Lazy CNY post

I'm still recovering from my cold, and still haven't been able to bring myself to write. Anyway, I'm going to cheat and paste an email I sent to friends this time last year:


Happy Chinese New Year! Farewell, Year of the Monkey, and hello, Year of the Rooster! Despite having plans to leave town during the holidays, I decided to stay in Beijing.

Beijing is a bit less crowded than usual because a large proportion of the population has left to go home, home being the countryside or smaller cities, both near Beijing and from all across the country. Seeing one's family is the most important aspect of Chinese New Year, the most important holiday in China. This usually involves long distance travel, usually train travel. According to China's Ministry of Transportation, train passengers made 680 million trips between January 25 and February 5. By the time the 40 day travel season is over, travellers will have made 2 billion train trips! Train travel, which is usually already a bit of an ordeal in China, can be unimaginably and agonizingly torturous at this time of year. I will continue to merely imagine these unimaginable images because I'm unwilling to experience them firsthand and would probably fly if I need to travel.

On Chinese New Year's Eve, a former classmate invited me and her boyfriend (also a former classmate) to her parents' house for dinner. After chatting over tea, nuts, seeds, and candy, we enjoyed a very pleasant home-cooked feast of about a dozen courses. I honestly can't recall what we ate, but I CAN say that dinner was tasty. Like my year and half year stints in Taiwan, I've been living almost exclusively on restaurant food and takeout, so any home-cooked food is a welcome break for me. We returned the next day to enjoy home-wrapped dumplings and another feast.

After dinner, we sat down to watch the CCTV Chinese New Year Gala Show. First broadcast in 1983, the gala show had an audience of 500 million viewers in 2004! By contrast, 86 million people watched this year's Superbowl and 125 million people watched the final episode of M*A*S*H. A 6 hour long affair, the show includes performances by pop artists from around Greater China (such as Hong Kong superstars Andy Lau and Jackie Chan and Taiwanese pop idol Jolin Tsai), dancers, martial artists, and comedians. The comedy skits and dialogues made up about half of the show, and unfortunately, it was the dialogue-heavy word plays that I had the most trouble understanding. I found the show to be a much more serious affair than the more ridiculous and often low-brow Hong Kong and Taiwanese variety shows, though then again those shows are weekly shows and this is a big bang once a year sort of deal. Unlike the less serious Hong Kong and Taiwanese shows, the stars of the show are not "flavour of the month" celebrities and the comedy skits are not as racy and cheesy. However, a few "flavour of the month" celebrities such as Olympic gold medallists and Jackie Chan's lacklustre son did make cameo appearances.

This being the first Chinese New Year I've spent in China, I've noticed some things here that I've never really seen in Vancouver. For example, I've noticed that there are numerous "temple fairs" in and around the city, perhaps as many as 170 of them. I went to the Changdian Temple Fair, one of the larger ones in Beijing, near the Liulichang antiques district. I read later that it reopened in 2001 after a 37 year absence, and that in the past, it was the most popular of the 8 largest temple fairs. It was a lively affair, with various performances on makeshift stages, hawkers peddling knick-knacks that no one really needs, and foodstalls selling snacks that have been exposed to Beijing's dusty wind and peoples' cough and sneeze particles. It may surprise you, but I actually ate a couple of things, including honeycomb candy, grilled egg pancake, and deep fried ice cream. As for the performances, there were singers, puppet shows, traditional Peking Opera, martial arts performances, and even acrobats and contortionists. I also went to a smaller temple fair, which had more or less the same stuff, so I assume most of the temple fairs are the same. In other words, I didn't bother going to any others, haha.

In China, where gunpowder was invented, people everywhere have been lighting fireworks and firecrackers. Every night, I hear the unmistakable cracks, whizzes, bangs, and booms of fireworks, some of the booms so powerful that they set off car alarms! All this happens despite the fact that there is a ban on fireworks, but like most laws, the ban is ignored. I've learned that in China, people break almost all of the laws. People run red lights, violate building and zoning codes, cheat on tax payments, etc. Companies cheat employees out of their pay and foreign firms out of their fair share, and violate health, environmental, and quality regulations and intellectual property laws. I'm convinced that you can violate any law in China, aside from murder, as long as you don't join a banned cult or criticise top officials. Anyways, I've avoided going out at night in case an errant firework blows off my digits or explodes in my face.

While people seem to celebrate old and relatively new traditions, it seems that even newer traditions have emerged. Throughout the evening of NewYear's Eve, I noticed that my Chinese friends kept sending SMS messages to me, all of them wishing me joy and luck in the new year. If you don't know what SMS is, it stands for Short Message Service, and is known as "text messaging" in North America, and oh, it's a cellphone thing. I also noticed my classmate's sister helping her dad send dozens, maybe hundreds of SMS messages to friends, family, and business associates. According to Xinhua News Agency, China's 330 million mobile phone users will have sent 10 billion SMS messages, known in North America as text messages, during the Chinese Year holiday. Beijing Mobile alone reported handling 1 billion messages on New Year's Eve! Wow, Xinhua News Agency sucks, because I've honestly never heard of Beijing Mobile. In case any of you are wondering, NO, I did NOT buy red underwear to wear on New Year's Day. As for spring cleaning, I hired my cleaning lady to do that for me. She comes every 2-4 weeks or so, and I pay her 30 yuan (less than $5 CAD) for 2.5 hours of work. The going rate is actually 8 yuan per hour, but I figure that a happy worker is a productive worker.

Sorry I didn't send e-cards, but you know me - I'm not a very festive guy. Still, do drop a line. It seems that news alert email far outnumber email from friends (hint hint!). Come on! Say hello to poor, lonely Ken! Happy CNY again!

Ken(ny)