Liu Shinan

Why cherish our Lunar New Year

By Liu Shinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-02-28 07:15

Despite worries over the increasing interest Chinese youngsters have demonstrated in Western festivals like Christmas and Valentine's Day, the Lunar New Year's Day, or Spring Festival, still appeared, in the seven-day holiday last week, to be the happiest, coziest and most meaningful occasion of the year for Chinese people.

That was evidenced by the fact that hundreds of millions, whether white collar professionals or rural migrant workers, packed themselves into every means of transportation to travel hundreds or thousands of kilometers to return to their hometowns, even if it had to be a last minute arrival, for the New Year's Eve reunion dinner. More evidence: the fact that the amount of fireworks set off doubled from last year and the fact that temple fairs across the country were bursting with pilgrims and holiday merrymakers, both silver haired and tender voiced.

At midnight on Spring Festival Eve, when I watched fireworks flying into the air with colorful and dazzling sparks scattering across the sky amid deafening sputters of firecrackers, some thoughts came to my mind. Most of the festival pleasures - eating good food, wearing new clothes, watching entertainment performances - are no longer a once-a-year luxury. Then, why do Chinese still treasure Spring Festival so much? No doubt what people treasure most today is not - at least not only - material comfort but something in the spiritual sense.

Many spiritual pleasures that people enjoy during the Spring Festival holidays are not always available the rest of the year.

During the week, people more directly enjoy the affection of their parents and brothers and sisters who usually live in different places. They visit distant relatives, whom they haven't seen for a year or even longer and shower their kids with gift money. They trade unrestrained drinks with childhood friends who have also returned to their hometown from other parts of the country, and they completely relax without worrying about the pressure of work.

They also exchange friendly wishes with their neighbors, with whom they usually talk little or whom they may have offended because of trivial conflicts. And they trade greetings or jokes or cups of wine with their bosses, to whom they usually have to be cautiously respectful.

In the past, material enjoyment might be the most attractive part of the Spring Festival, because our ancestors generally lived in poverty. But the spiritual wealth they demonstrated in the festival - the mutual love and respect not only between family members but also among community members - was also seen on ordinary days.

Nowadays, good food, beautiful clothing and entertainment are part of everyday life but love and respect between people seem to be fading from our everyday life. Spring Festival is the time of the year when people most strongly feel the affection between loved ones. It also creates an atmosphere where people give and receive love, care and respect in a sincere, natural and relaxed way. I think that's the reason that contemporary Chinese treasure Spring Festival so much.

Fortunately we still have the Spring Festival and other traditional festivals. However, shouldn't we think seriously about whether we are losing, in our daily lives, some of our precious traditions and customs and righteous traits and feelings?

In this sense, defending Spring Festival is not something that relates to chauvinist resistance against the influence of invading foreign cultures but an effort to warn ourselves against losing the human love which is most strongly demonstrated in the Spring Festival and which is universal in all the world's cultures.

Email: liushinan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 02/28/2007 page10)