Chinese New Year

The Chinese New Year is the biggest holiday in China.  Most students have a three-week break, and everyone returns to the place they were born to celebrate the New Year together.  This year, my family and I spent the New Year in FuZhou with my grandparents (on my dad's side).

We had planned to take the high-speed rail (eight hours at least) there, since it was way cheaper, but tickets ran out.  So we ended up flying a plane.

Living Quarters

Our flight was in the afternoon, and we arrived somewhere in the evening.  Since our grandparents had two apartments in FuZhou, they lived in one and let us stay in another.

Even though the apartment was a little small and situated on the fifth floor of an elevatorless building, I had always liked the feeling of wonder I experienced every time our family stayed there.

I loved the (as I called it) "ancient" sugar pot, the clocks that wouldn't run unless you wound them, the desk drawers, and closet drawers full of "old" items.  Old photo albums which contained pictures of my grandparents, my dad, and my uncle almost thirty years ago, packs of playing cards, a certificate of my grandpa's when he won first in playing Chinese Chess, an old but sharp pocket knife which I wished I had, stacks and stacks of blank sheets of paper that would have been used years ago when my grandparents still taught at the university, photos of me and my siblings under the glass on the tables...I loved digging through everything, even when I got into trouble for not finishing whatever I had been assigned to do (plus getting dust all over myself).

The ancient sugar pot.  My dad's grandfather made the handle, and my dad recalls that my grandma always had it in her kitchen.  I like it, even though some of our family members say it's a little dirty.  :D

One of those old wind-it clocks.

The Food (which MUST be mentioned)

Besides the place, I liked the food...well, sort of.  Not really, actually.  But I had so many pictures of food I thought it would be a waste if I didn't include any in this post.  So, here goes:

I DID like this one!  It's a special FuZhou food called zhe (a word in the FuZhou dialect; there is actually no name for it in Mandarin).  Inside it's filled with sweet sticky rice, and oh boy! it's so sweet you can only eat three or four at most.  Which, of course, I did.  (This is a typical Chinese New Year food.)

My mom makes the best of these!  The red stuff is dried jujubes (called zhao zi), and the yellowish stuff is something you find in lotuses, called liang zi.  I'm not sure what the English word for it is.

Fish!  It was the only type of meat I could eat, and I got a little sick of it after eating it so many times.  It's really good, though.  My dad does the best job of frying them.

This is...well, we call it nian gao.  It's made of sticky rice flour and is really sweet.  Also a typical Chinese New Year food.

Dinner on the Chinese New Year's Eve!  New Year's Eve dinner is always the biggest meal.  EVER.  We cooked this time, and we spent (literally) the entire day cooking.  Thankfully, no one asked for much of my help.  :D

New Year Traditions & Passover

There are actually a LOT of Chinese traditions on our New Year that are pretty similar to Passover in the Bible.  (I believe the traditions we have had their origins in Passover, but the real meaning for the traditions got twisted, as did the traditions themselves.  By the way, most Chinese people don't even know why such traditions are kept.  It's sort of like, "All our ancestors did it, so we do it too.")  I don't have time to list all of them here, but you may be able to look it up.

Oh, one more thing before I start.  I believe the Passover story in the Bible is completely true; however, our stories and legends are not, though they are probably based off the Passover event.

"Passing" Over:  When we say, "It's time to celebrate the New Year" in Chinese, what we actually say is (literally), "It's time to pass over the year" (guo nian).  I never thought much about it before, but it actually seems really strange when you think about it.  Who "passes over" a year, anyhow?

The "Blood" on the Doorposts:  During the Chinese New Year, you'll see a lot of homes with these red chun lians covering the doorposts of the door (top, left, and right).  The words on the chun lians are blessings for a prosperous and peaceful New Year.  But what's most interesting is why we put up these chun lians.  Legend has it that a monster goes out every New Year's Eve to eat up children.  However, this monster hates the color red.  When you put red on the doorposts, he won't come to eat you.  (Didn't the death angel pass over the doors with the blood of the lambs on Passover?)

Asking Egyptians for Gold, Silver, etc.:  Adults usually hand out red envelopes to children during the Chinese New Year.  The red envelopes are filled with money...a long time ago (when my mom was a child), kids got red envelopes by asking adults for them (there's even a little rhyme that goes with this).  I don't think they do that now, though.

Eating Together:  In the Bible, the Israelites were commanded to eat the Passover, as a family, inside their houses.  They were not to leave at all until G-d commanded them to.  In ancient times, families and relatives would spend the night after the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner inside the same house.  I'm not sure if it's still done now, but it would be pretty interesting if it was!

The Coconut

Oh...yeah, the coconut.  Let the pictures do the storytelling for this one.

My uncle's family brought six coconuts to the dinner on the Eve.  After we had drunk the juice inside, we decided to keep the coconuts and try to see if we could get at the meat.

Well, let me rephrase what I said under the previous picture.  I was the one who wanted to keep the coconuts.
Anyhow, I used a knife to (painstakingly) split the coconut open.  Come to think of it now, that was a little silly.  (But hey! none of the articles and videos on the Internet about opening coconuts worked when we tried them!)

Last Remarks

We came back home mid-February.  And...

Durian dessert!  Such a delicious treat eaten on the TRAIN RIDE (yes, we got tickets this time!) back home,

Oops.  I forgot to mention what my favorite part of the trip was...
My favorite part of the trip was that there was a nice, big library half an hour away from the place we stayed in!  This library had English books on top of all the Chinese ones.

(I'm always looking for a library (books, I mean) wherever I go.  If I don't have books to read, I panic.)