Two Days of Fireworks

The official Chinese New Year's Eve (大年三十, da nian san shi, or "big year thirty") was February 6th, and I celebrated by studying for a few hours, then having dinner with Panda. Before and after dinner, we watched TV, which is more or less the Chinese custom for celebrating any holiday. The big show from eight o'clock to midnight on New Year's Eve is the CCTV Spring Festival Gala--essentially a variety show--broadcast in Chinese with subtitles. As the pre-gala coverage was sure to mention, again and again, the CCTV Gala is over twenty years old, and watching it is a tradition for many Chinese.

It's also among the most boring things I've ever sat through in my life. Think of big feathered dresses and huge choreographical showpieces of the kind that were popular in early Hollywood; put that together with comedy routines that don't actually get translated, bubble gum pop songs that get translated poorly, loads of image-enhancing propoganda and a schmaltzy tribute to the "snow disaster," and it's just a bit more interesting than watching paint dry. Granted, had my Chinese been much better, I might have enjoyed it a bit, but having to rely on the usually meaningless subtitles makes for dull viewing. Perhaps lovely songs were rendered ridiculous by translations like "Hark! The children are reading their books." and "All the flowers and the drunken people." And rather than providing a translation of the words in cross-talks (a kind of comedy routine), the producers instead ran descriptive passages along the bottom of the screen: "This sketch is about China's real estate market. Real estate prices have risen drastically in recent years, and this has led to . . . etc. " The whole thing seemed like nothing more than a good-will message to the world.

By ten o'clock or so, I managed to convince Panda that this was 不好玩儿 (not good fun) and to get her to agree to go out to Bao'an with me to watch the fireworks. In my neighborhood last year, every tree, gate and window had been covered in decorations, colored lights, Chinese lanterns, and the fireworks had run all night, all leading up to midnight, when so many fireworks went off it looked like noon. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the bus stop, the buses were no longer running, so I got stuck in NanShan.

However much more money there might be in NanShan than in Bao'an, there certainly isn't much more celebratory spirit. Panda and I walked around a good while, but over a perios of a few hours not much was happening--a few fireworks right at midnight, but nothing like what I'd seen last year. One or two people climbed up to the roofs of their buildings and set off Roman candle after Roman candle, but the lights were mostly from isolated spots. The absolute chaos from last year (with fireworks shooting from every roof, most balconies and from the road, all while children ran around with sparklers, and the whole thing looked like the sun would surely rise on a corpse-littered street)--that chaos never made an appearance. Instead the whole night seemed subdued.

Two days later, Winnipeg and I went into Hong Kong for their fireworks display. Beforehand, I had a good Reuben and some chili-cheese potato skins at Murphys, and we managed to get relatively close to the display (though a million people or so must have been between us and the water). Last year, we'd watched from the wrong spot in the rain, and the whole show had looked like a backlit cloud of smoke. Though our view this year was partly blocked by buildings, the sky stayed clear, and we got a fantastic show for our time. In the first thirty seconds of the display, we must have seen more explosions than we did during the whole display last year.