Chinese New Year- If It Is Going To Go, It Might As Well Go Like That

Well, if the curtain has to be brought down on these celebrations then you might as well go down fighting for them. That is how it seems the Chinese greet the Lantern Festival, which falls on the 15th day of the Lunar New Year and marks the end of these weeks of travel, celebration and the good old-fashioned eating of too much food. Although, when they went, they went down with a smile on their faces.

From about 6 in the afternoon, to past 10 at night, there were fireworks and crackers being let off everywhere, and I must emphasise everywhere. If they were not in the sky over ahead, they were in the sky just ahead of me, if I was caught between two buildings they were reflecting in both the apartment windows and in those of the cars below. This crescendo of celebration also brought with it a little too much of what could be described as a crashing din, with the bang of the banger (popular!) reaching around every corner and within every building. This is one aspect of the night that can actually begin to wipe the smile from your face.


As I cycled slowly towards Shi Da Lu and with my attention taken by the lights and patterns ahead, I did not at first notice where the shapes and sounds were coming from, as I got nearer I realized that someone was, every few minutes, just putting a box of fireworks in the middle of the road. With vehicles still passing-by, rockets gained heat and then whistled into the night sky, above the shiny, reflective bonnets of the cars beneath. The odd one, with a low trajectory, sent a thousand multi-coloured sparks dashing across these metallic frames. It looked amazing, the more so for the fact I would probably be locked up for doing the same thing back in Britain.

After some time, there is a point surely, where you reach firework overload, I retreated to Sculpting in Time Café for a bit of study. But I soon realized my appetite for fireworks was unsatiated as I found myself bending ever lower in my seat to catch another glimpse of these locally named "fire-flowers", still rising and fanning out over the buildings and trees outside the window.

On another note, a pleasant thing I acknowledged this week that was connected with my return to work, was that after just a couple of days of being around young kids again I was feeling fresher both physically and mentally. I have noted it in a wider sense before, never in such a specific instance, but there really is something quite splendid about being around Chinese children. They are just so full of life and simplicity and not the duplicity, which I am afraid, seems to have infected even some of the quite young in Britain.

If I had to do this everyday then maybe I would not feel quite the exuberance I do. However, the limited number of teaching hours a foreign teacher can quite happily live on here, means that a taste of this youthful inhibition and honesty is rather uplifting, leaving you free to use your Chinese studies as a source of disillusionment and despair. On that note, I will conclude with the observation that 2-3 weeks away from regular classes and subsequent chatting in Chinese, has left my carefully choreographed Kou3 Yu3 (oral language) confidence in tatters. But, that’s nothing new and will be dealt with in due course.