New Year to go off with a bang for expats

Those left stranded in China over the Chinese New Year plan to make the best of the experience, with parties, dinners and fireworks, Chitralekha Basu finds.

It's freezing outside. The roads are empty. Air and rail tickets are sold out. Your Chinese colleagues and friends have withdrawn into their shells to watch the CCTV gala and are snuggling up to their dear ones, or gone home to enjoy piping hot dumplings.

Spring Festival in China is essentially a family affair and being stranded in a Chinese city with a week's holiday and nowhere to go (unless the canny expat in question has booked an exorbitantly-priced, quick getaway to Bali or Siam Reap, well in advance), even as fireworks go off relentlessly till midnight, might not be the most desirable experience in the Middle Kingdom. Right?

Curiously, the foreigners we put this question to did not think spending Spring Festival in China was such a bad idea. In fact, the people we interviewed - old China hands and just-arrived types - said they were looking forward to the festival break and celebrations, even if they were not integrally related to it.

American Zach Johnson, who works with a French NGO, south of Beijing, remembers being awakened by a heart-stopping din on the first night of the festival in 2010.

"I thought it was the end of the world," he says. "There was 365 degrees of the loudest-sounding booms with colorful lights dominating the dark sky."

It took him a while to figure out that he had not entered a science-fiction flick "and that we weren't going to war with Transformers".

The decibel levels, in fact, were "quite normal" when it came to banging the Chinese New Year in. Besides, being jolted awake in the middle of the night came with a reward. "I saw the most spectacular fireworks barrage ever."

Sichuan University student Lucy Fluck rounded up an international community of friends - Monia, from Italy, Love from Sweden, Mega from Indonesia and Nick from the US, joined a little later by Kika, from Slovakia - to celebrate Spring Festival in Chengdu in 2010.

They had a "big, scrumptious dinner" at a small Chinese restaurant and then chatted over beer all night long at her apartment, but not before setting off "one of those massive Chinese firecracker thingies" on which they had scrawled "names of dead dictators", as a token of "blasting away all evil".

Away in Germany this year, Lucy still intends to recreate the festival magic. She is inviting her friends over for a hotpot, prepared with Sichuan pepper and other ingredients she carried all the way from Chengdu.

A fruit and chocolate fountain will be served as dessert, followed by a bout of karaoke singing, doffing one's cap to Chinese tradition.

Fluck will share her China stories and then move on to a German New Year custom, in which tiny bits of lead are heated on a spoon and dropped in cold water. The solidified shape in water the lead takes supposedly denotes what the future might look like.

Like her, Dylan Schuyt, a Dutch student who spent his last Spring Festival at Beijing and is back in Europe this year, is missing the zing in the air and will probably go to a Chinese restaurant to indulge in nostalgia.

He had landed up in Beijing just four days before the festival in 2010, didn't have any friends and "all the English-speaking people seemed to have disappeared".

On New Year's Day he ran into a Scandinavian group and went with them to the happening bar and music hub around Houhai Lake.

"We spent the whole night in the Reggae bar and at midnight stepped outside to watch the fireworks," Schuyt says.

He got the scare of his life watching fireworks being ignited in streets less than 3 meters wide. When the owner of the adjacent restaurant stepped out with a pot of fireworks bigger than himself Schuyt was petrified.

"Then he decided to put the whole thing into my hands, handed me a lighter and pointed his thumbs up with a big grin," says Schuyt.

"I lit all the fireworks and it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life."

He and his new-found friends stayed in the bar till 7 am. The bar owner made them a breakfast, to extend the spirit of festive camaraderie.

China Radio International anchor and thespian Chris Verrill is looking forward to teaching children theater during the holidays.

"This is going to be my best Spring Festival," he says. "We're spending the vacation using theater skills to help Chinese students improve their spoken English."

The break will be utilized to help mount a production of Treasure Island, by the students of Beijing Playhouse, a theater group specializing in producing Broadway-style musicals, which Verrill runs. "It will be a lot of fun," he adds.

Zach Johnson has invited his friends, a Chinese-French couple from Hangzhou, to ring in the New Year. "I'm sure we'll all take turns cooking. We'll eat her crepes, his hotpot and my ice cream (bought from Jenny Lou's). We'll go sing at KTV and eventually have our world peace conversation."

Beat Muller, who runs a Swiss bakery and cafeteria in Shunyi, and has seen 10 Chinese new years pass by, takes the business of spreading festival cheer rather seriously. He ritually invites his "stranded" friends over to join the family dinner.

"I would throw a bigger party and call more friends," he says, if he could afford it. Dinner is followed by watching fireworks light up the Beijing sky. Back home from exposure to the midnight chill, the group will share a hot soup Muller will prepare in advance, "and of course a glass of sparkling wine goes along".

The Chinese New Year can bring surprises, he says.

"One year, it started snowing heavily in the evening. By midnight the sky cleared and the stars were out. Beijing turned into a wonderland, with magic in its air. With the virgin snow covering the landscape and the fireworks going off, it felt like being in a fairytale."

Margaret Ray, newly arrived from Australia, is waiting to be overwhelmed. The teacher and choir singer is planning to go on extensive walks on the streets of Beijing with her journalist husband, "and learn about what the Chinese do during the festival".

Undaunted by the information that there won't be too many taxis plying the roads during the festival week, Ray has a well-laid-out plan of visiting an expansive list of "art galleries, museums and tourist sites".

For her the festival break is all about exploring the new culture that she has made her temporary home. Even if money weren't an issue, "I would probably still do the same things."

(China Daily 01/27/2011 page20)