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On Sunday, February 18, we will celebrate the Chinese New Year, the
biggest feasting, well-wishing and merry-making season for the Chinese -
in this country and elsewhere.
On Wednesday, a friend from Mexico wrote me saying: "This year,
strangely, we're going to be featuring several notes about it in my
newspaper."
As Chinese products continue to fill shelves everywhere the world, it's
just as well the rest of the world knows more about the cultural
traditions of China.
To the rest of the world, the Chinese Lunar New Year (according to the
Lunar Calendar) is known as the Spring Festival. In Chinese parlance, it's
simply Guo Nian.
"Spring Festival", by the way, is an apt translation. Festival, a time
set aside for feasting (and other celebrations), is spot-on. Food used to
dominate the Lunar New Year celebrations, for obvious reasons. Times were
hard, if there's any time in a year that people get to feast and, if the
harvests were good, eat their fill is during the New Year. Hence, the
festive mood from all around.
But the Spring Festival fails to capture the other side of story for
"Guo Nian", which is what I'm going to talk about here.
As more foreigners learn to speak Chinese, they'll want to learn about
"Guo Nian" anyway, so that they can celebrate the Chinese holiday the
Chinese way.
Literally "Guo Nian" means "Pass the Year". According to legend, the
"Year" (pronounced Nian in Mandarin) is an animal, a man-eating and
havoc-wrecking beast. He makes his lone visit at the year-end. That's the
reason for the fireworks - people hope to drive the Nian beast away with
the noise from all the firecrackers.
The concept of Nian-Passing is uniquely Chinese - The only time they
prepare abundant food for themselves they have to remind themselves of the
beast there to spoil their meals. The Chinese always keep things in what
my Mexican friend would certainly call a "strange" perspective. To really
enjoy the New Year, we have to first pacify our enemies, real or imagined,
lest they pop up from out of nowhere to poop the party. New Year's Eve
also counted as the end of the fiscal year, by which time one had to clear
one's debt with creditors, another sobering reminder of the many a needy
day in the past, and certainly another contributing factor to the somber
outlook towards the festivities.
The Nian beast is sometimes called Da (Big) Nian. Indeed, there is a
Xiao (Small) Nian to pacify too. The Small Nian is the God of the Stove.
The God of Stove, according to folklore, goes up a week before the New
Year to report to the King of Heaven the deeds of the family he's been
with. So on this day, families prepare a sticky, cane-shaped, toffee-like
sugar for him, to sweeten his lips - so that he would have nothing but
sweet things to say.
Families never fail to pay this tribute lest the God of the Stove tells
warts and all and make them lose face in front of the King of Heaven. More
realistically, people bribe the God of the Stove to avoid the dreadful
prospect of him being so angry that he would refuse to light a cooking
fire for the family in the next year.
The Chinese, in short, pacify their enemies first. The enemies might be
real or imagined, but the Chinese are convinced they're always there. They
know if their enemies are not happy, they won't be happy. Terribly
self-abusive this may sound, but that's the Chinese mind at work at the
subconscious level, at all times. As a matter of fact, the way the Chinese
"pass the New Near" is the same middle-of-the-road approach they take in
everything they do. It's the Yin-Yang philosophy - One can not enjoy the
happy unless one also understands the sad - at work.
So now, if you have pacified your enemies and exorcised your demons,
you can say properly: Guo Nian Hao!
Happy New Year!
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