Chinese New Year 2005 commentary

'hard-sleeper' tickets (a bed in a room with 6 others, 2 x 3 high bunk beds). We did ask for 2 tickets for the night of 6th February but somewhere along there was confusion and our request turned into 2 tickets for 6th February in the night......or the very early morning. At 12.30am to be precise.

We arrived at the train station at 11.15pm, looked on as hundreds of fellow travellers with later departure times slept in the underground car-park and make shift tents close to the station, and fough our way into the first of many queues - this one to get into the station. Now Chinese queues aren't the friendliest at the best of times. Where I come from, queue jumping is frowned upon. Here it is accepted and practiced by most. Its generally not considered rude, it just happens all the time and when there are mroe people than usual in a bigger rush than usual things get physical. Elbows are used as levers, strategically placed bags act as blocks fopr toehrs and open new pathways for thier owners. On the right day its genuinely fascinating to watch - at 11.15pm on a cold, wet Saturday night its a real test of a mans patience.

So after the entrance queue, the baggage x-ray and the fight to get up the stairs, you have to find the platform number of your train, put your head down and charge through and endless sea of complete disorganised Chinese confusion that is the train station waiting area. You get to your designated waiting room, which feels more like a sauna, is completely overcrowded and where the queue for your train is about 500 people long. Still, once you've battled your way through that one and get to the otherside of the scrum where two train loads of passengers have converged on the same staircase, you get to the final 'get-on-board-the-train' queue and you can settle into your bunk-bed for the night.

If you know anything about the Chinese New Year or have read the more recent entries in my Blog, you will no doubt understand the importance of this festival for Chinese people. Although its meaning is different, its significance to those who celebrate it can be compared to Christmas for people like me. And as with Christmas, there are many traditions which are meticulously observed, but essentially it is a time to be spent with your family. A time to wish for luck and welcome in the new lunar year. So on this page I hope you can share some of my experiences at my first 'real' Spring Festival/Chinese New Year celebration. If nothing else, I hope it can give you an insight into life in the countryside in China.

This year the lunar new years day fell on the 9th February, so the 9th, 10th and 11th were the official celebration days, with the 8th being the new years eve and an important part of the festival. But before I talk about those special days and the numerous traditions and rituals which everybody goes through, I think its important to set the scene and introduce an essential but often negelected start to this festive time - the journey home!

The first hurdle is actually getting a ticket to travel. Prices are increased and demand for any kind of transport home is sky high. Chinas population is somewhere in the region of 1.3billion. I heard that during the national day period (a week long holiday starting October 1st to celebrate the founding of new China) there is a population movement of 500 million people (250 million in each direction). I can assure you that during Spring Festival this number is a lot higher. Imagine how chaotic things are at Heathrow at the peak time during the Summer and then imagine what it might be like if EVERYONE in Europe decided to travle over the same 3 days. If you can envisage that, you can begin to understand the chaos and crowds that travelling home brings up.

The train is everyones first choice for any journey with a travel time of more than 2 hours. In a country this size, thats pretty much every journey! So train tickets are hard to come buy. Tickets for the train go on sale 10 days before the travel date (it used to be 5, but things are getting better!) and people queue round the corner and through the night to get them. We were lucky enough to get 2

The train journeys here are fine. Usually uneventful (as you hope for on a train journey) and you get a good nights sleep on a relatively comfortable and clean(ish) bed - I'd take this over British Rail anyday! We arrive in Hefei and are greeted by my girlfriends Aunty, cousin and father, who has kindly arranged a car and driver to chaffeur us around for the day. We have lunch and forcefully give hong-bao (the traditional Chinese New Year gift consisting of a red envelope full of money) to a reluctant, proud and incredibly kind aunty. By way of an extra present for a lady who has had a hard year, we offer to take her and her son (Jewels younger cousin) shopping in the local supermarket to stock up on things for the coming 4 days. This is the point where my definition of a crowd was changed forever.....

Now I know men are not the greatest shoppers at the best of times, but I think I am not your typical man when it comes to getting around a department store. I'm not saying I'm good - just not bad.

We all know what the Christmas/January sales can be like - every man and woman for themselves. I've seen how desperate last minute shoppers and bargain hunters can get - carving their way through crowds like the proverbial hot knife through butter. But they have nothing on the people at the most popular supermarket/department store in town on the last full day of shopping before the families retire to the safety of their homes.

After fighting our way around the supermarket for about an hour we decided to stake our claim in one of th efull compliment of checkout queues, which took about another 45 minutes. It would have taken MUCH longer were it not for a bit of crafty queue jumping from an 'in-the-know' aunty and then some pleadings of ignorance about the situation from an equally canny grilfriend. So now all the shopping was done and we said farewell to the aunty and cousin before heading off for our next, and final, stop - Gaofeng.

Gaofeng is a typical Chinese countryside town. I don't even think it qualifies as a town, but thats what it officialy is. Its actually more like a county, spread out over a very large area. The 'downtown', where Jewels family home is, has one bank, one bus, one electricity shop, one clothes shop, about 300 chickens running wild, a river which doubles as a communal washing machine and a single track road leading all the way through it. Its really quite nice once you get adjusted.

And another thing it definitely is is cold. Very, very cold.

China has the orginal 'North/South' divide. Its got nothign to do with cost of living, accent or local football teams - here its much more practical and has everything to do with heating. Put simply, the north of China (above the Yangtze River) is allowed to have central heating and the south of China (below the Yangtze River) isn't. When you look at the extremes - Haerbin in the north, which used to belong to Russia and gets as low as -40 and Hainan Island in the south, which is on the same lattitude as Hawai - it makes sense. But as with all divides, those which sit closest to the dividing line tend to be pretty similar. And guess what? Gaofeng falls just in the south, so gets no central heating. Instead you have to make do with layer upon layer of clothing and the 'hot-ash-stool', which is a wooden stool with burning embers underneath. Kind of like individual central heating. Actually quite efective, but not entirely comfortable.

So we arrived 'home' and greeted the rest of the family. My incredibly basic Chinese has allowed me to master introductions, but there is only so many times you can say "I am really pleased to meet you" in one greeting. The rest of the time I put on the cheek-aching perma smile which conveniently hides my embarrassment at not speaking better Chinese and my confusion at what the hell is going on. And that is most of the time. If someone speaks to me slowly in simple mandarin Chinese I can usually catch their meaning and convey my meaning is very broken (closer to destroyed than broken, really) Chinese. When the people who are speaking are going full out at their natural speech speed and are jumping between standard Chinese which everyone learns and the local dialect which only those fortunate enough to be born in the area can understand, your head starts to spin. I guess you could say I was pretty dizzy.

But the family have accepted me now and they are genuinely great to me. They take real care of me and are constantly running around fetching me drinks and making sure I am confortable. Its really quite touching, although I am sure that some of it has a lot to do with the worry that should anything even slightly bad happen to me whilst visiting there will be, as the fathers puts it, an 'international problem'. And bearing in mind that as little as 15 years ago no foreigner would have been allowed to visit a house in this area, having an attitude like that is not suprising.

The house they live in is quite nice, especially by Chinese countryside standards. Its 3 floors high with a central room on each floor, with 2 rooms either side. The ground floor has the parents bedroom and a living room off the central room which is used for eating and some late night gambling. Next to the living room is a wood-fire powered kitchen and a dining room and behind the livign room is the washroom. Please note here that I use the word 'washroom' as I do not want to put you under a false impression that this is a 'normal' bathroom. I mean it is a 'normal' bathroom except that it doesn' t have a toilet (there is an outside toilet on the side of the house) and it also has no running hot water. More about that later though.

The first floor is home to a very nice but never used central living room and Jewels room on one side and her brother and sister-in-paws bedroom on the other. Countryside tradition dictates that daughters should go to live with their husbands family, which is one reason wny sons are so desireable to the Chinese - they don't leave home and can support you as you get older. Mind you, the family of the bride is paid quite well by way of compensation.

So after we had finished a few rounds of green teas and I had perma-smiled my way through a quick family catch up in the living room, we took our bags up to our room, which would be home for the next 8 days. Now this might seem like trivial information to you, but for me it was a real sign of how much I have been accepted by the family. This is the second time I've visited the family home and the first time, about a year and a half ago, things were not quite the same. The sleeping arrangements, for example. On my previous visit there was no way that they would have let their preciuos daughter share a room with her new boyfriend, as they were this time. No, lat time I was 'lucky' enough to have the opportunity to share the brothers bed, with her brother, whilst her father slept on the floor next to us. The men of the family were certainly keeping an eye on me that time!

Now that we were 'home' and settled in, Spring Festival had begun in earnest. And now I started to see just how similar this celebtraion is to Christmas. The parents running around preparing everything (mainly food!) whilst their children sit in front of the TV watching the endless round of end-of-year specials. The celebration of Chinese Olympic gold medal winners was a particular favourite of mine.

Similar to the BBC Sports personality of the Year, except rather than rewarding these Olympians with another trophy they were instead given the opportunity to entertain the nation with their Karaoke ability. Stick to sport is my suggestion. There were also

the 3 Chinese fencers who were dressed as various historical chracters and who had to fight a mock battle to the death. The 2 Olympic gold medalists scored an overall rehearsed draw, whilst the poor silver medalist was confined to another close second as he was 'killed' by Romeo in the first round. I somehow can't imagine Steve Redgrave and Sally Gunnell attempting Karaoke or re-enacting Macbeth for the pleasure of BBC viewers.

Another similarity of Christmas is all of the 'traditions' that need to be observed. On the whole they make a lot o f sense in context, but there were occassions when I wasn't sure if I was really tasting an authentic experience or just being humiliated at the hands of a sadistic girlfriend.

The Chinese New Year is, unsurprisingly, all about new, clean starts. A new year, a new start. Ridding yourself of all the bad luck of last year and hoping for good luck throughout the next year. Thats why on the first day of the new year everyone wears new clothes, traditionally red although that is not followed so rigourously now as anything modern is preferable. Brand new red underwear is a must, though. The new clothes are put on on th efirst day of the new year, after all the preperation work for the rest of the day has been done. This includes the most important ritual of cleaning all entrances to the house and placing red banners along the sides and across the tops. These banners have great significance as they invite good luck and fortune into the house for the next year. As an honoured guest, I was lucky enough to take the prime job of sticking these banners to all manner of doors in the house (including the outside toilet door!).

One of the stranger 'traditions' also involved an element of cleaning away bad luck, wlthough I'm not convinced it was really a tradition as I was the only one who had to endure it.

As it was pretty col, I was tending to wear a hat everyday to keep my poor ears warm. Unfortunately this is not wholly pratical, especially at meal times. You see, with my comedy hair, if I ever took my hat off I ran the risk of ebign mistake for Ronald McDonald and havign people order burgers and french friues from me. As such, my very observant and caring girlfriend convinced me that a 'get-rid-of-bad-luck-in-your-hair' hair cut was in order. Everyone else seemed to have shorter hair than the day before, so I thought it would be a good idea. "Wheres the barber in this town?" I then asked.

I clearly remember a wicked smile crossing her face as she whipped out a pair of scissors from behind her back and draged me outisde, where she dumped me on a stool in front of about 15 curious and giggling neighbours. She then proceded to sheer me like a sheep for the next 10 minutes. Not so much a Chinese New Year ritual as a ritual humiliation of the foreigner! Still, she didn't do a bad job really!

After this I then enjoyed my favourite of the traditional activites - a very long, hot bath, again the idea behind this is to wash away all the bad luck. It was only after I finished that I was told that it was also traditional not to shower or clean for the next 3 days as doing

so would then wash away all of the good luck that I had gained at the start of the new year (all this washing and luck was starting to confuse me by now!). Now this would usually be a hige problem for me. I'm a 2 shower a day man - I love them. And at first, the thought of no shower for the next 3 or 4 days (it turned out to be 5!) was a bit daunting. Then I realised that with no running hot water (hot water here is obtained by heating a huge tub full of water over a fire and then collecting it in buckets and thermos falsks to be used as needed) it was probably best that I did not have the choice, or I am sure I would have spent those days standing a freezing cold trickle of water in the shower, cursing the countryside and all who live there.

So the doors were decorated, the bodies were clean, the new clothes were on and evryone was ready to get on the with biggest part of the celebration - sitting in front of the TV. Its incredible, no matter who I ask - man, woman or child - about what they did during the biggest celebration of the year, everyone will say "eat, sleep, watch TV". At first I thought it was a little sad and then I thought that that is pretty much what everyone does for Christmas at home, so I shouldn't be so suprised.

And this goes on for the full lenght of the festival. The family mills around the house, drinking green tea, eating all manner of food, watchign TV, talking about anything and everything.adn generally having a good time. At midnight on the first night fireworks are set off to welcome in the new year. Its all very impromptu - no organised displays or anything - and it was very enjoyable, albeit a little cold, to stand on the roof top balcony and watch sporadic explosions of light and colour around the town for about an hour.

On new years day, the red banners are out up on the doors, the new clothes are out on and then, when all the family is ready, the main lunch/dinner is served. This really signifies the start of the new year and the exdpectaion of good luck is expected from then on. Just before you eat, everyone goes to the main entrance of the house and the firecrackers are let off. The deafaning 'bangs' are meant to scare all of the bad things out of the house and leave lots of room for good luck to pass through those newly decorated entrances.

After eating lunch, life goes straight back to normal as everyone gets another fresh cup of green tea and heads for those heated seats in fornt of the TV. And things stay like that until the evening when the countryside folk come out to play.....

Technically speaking, gambling is completely illegal on the Chinese mainland. Of course it contines everywhere on a small scale and in the countryside it is as normal and important a part of life as anything. Mahjong is the main game and the place to make most money if you're good/lucky and lose a lot if you're a novice - like me. I decided to steer clear fo the mahjong table (apparently I have the skill level of a 3 year old!) and leave it to Jewels brother to try his luck. He's a bit of an expert and often wins 1000 - 2000RMB in an evening. Thats about £160, and not bad going in a place which has an avergae monthly salary of about 500RMB (about £40).

I decided I would stick to what I know best - cards. I've been playing crads for as long as I can remember. Everytime there was/is a family get together at home the cards come out. I remember my grandfather teaching me Black-Jack and Brag as a young impressionable 5 year old. Now I'm no card shark, but I do know how to play. And all that washing and hoping for good luck had obviously worked as the locals have a game which is pretty much the same as 3 card brag. Thank you very much, I thought. I can play this game - it's going to be like stealing candy from a baby!

And indeed it was. Just like stealing candy from a baby. So now I have no more candy and I am officially a baby! Whilst the locals continued there marathon cards session, I decided to cut my losses after about an hour, much to the dissapointment of my fellow card players who were obviously sad that their ATM was leaving before they could really get their teeth into him.

But it was'nt all bad. Jewel's mother and father seemed to be the recipients of most of my money, so at least they grew to like me a little more after that!

Thinking about it, I think her parents are actually on-the-ball when it comes to

all things money.

They were very generous to me this year and as a sign of how they have accepted that their daughter is now dating a hulking lump of a white man they gave me my 'hong-bao' - the famous red-packet complete with lucky money. Being as I was their guest and as their daughters boyfriend I should be trying to win them over, it would have been more traditional for me to give them hong-bao (as a couple we did give a joint gift). But as with many things in China, not all traditions are being observed - especially by ignorant foreigners like myself. So they very generously gave me 200RMB as lucky money. Or so they said. I think they gave it to me to ensure that I had no excuse to avoid the card table and then they could have a chance to attack my wallet, which they did all to succesfuly.

So apart from losing a little money (I like to think of it as an investment in acceptance) and getting a little sick from all the food (no vege-burgers in Gaofeng) my Spring Festivla was great.

Lots of time spent in front of the TV watching pictures and trying to make sense of a still unthamoable language, long walks in the coutryside to enjoy the rice fields, mountains and snow. And most importantly a lot of time spent with people who showed kindness to a fault.

I learnt a lot about Chinese coutryside life this year and hope that next year I will be able to enjoy it even more. I'll just be sure to practice my card skills before I go next time......