Hope springs eternal

YOU can never say that you don’t know Chinese New Year is coming. It is announced through the shops, in the airwave and, above all, in the psyche of service providers in town.

There is nothing subtle about it. The impending arrival of the New Year is first evidenced by the appearance of the colour red. It comes quite suddenly. One day it is business as usual then the shopkeepers open the container loads of New Year’s decorations, and red is everywhere — in the lanterns, in the posters and in the buntings which are displayed liberally around the city. This being the year of the rabbit, so, images of cute little bunnies is hopping up in all places.

If our eyes are dazzled by garish colours, so too are our ears challenged by the ubiquitous happy, bouncy (dare I say, annoying) Chinese New Year jingles like “Guo Xin Nian, Guo Xin Nian…”

Most importantly in the week before the Chinese New Year we run into the brick wall of “after the new year” syndrome. Try getting anything done before in that period; invariably you’d get the reply, sometimes apologetic, sometimes curt, “It has to be after the New Year.”

Last week I took my watch to a repair shop. The man said, “It would not be in time.” (I am sure the pun was not intended)

“In time for what?” said I, perplexed.

“Chinese New Year,” he said, giving me a puzzled look. I could almost hear the inaudible “duh!”

It’s the same with trying to get someone to do chores, like getting the gate painted, the fridge repaired, or the photos developed, always it is the standard “after CNY” reply. Why, even my dentist was in that spirit, the spirit of deferring to after the Chinese New Year.

“Can you stand the pain?” asked the nurse.

“No, it is not painful (I almost wanted to add the word “yet”). I just want to have my fillings checked.”

“Then it has to be after the New Year,” was the curt reply.

The big day arrived with a big bang, literally. There is supposed to be a ban on firecrackers. Well, you could have fooled me.  I woke to the sound of a series of explosion. Looking out I could see that it emanated from just behind the police quarters. What an irony!

In my younger days there was no ban on firecrackers. Wow, those were the days. Shop owners used to compete with each other as to who could burn more money with crates and crates of firecrackers. For us as kids it was a field day. We used to throw damp gunny sacks over the splattering and exploding packets of firecrackers to smother them, and made off gleefully with the unfired ones for our recreation later. It was a battle between the “bombers and the little bomb-defusers” It was all good fun in those days.

But things have changed. For a start the firecrackers are getting more and more powerful. I remember in the 60s we used to play our version of the “chicken game” — to see who can hold on to a firecracker with a burning fuse longest. Of course, we sometimes cut it too fine and suffered numbed and blistered figures. However, nowadays with what we have on the market (or is it black market) that would be near suicide. The exploding nasties we have these days are more akin to dynamites than firecrackers. Every year there are reports of people getting their fingers blown off. So powerful are the modern firecrackers that some cunning thieves used to use them to blow off the padlocks of the coin receptacles of phone booths (at least when there were still coin operated public phones). I presume they were doing it for the hell of it, for the ROR (returns on risk) was just not worth it. How many coins would compensate a lost finger?

What’s this fascination with noise and the colour red during Chinese New Year? Apparently it has something to do with scaring away a certain monster. As legend would have it, in China every year at the beginning of spring this nasty creature would wake up from its winter hibernation to attack villagers. Needless to say the New Year was never a happy occasion.

One day an old man appeared and advised the villagers that the beast, though ferocious, would be as timid as a kitten when confronted with something red and loud noise. The old man was one of the gods incarnate. The villagers took his advice. On the first day of that New Year there were lots of banging of gongs, letting off of firecrackers, generally the creation of a racket, and the people were painting the town red with their attire. True enough the monster hightailed back into the mountains. Since then, red was the de rigueur or fashion and noise the order of the day during Chinese New Year.

The monster was called “Nian” which is also the term for “year’ in Chinese. Thus, the New Year is celebrated as “Guo Nian” (pass over the year), which can be liberally translated as ‘surviving the Nian’.

Well, that is the story and like most myths there are rational basis for their existence. It is said that ‘Nian’, the terrible monster, is a metaphor for difficult time brought about by the severity of winter. Among the poor where heating during the cold months is a luxury, the winter months with long cold nights can be very taxing. The Chinese New Year is celebrated as the advent of spring, the harbinger of brighter days. Hence, it is also known as ‘Spring Festival’. A very popular Chinese New Year song by Zhang Xiao Ying that came out around 1970, “Ta Di Hui Chun” (spring has come back to the world), sums it up nicely.

Perhaps it is difficult for us, living in a clime without the cold months of winter to quite understand the sense of exhilaration one gets at the first whiff of spring is in the air. The sight of the first crocuses (one of the first flowers to bloom in spring), new buds on the trees and birds chirping is enough to send the heart singing with joy. Be that as it may, but it is a human trait to long for betters days (some would say that man is never satisfied). In the temperate countries spring is a tangible signal of forthcoming betters and brighter days in the literal sense. We may not have actual winter days but it is a basic human desire to look for continuous improvement. The fact that we still have the spirit to hope for a better future is something to celebrate – something worth making noise for.

The writer can be contacted at [email protected].