merry newyear and happy newyear

Five weeks ago, my co-workers started asking me where I would go for the Lunar New Year vacation. “Will you go back to America to celebrate with your family?” they asked.

“Uh, no, I’m going to Fuzhou to see my grandmother,” I replied.

“Ah,” they all nodded appreciatively. Wait, I wanted to clarify, it’s not like that, I’m going to see my grandma because I haven’t seen her for a long time, but my impression as a filial son of China who dutifully returns to his ancestral home for the New Year was already made.

The New Year here was a big deal, and everywhere people would be a little more pleasant, a little more cheerful, as the days counted down to it. The color red made a splashy appearance in every mall and home, where front doors were framed on all three sides with red banners sporting lucky poems in short Chinese couplets. (I wanted to paste “This Man Does Not Know What He Is Doing / Please Wish Him Well / Happy New Year” in calligraphy around my door but I never got around to it.) In the Coastal City mall that I frequent, I noticed that a display that only recently featured a talking penguin amidst a backdrop of fluffy snow had had its penguins swapped for trees with red 红包 hanging from branches like ornaments and the white fake-snow powder replaced with red confetti. Kids were jumping up and down in front of it and people were posing for pictures. I remembered the less-than-stellar Christmas lesson I gave to my 初三 students, who only knew that Santa was that “red fat man.” I had been disappointed. Here, compared to the Lunar New Year, Christmas is nothing. Which makes sense. It’s their holiday – and one rooted in thousands of years of history. The kids just did not understand the concept of Secular Christmas – and in seeing their blank faces, I wondered why the heck I got excited for a holiday that has a religious context that doesn’t apply to me. Besides my students not sharing my enthusiasm for it, this was also what weighed in my gut that week: maybe Christmas shouldn’t be my holiday, either.

But how much should the Lunar New Year be my holiday, either? In their generosity and good will, the Chinese I have met here have welcomed me with open arms, which I am really thankful for. But sometimes it’s a little too much of a good thing when I feel like my actual identity is about to become engulfed by my genetic ancestry. “Of course he celebrates Chinese New Year and goes to his 老家 to see his grandmother,” I imagine them thinking. “He is Chinese, after all, and one of us!” But the truth is that I’ve never really celebrated the New Year before. At most, my mother would putter around the house and overnight we’d find a little stack of mandarin oranges on the table with red paper cuttings around them. We would seldom talk much about it or do anything more than that, and even figuring out which calendar day the New Year would fall on eluded us sometimes. Some years it went by without us even noticing. Instead, I remember every Christmas with family, tree decorations, presents, and food. Those are the memories that I have significant and fond feelings for. How did my parents manage such a cultural switch when they first immigrated, I wonder? It must have been like giving up a white Christmas for a red New Year, something I understand the magnitude of now.

Feeling an allegiance to Christmas over New Years made it particularly strange for me every time a family member or acquaintance would hand me a 红包。 These are the “red envelopes” filled with money that you may have heard about, and are roughly analogous to Christmas presents. All married adults have to give them to children, who are by definition those not yet married: so I ended up receiving quite a bit of cash loot in my jaunts around China and Malaysia! Sometimes it would even be a family member I felt I didn’t know well enough to deserve getting a present from at all, adding to the weird feeling of guilt and imposter-ness I’d experience whenever receiving 红包. This isn’t even my holiday, you don’t have to give this to me! I wanted to protest sometimes. But refusing a 红包 is baaaaaad, so I would shut up, smile, and say 恭喜发财, as trained to do for the specific situation. And try to stop wondering about whether they imagined my training to go back further into childhood than it really did.

My own personal confusion aside, though, seeing the New Year was very nice. The city emptied a bit and became quiet: imagine New York City with the decibel level turned down and the people leisurely walking instead of thronging and crowding, and you might be able to get a better sense of the relaxing dislocation I’m trying to describe. Shenzhen is often accused of not possessing Chinese culture and being too Westernized in all the “wrong” ways, so the red market bazaar that I posted about seeing in the Hui Zhan Zhong Xin city center was very refreshing to see. It was as if the busy financial markets and traffic flows of a metropolis that grew only on credit and consumption suddenly gave way to reveal a beating red heart.  Red in the living, breathing, and traditional sense, not the Communist one.  “Redness” was always inherently Chinese before it was Communist.  People misunderstand that a lot.

In any case, I guess I actually didn’t really see or experience the full package deal of a Mainland New Year, because a week before the actual date I left to travel to Fuzhou and Malaysia. I will talk about those experiences soon.