Welcome and Happy Chinese New Year! I wish you all much happiness, abundance, and prosperity in the year of the ox.
My first Spring Festival in China was the transition from the year of the dog to that of the golden pig, my year. For those of you who are not familiar with Chinese astrology, every year corresponds to an animal on a 12-year cycle. The "golden" year only comes once in several years, so the fact that 2007 serendipitously corresponded with my birth animal was pretty extraordinary.
I was living in Ningyuan, a small town in rural China at that point, and Spring Festival was my only chance to really travel as a teacher, so I took off and met my mother in Australia. I didn't forget to celebrate my new found culture though. I bought hong bao's (small red envelopes for money) in Chinatown in Sydney, and decided that on the first day of Chinese New Year that I would disperse 8 hong bao's to random people, spreading the joy of the year of the pig.
In each hong bao, I placed 5 types of currency. I'm a huge fan of feng shui and an even bigger fan of symbolism, so I decided that each dollar and coin represented worldwide prosperity and unity. Since I'm American, I placed a dollar in each one, a Hong Kong dollar, a 5-dollar Australian bill, a New Zealand dollar (I had been there a week before), and finally, one Chinese RMB.
I set off on my mission to make this day special. My mom got a hong bao, both because she's my mom and also because she was the only other person I knew in Cannes. I gave one to the woman who cleaned our room, leaving a note about Chinese New Year. I gave one to the waitress at breakfast, one to the waiter at dinner, and so on...
I now live in a modern city called Hangzhou, which is two hours from Shanghai. Tomorrow I will go back to my Chinese 老家 (lao jia / hometown), the town I lived in my first year, with my British friend to celebrate the traditional Chinese festival with my close friends and students, who I consider to be my Chinese family.
Tonight I spent Chinese New Year's Eve with two of my closest friends here, one of them Chinese and one of them Italian. It was perfect. My Chinese friend invited us into her candle-lit living room, and we prepared dinner together while watching the traditional Chinese New Year's program on TV. Around midnight, fireworks all over the city began to explode. It made the Olympic fireworks seem small in comparison!
So, in the year of the ox, I'm grateful for all my friends and for all I have learned about Chinese culture in the past 3 years. I'm most thankful for the openness that I have experienced from my students who accepted someone foreign, for my friends who invited me into their lives, and for my teachers, who were patient with me and my poor Chinese. Chinese say, "大家好" (da jia hao) when greeting everyone. It literally translates as "hello big family". I can't but think what the world would be like if all languages had this concept and moreover, if they chose to uphold it.
For more information on this go to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_astrology .
Living in China was a writer's paradise. I daily encountered people, places, and objects that I would have been hard-pressed to imagine on my own. After living there for almost 3 years, I can honestly say that I loved it there. Chinese people, culture, and language are incredibly fascinating, and the more I learned, the more I understood a sixth of the world's perspective. I recently returned to the States to rediscover my home country and to be a bridge between east and west.
