Guo Nian Hao

On Sunday, February 18, we will celebrate the Chinese New Year, the biggest feasting, well-wishing and merry-making season for the Chinese - in this country and elsewhere.

On Wednesday, a friend from Mexico wrote me saying: "This year, strangely, we're going to be featuring several notes about it in my newspaper."

As Chinese products continue to fill shelves everywhere the world, it's just as well the rest of the world knows more about the cultural traditions of China.

To the rest of the world, the Chinese Lunar New Year (according to the Lunar Calendar) is known as the Spring Festival. In Chinese parlance, it's simply Guo Nian.

"Spring Festival", by the way, is an apt translation. Festival, a time set aside for feasting (and other celebrations), is spot-on. Food used to dominate the Lunar New Year celebrations, for obvious reasons. Times were hard, if there's any time in a year that people get to feast and, if the harvests were good, eat their fill is during the New Year. Hence, the festive mood from all around.

But the Spring Festival fails to capture the other side of story for "Guo Nian", which is what I'm going to talk about here.

As more foreigners learn to speak Chinese, they'll want to learn about "Guo Nian" anyway, so that they can celebrate the Chinese holiday the Chinese way.

Literally "Guo Nian" means "Pass the Year". According to legend, the "Year" (pronounced Nian in Mandarin) is an animal, a man-eating and havoc-wrecking beast. He makes his lone visit at the year-end. That's the reason for the fireworks - people hope to drive the Nian beast away with the noise from all the firecrackers.

The concept of Nian-Passing is uniquely Chinese - The only time they prepare abundant food for themselves they have to remind themselves of the beast there to spoil their meals. The Chinese always keep things in what my Mexican friend would certainly call a "strange" perspective. To really enjoy the New Year, we have to first pacify our enemies, real or imagined, lest they pop up from out of nowhere to poop the party. New Year's Eve also counted as the end of the fiscal year, by which time one had to clear one's debt with creditors, another sobering reminder of the many a needy day in the past, and certainly another contributing factor to the somber outlook towards the festivities.

The Nian beast is sometimes called Da (Big) Nian. Indeed, there is a Xiao (Small) Nian to pacify too. The Small Nian is the God of the Stove. The God of Stove, according to folklore, goes up a week before the New Year to report to the King of Heaven the deeds of the family he's been with. So on this day, families prepare a sticky, cane-shaped, toffee-like sugar for him, to sweeten his lips - so that he would have nothing but sweet things to say.

Families never fail to pay this tribute lest the God of the Stove tells warts and all and make them lose face in front of the King of Heaven. More realistically, people bribe the God of the Stove to avoid the dreadful prospect of him being so angry that he would refuse to light a cooking fire for the family in the next year.

The Chinese, in short, pacify their enemies first. The enemies might be real or imagined, but the Chinese are convinced they're always there. They know if their enemies are not happy, they won't be happy. Terribly self-abusive this may sound, but that's the Chinese mind at work at the subconscious level, at all times. As a matter of fact, the way the Chinese "pass the New Near" is the same middle-of-the-road approach they take in everything they do. It's the Yin-Yang philosophy - One can not enjoy the happy unless one also understands the sad - at work.

So now, if you have pacified your enemies and exorcised your demons, you can say properly: Guo Nian Hao!

Happy New Year!