Chinese New Year

In the Chinese culture, today (7 Feb) is the Chinese New Year (CNY) Day. It’s also called the “Spring Festival”. On CNY day, and for a few days onwards, when the Chinese people meet their relatives, friends and acquaintances, they would exchange a few phrases of good will such as wishing each other good luck, making great fortune, etc. Like Christmas and the Mid-Autumn Festival, in Chinese cities like Hong Kong, the CNY has become highly commercialized, in the sense it has become an occasion for many businesses to make money from it. When I see a commercial on the TV paid for by a certain business, such as a supermarket, offering good wishes to its audience, I can’t help suspecting that the boss of this supermarket does so more for his/her business than for really wanting his audience good luck.

Although I’m Chinese, I’ve never liked CNY. I would even say that I have always disliked passing CNY, for different reasons at different stages of my life.

I didn’t like CNY even when I was small. Most people would find this strange, because children are supposed to be its great beneficiaries: they get to wear new clothes and new shoes, eat plenty of candies and other confections that are only available during CNY, and, most of all, accumulate wealth through receiving “lai-see’s” (red paper packets with money inside) from married adults they happen to meet during the CNY days. And they usually meet many adults on the first few days of the CNY, because these are the few days in a year that their parents would take them to see their relatives and friends by making visits one after another.

True, that’s the general situation. But when it comes to individual situation, I never benefited from CNY in such ways when I was a child. As far as getting to wear new clothes is concerned, more than often it became a disappointing and frustrating issue, because when I was small my family was rather poor financially, and while seeing other kids wear new clothes and new shoes on the CNY days walking proudly on the streets, I and my siblings often did not get our wish that our parents would buy us new clothes and new shoes fulfilled. There was often some hope when time got near CNY, but often it just ended in disappointment: we still had to wear the same old clothes and old shoes when we were taken by our father to various places to make new year visits.

But did I not get to eat more candies and confections than usual. The answer is affirmative. However, the candies and confections were things I never liked. On the few days before and after the CNY day, my parents would make various kinds of traditional confections specially for CNY, such as dumplings in sweet soup (tang-yuan) and fried taro strips. The problems was, while every year my parents would try to convince me that the dumplings in sweet soup was tasty to the extent of almost coercing me to eat them, I would feel it’s like having to go through an ordeal every time I was made to finish a bowl of such dumplings in sweet soup. At least there was something positive that I learnt from such experience: that something that’s nectar to person A could be poison to person B. It’s due to such experience that throughout my life I never make efforts to persuade other people to eat something that I think is delicious, because I strongly believe that while something is delicious to me, it can be the opposite to another person.

What about the benefit of accumulating wealth through receiving “lai-sees” from married adults? Well, more often than not I ended up collecting lai-sees without accumulating wealth. Therefore in the end it turned out to be another frustrating experience, even more frustrating than not getting new clothes to wear. What happened was, due to the poor financial conditions of my family when I was small, my parents would confiscate the money I and my siblings got from the lai-see’s. They did that with really grand reasons: they would save up the money for us, so that it could be used for purposes related to our studies, such as buying dictionaries, etc. They never considered that we didn’t get such lai-see’s without making sacrifices. Acutally, from the CNY day onwards, for a few consecutive days, I would have to go out with my father regardless of how cold or how rainy the weather was. He liked making new year visits to his relatives and friends. So from the first day of CNY, he would take us to his relatives’ and friends’ places, usually one after another and going to more than five places on the same day. Everytime when we arrived at the place of one of his relatives or friends, my father would begin a long chat with those people, leaving me (and sometimes also my siblings) bored to death with sitting in his proximity with strangers or semi-strangers not knowing what to say or do except sitting there and continuously feeding myself with candies offered to me (TV was still a luxury when I was small, and households my father visited generally did not possess one for poor kids like me to kill time by watching whatever was on it, like kids nowadays can do). But the whole exercise was really boring. To me, the only positive outcome of such visit was receiving the lai-see’s from the perons who my father visited. But then eventually they would be confiscated.

In addition to not being the beneficiary of the above myths about what kids would like about CNY, I also had to suffer other things due to CNY. Because my father was kind of a Buddhist, he would make visits to various temples during the several days after the new CNY began. And he often took me with him. The problem was, every time when I was in a monastery or temple, whether Buddhist or Taoist, I would be made to feel very uncomfortable by the irritating smell of the incense being burned in the temples. I always got my eyes and noses irritated to the extent that I would leave the temple or monastery with tears in my eyes, not because of anything sad, but because the incense had irritated my nose and my eyes so much.

That’s why I never enjoyed CNY when I was a child.

When I was in my teenage, I disliked CNY for some other reasons. At that time I subscribed to communism and when the Cultural Revolution in China occurred, I was excited about the movement to “eliminate the four olds and establish the old news” (po-si-jiu, li-si-xin). One of the ‘olds’ to be eliminated was traditional Chinese folk customs. The traditional ways of celebrating CNY were of course among the targets of elimination. I particularly detested (I still do, although to a much lesser degree) the practice of saying four-character phrases to whoever you meet on the CNY day or the few days after it, wishing them things like “make great fortunes”, “get unexpected money at hand”, etc., and, for someone subscribing the communist belief that one deserves only the fruits of one’s labour, they definitely fell into the cateogory of bourgeois or feudalistic wishful thoughts that should be eliminated. Understandably, such interpretation of the nature of traditional CNY practices would only enhance my dislike of CNY. The good thing during this stage of life of mine was, as a teenager, I was rebellious enough not to succumb to my father’s demand of following him to various places to make new year visits to his relatives and friendsf any more. That saved me from having to endure the boredom of seeing people who I didn’t know why I should be seeing once every year.

After entering adulthood, my zeal for communism died down, partly because of my disillusionment with the ideology as a result of the series of political events that happened in China in the years 1976-80 (and especially 1976) and partly because of the hard reality of various aspects of life that I had to face after leaving the ivory tower of university. However, my dislike of the CNY persisted. This time the reasons of my dislike were a mixture of those that made me dislike this Chinese festivity during my childhood and my teenage. And then while time passed by year by year, the dislike persisted across to another stage of my life, i.e. when I became a married person.

Living in a community permeated with Chinese culture, a married person is, during the CNY period, expected to hand out lai-sees to those still unmarried, regardless of whether the latter are children or adults. The person is also expected to make visits to relatives from his/her family and those from the family of his/her spouse. Many of these relatives are people one would not think of for a second throughout most part of a year, and suddenly on this CNY, or maybe a day or two before, one would have to make plans on the itinerary of making visits to these people, or plans on hosting gatherings at one’s own place to accommodate visits by these relatives. Those who subscribe this practice of the Chinese culture would say that it’s exactly because relatives and friends are too busy to contact each other over the year that the CNY provides a good chance for everyone to meet up and sustain the relationship. Yet I find much irony and hypocricy in such a justification for the practice. If there are people who are not close enough to you to the extent that you don’t make any effort to contact them occasionally during the span of almost a whole year, why should you want to do that simply because it’s CNY time and because they are your relatives?

And then there is this issue of giving out lai-sees. The Chinese claim that giving out lai-sees is a gesture of good will. But then if one naively believes that and just gives out red paper packets with slips inside expressing good wishes instead of cash notes, then one will very likely be finger-pointed from the back by the recipients of one’s lai-sees after the encounter is over. So any lai-see giver is expected to put money, preferably cash notes rather than cash coins, into the red paper packets, so as to make their receipients happy. Now here comes the issue of how much money one should put into the lai-sees. If it’s really just a symbolic manifestation of good will, then theoretically speaking the amount that should go in the red packet should be constant, with no concern of who is to be its recipient, because after all, one shouldn’t have such partiality that one would wish one’s brother more luck than one’s cousin. But then in real life, one has to work out different amounts of money for different categories of lai-see recipients. So every time when CNY approaches and when it’s time to prepare the lai-sees, I and my wife would have to work out: first, whether for that particular year we would need put in more money than we did in the previous year in accordance with the inflation rate of the year; two, how much should be for our son, how much for our son’s cousins, how much for the janitor and the cleaner of the flat we live in (and whether the amount should be different between them), etc., etc. Often I would become irritable about having to do all these things, and sometimes my wife would take that as a sign of my being unwilling to spend money on giving out lai-sees. But that’s an unfortunately misunderstanding. I would have been happy to spend a few thousand dollars just to have someone to help deposit whatever amount of money into the bank accounts of these target lai-see recipients just to free me from having to go through the lai-sees preparation stage, to carry out the actual act of handing them out to the recipients, and, to do the verbal replay of those so-called CNY luck wishes to them. It’s actually not a matter of having to spend money. It’s a matter of being made by this culture to do something the value of which I don’t buy. For example, why should the money in the lai-see that’s to be given to my wife’s elder brother’s unmarried daughter, who probably couldn’t even address me properly when coming across me on the street, be more than that in the lai-see to be given to the janitor of the flat where we live, who helps to guard our flat from intruders and who I see almost every day? And, why, in the first place, can’t a good wish represented by a lai-see be a good wish without money in it?

With my attitude towards all these conventional practices of the Chinese culture regarding CNY, it won’t be hard for this post’s readers to appreciate the fact that for many of the years since I got married, the issue of giving out lai-sees and visiting relatives during CNY time would become a source of tension between me and my wife, who holds a much more positive and welcoming attitude towards CNY and the conventional practices associated with it. Experience in the years since we got married suggests that our amity tends to ebb during CNY time. This is sad, because the ebbing is for an unworthy reason. Perhaps my teenage fanaticism against traditional Chinese culture is still having effects on me, and for that reason I tend to be apathetic towards almost any Chinese festivity: Ching Ming Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, whatever. Yet at least those festivities could be celebrated rather individually and do not involve other people. On the other hand, CNY does not allow you to pass it on your own and in your own way. Therefore, while I often manage to take other Chinese festivities neutrally, I often turn irritable during the CNY time, because it doesn’t let me pass it the way I like, but drags me into those interpersonal encounters that I see no point in having.

Now at my current age, I dislike CNY and other festivities on a more intellectual level. To me, CNY and other festivities are no more special than the rest of the 365 days of a year. It’s only due to human beings’ desire to entertain themselves with various excuses that they make certain days of the year festivity days and call them CNY or Mid-Autumn Festival or whatever. It’s similar to the case that the Earth itself does not have national boundaries to segregate groups of people, only that human beings themselves draw up this and that artificial lines on a political map of the world to separate people into nations. For a migrating bird, it flies across physical regions without having to have any passport. In the case of CNY, it’s just a normal day for non-Chinese people, not to say for a migrating bird. Call me an anti-establishmentarian for such a belief. I don’t mind.

But then one could ask, why not just pass CNY the way you like? Why not forget lai-sees giving and relatives visiting during those few days? I wish I could do that. Yet my cowardice in going against conventions makes me comply with the conventional practices, albeit reluctantly. Moreover, I don’t want to allow my own unconventional attitude towards festivities and, in particular, CNY to affect my relationship with my wife and other people of my tribe. So I still give out lai-sees. And I still make new year visits. Before my son went to study in Brisbane, I followed conventions and took him with me to make new year visits, just like what my father did to me when I was small. I was well aware that I was putting him in situations like what I was in when I was small. I sometimes would feel guilty for that. Such incompetence to defy convention would certainly be frustrating to me, and I would either hate myself for that, or turn my frustration into the irritability that I would direct to people around me during the CNY period. Of course, the greatest victim of such irritability would be my wife, who has to stand all my grumblings about CNY practices every year during this time of the year.

I’m hoping that as I get older, my negative attitude towards CNY could soften, and that I can enjoy passing CNY in future. But then, will I?

(P.S.: I began writing this post on the morning of CNY day, but it took me more than a day to complete. Partly because in the afternoon and the evening I had to make new year visits to my wife’s mother’s place and then to my younger sister’s place. So when I finish writing this post, it’s already the second day of CNY. On this second day of CNY, I was meant to make a new year visit to my wife’s eldest sister’s place with my wife. Thanks to my wife’s understanding, she accepted my preference of staying home and has made the visit on her own.)