her whole life. My mother was born into it and didn’t keep it. I was born into it and didn’t keep it for forty years. Then one day, after a bargain in a parking garage, I decided to start.
The bargain didn’t introduce me to the practice. The practice had been around me my whole life. The bargain made me remember what I already knew. Thirty days without meat for a desperate prayer to a God I bargained with the way I had bargained with everyone in my life. And somewhere in those thirty days, the practice my grandmother had kept silently beside me my whole adolescence came into my hands.
The decision to keep the days was the smallest possible commitment I could make to a lineage I had always known about and never honored.
The lunar calendar for the year ahead is sitting on my phone. The next chu yi is a Monday in June, and the next shi wu is a Monday two weeks later. I will eat rice and vegetables on those days. I will think about a grandmother who kept these days for sixty years and never once told me I should keep them. I will think about a mother who didn’t keep them and died loving fried chicken.
I will keep the days.
Until next week,
Eddie