ENTER THE DOG
January 2006
Firecrackers are
for sale on the sidewalks. Lights are strung over the streets and in
the trees. The supermarkets are insanely crowded and have a special
emphasis on red underwear and giant stuffed dogs. People are eating
dumplings and seem to be in good spirits. Windows are decorated with
red cut-paper designs. And although most of China is coming grinding
to a halt, there is also “arguably
the biggest movement of humanity on earth” as people head home for
the holidays.
That’s right
folks, it’s time for the Chinese New Year. Although the world entered
2006 at the beginning of January, the Chinese New Year follows a
traditional lunar calendar and doesn’t commence until January 29th.
Saturday marked the beginning of the festive season with the Little
New Year. This is essentially a week-long New Year’s Eve, where
people warm-up for the main holiday by cleaning their houses, eating the preliminary courses
of dumplings, shopping for new clothes, and of course, sending off
copious amounts of fireworks.
We had the good
fortune to be riding through Dalian in a friend-of-a-friend’s car on
the first night of the little New Year. The city was spectacular,
with white lights and red lanterns decorating the streets and
fireworks exploding between the buildings. All of this was enhanced
by the fact that we were actually sitting down while traveling, rather
than standing up surfing the city on a crowded bus.
The Chinese New
Year, also dubbed “Spring Festival,” is the most important holiday in
China. It is a time for family reunions, dumplings, and a week
without work. The trains and buses are literally packed as people
travel back to their hometowns. Factories will close and migrant
workers, many of whom work 6 to 7 days a week, will return to their
villages for some much needed R & R, along with droves of college
students and anyone else who lives far from home.
Spring Festival is
rich with traditions, mostly regarding bringing good luck and warding
off bad luck. The dumplings will harbor the occasional date or coin
which will bring good luck to the finder. People will put up new door
decorations emblazoned with the character for fortune, which will
prevent evil from entering their house. The fireworks are to scare
away the evil monster/ghost that might bring bad luck in the coming
year. The more fireworks, the more luck.
Luck takes a more
tangible form in the little red envelopes of money that generous
relatives give to the children. In the old days, the children then
gave the money to their parents. But nowadays, with the increase in
wealth, most of the kids can keep their money. Everyone should wear
new clothes on New Year’s Day, and some people will not wear any of
the new clothes they bought throughout the year until the New Year.
The coming year is
the Year of the Dog. The Chinese calendar has a 12
year cycle, with each year marked by a separate animal. So for
everyone who is 12, 24, 36, 48, etc, years old, this will be a special
year since it is “their” animal. To ward off any evil that might
befall them in the coming year, the people born in the Year of the Dog
must wear red on New Year’s Day. This red rule extends all the
way down to their underwear, which explains why there has been an
abundance of red undergarments in the shops lately. One of my friends
who was born in the Year of the Dog (36 years ago) wrote this to me in
an e-mail: “The
people who were born in the dog year will be very lucky or unlucky
according to the traditional superstition. Although I don't believe
it, I told myself to be care with everything this year because I was
born in dog year.”
I’m a monkey and
Zac’s a horse, so during our stay in China, spanning the
years of the Rooster and the Dog, we’ve been completely free from the
red underwear requirements. Yet we still seem to have an
abundance of luck because we were invited to be token foreigners at
the mayor’s New Year’s party. So on Thursday night we went to
the convention center along with two other teachers from our school.
Our table was quite prestigious, being diagonal to the Mayor’s VIP
table. After a few speeches that we couldn’t understand, there
was a wonderful show consisting of many dancing and musical acts.
There was a little bit of everything: from pop singers to Peking
Opera, mermaids to acrobats, fan and umbrella dancers, and even
children dressed as dogs doing martial arts. The Year of the Dog
looks promising.
We
will continue our tradition of never actually spending a Chinese
holiday in Dalian by flying to Hong Kong for the week of Spring Festival. We decided to do this for two main
reasons: Hong Kong is warm and we didn’t want to squeeze on the trains at the same time as
the rest of the nation. Since we wouldn’t be in
Dalian for the New Year, we decided to
celebrate a little early. We were unable to resist the allure of the
fireworks, so during the Little New Year, we invited our friend
Charlie over to light some fireworks. We went to the train tracks
near our apartment and lit up the night with giant sparklers, Roman
candles, some spinning sparklers, and other assorted fireworks. I
think it’s safe to say we’ve warded off the evil monsters for the
next year.
Happy
Chinese New Year!
Click here for more pictures from the Chinese New Year / Spring Festival
