The restaurants and parks are packed, except for the actual New Year’s Eve. Then everyone is at home and takes part in a long, together extensively prepared, feast which drags on for hours, interrupted by MaJiang, card games and television (there are cult programmes re-run every year that day, similar to the “Dinner for One” sketch that has caught on in Germany, Scandinavia, and Australia). On the first day of the new year people are out, though, on the streets, in parks, shops and malls and restaurants, visiting museums and exhibitions, and cinema, they have long enough been perched on each other.
The boys are more interested in this new “book”, a kind of glass representing a thick book, if you wipe with your hand across the page, the display will scroll to the next pages, back and forth as desired. The boys do not read, they browse and find it great.
After the New Year celebrations at home you go to the museum, watch at ancient works of art (this is an important – obviously male – individual in a tailor-cut sarcophagus of gold).
For a whole week, even before the New Year’s Day, especially in the New Year’s night, and also more than a week later, there is popping in every nook and cranny. Chinese love fireworks. In contrast to western pounding, the Chinese kindle their New Year firecrackers not at midnight of New Year’s Eve, but whenever they like.
Thus it can happen quite possibly that on a Wednesday after New Year you are sitting at 11 o’clock in the late evening on your balcony, warmly dressed because in February the outside temperature is ten degrees centigrade. You may have a glass of red wine in hand, looking at the hustle and bustle of traffic on the street below. What you don’t see is what is just now being prepared beneath the balcony, down on the street.
Suddenly, without any announcement, a crash will detonate just underneath you that would be banned in Germany because of the decibels released by the explosion (say you’re happy if you were still sitting on the balcony and not lying in bed and dozing off, for that would have been a very nasty awakening). A tenth of a second later, a rocket passes by from below, unfolding a colourful rain of stars precisely at the altitude of your private balcony, but fortunately 30 metres off, and then the private fireworks, free for the passive observer on the balcony, is really get going and will calm down again maybe 15 minutes later.
And that you may experience for a whole week. Of course not always just below or in front of your private balcony.
On the evening of the first day of the new year, the pounding is most intense. Then you may roam the streets of your “village” in ShenZhen and watch all the families and gatherings of friends and neighbours having prepared larger or lesser fireworks and eager to set them into action. Particularly eager – Chinese not being different from Germans – are children and men. Women carry the baby or comfort the little ones where something has failed or if they burnt themselves. Big sisters or neighbourhood children assist the little brothers or fellows from the neighbourhood (big brothers do not help because they have to pop themselves). Most amusing is the observation of small children playing with fire during the day and the greater tries to care of the younger and helps setting fire but is as well rather scared in doing so.
Two weeks later, full moon rises, the Lantern Festival is coming up. Originally (and certainly in some areas even today), lanterns are made and displayed, in ShenZhen you may observe one metre wide hot-air balloons with internal flames that are launched. During the day, in some places people hang riddles on ropes (once at the hanging lanterns), hundreds of people make a kick out of solving them.
In theory, the Lantern Festival is the completion of the New Year celebrations, work at the job resumes already one week before, but on the evening of the Lantern Festival, if the weather is fair under the full moon, you may watch the hot-air balloons sailing through the air, and the final fireworks.
The family of ”mayor” Song meets only the day before New Year, to the banquet, and on New Year itself. The son, chief doctor at the hospital in ShenZhen, is living there, too, after all, and the hospital does not close. But the families of programmer Wang
At least as appealing is this model of the city of ShenZhen below the glass plate, now you can locate your own residential area and the school and the apartment of friends, if necessary, by looking very close.
Riddles are hung during the Lantern Festival. Phone a friend, obviously.
and his wife QingFang will stay together for a week. The prayers of Mother Wang have largely been fulfilled, New Years passed in harmony. The weekend before the Lantern Festival, on Saturday, Wang QingFang’s father is taken to the train station, on Sunday, the in-laws follow. Slowly normal life returns.
