Happiness Upside-Down.

The Chinese New Year is tomorrow, February 18th, and the city is decorated with red lanterns, flowers, ornaments, bustling with traffic, packages, people, and exploding at every corner with excitement, or more literally, with sparklers, and fireworks. Traditionally each spring festival, everyone goes back to their hometown to spend the weeklong holiday with their families, and since the end of January when school got out, people traveling en masse across the country. The Wang’s daughter has come home from Singapore, where she has been working for eight years, and everyday, relatives, classmates, and neighbors have been stopping by for tea or meeting us for banquet lunches all over town.
That said, Spring Festival is also about food. A few months ago, people started preparing thick red sausages to celebrate prosperity on the New Year, and strings hang at every market, and in every house, frequently rubbing up against the days drying clothes on the clothesline. This afternoon I noticed a coat rack outside someone’s door where two whole chickens were hanging upside down, tanning with string of sausage, and a dog patiently waiting for disaster. Does this seem absurd to anyone else? There’s meat everywhere.
In my house we’ve also been eating a lot of different rice combinations wrapped with cornhusks and string. Some of them are stuffed with meat, but others are sweet with brown sugar and red bean paste or corn. There are also a variety of different small cakes and treats that I think are for the New Year, and a “New Years Fish” that is actually a bowl of about a dozen whole fried fish soaking in a spicy soup that you have to poke around for with your chop sticks. A spring festival banquet isn’t complete until everyone was stuffed out of their minds before eight more dishes arrived on the table for mandatory sampling. Both yesterday at lunch, and dinner this evening, the table was overflowing with food and plates were stacked on top of each other in heaping pyramids of meats, soups, vegetables, rolls, with the constant clink of cheering glasses above.

But to be honest, amidst all of this excessive festivity, I feel like we’ve all gone a little insane. So much of what historically must have been meaningful Chinese heritage, I feel, has been lost in the insatiable consumerism that is storming over this nation. Millions of cheap plastic disposable lanterns clutter every commercial overhang and window clashing with yesterday’s advertisements, and box upon box of processed individually wrapped cakes replace homemade goodies. Grandparents are abandoned in their rural villages, and there just aren’t enough trains to get the migrant workers back home. The rising middle class shares new opportunities for travel, leisure, and living room TV extravaganzas while the poor are left to their own devices when only children can’t get stuck somewhere else. Also, with firework explosions on three sides, post-trauma car alarms, smoking card board launch pads, and the cops belatedly buzzing the crowd with lights ablaze, it’s not hard to confuse these drunken, lantern littered streets with some kind of violent combat zone.
Maybe it’s just my foreign disconnected self refusing to be swept away in the celebration and watching wide-eyed as two young boys duel with giant roman candles, and the waitress clears away yet another untouched bird or fish. Or maybe with China’s new eye towards the American dream, it feels like my country’s biggest flaws are perverting traditions and cultures everywhere. It’s one thing when we replace Jesus with Santa and presents, but when our outsourcing and obese consumer culture displaces millions and buries Chinese traditions in so much product that young generations can no longer find the meaning, it’s hard to celebrate.
One of the most popular Spring Festival decorations is the character for happiness written on red paper cut outs and decorated with fish, pigs, and other symbols for prosperity and wealth. In Chinese, the pronunciation of “upside-down” is the same as the pronunciation of “arrive”, and a lot of the decorations for happiness, on my door for example, are upside-down, as a play on words to mean that happiness will arrive, or has arrived. When this was first explained to me, I thought it was clever…now I’m wondering if at some magical threshold number, all of the red glittered arriving happiness doesn’t just become tacky decorations hung upside-down.