An Untraditional New Year's Celebration

Chinese New Year's is a time for families to get together. Train tickets can be nearly impossible to buy and airplane tickets are more expensive than ever. The time leading up to Spring Festival (the Chinese New Year) is known in Chinese as "chunyun" or the Spring Festival Travel Season. It's a time of high traffic migration; everyone, it seems, goes home to celebrate the holiday with family. You can think of it as our Thanksgiving holiday on steroids.

Of course, not everyone gets the opportunity to return home. This past Saturday night was New Year's Eve and a friend of mine was also in Beijing, she chose not to go home in order to pursue internship opportunities. Her family was calling her before New Year's telling her there's still time to buy a plane ticket and come home to celebrate it together, but she was set on meetings that begin on the second day of the New Year. Through an online community, she found a group of people who also didn't go home for the New Year and were going to celebrate it together.

We went over together and met up with everyone for dinner at a restaurant near Tsinghua University. The group of eleven consisted of four women and seven men. I was the only foreigner. The average age was probably 24, the youngest was a high school student aged 16 and the oldest was a writer aged 31. They were from Guangdong, Fujian, Guizhou, Gansu, Hunan, and Jiangsu provinces. My feeling is that a great number didn't return to their homes for economic reasons, either they were working in Beijing around the holiday or couldn't buy a plane ticket home after the cheaper (though still pricy) train tickets were sold out. I get this feeling because no one asked or said their reasons for not going home. On the whole, economic topics were avoided by all present. If they were asked what they were doing in Beijing, most gave ambiguous answers about studying or working. Most of the topics we discussed were cultural topics such as books, writers, and mainly movies. And a majority of the conversations were led by my friend; the 31-year-old writer; a 20 year old student who was preparing to take the college entrance exam a second time in order to switch majors (he was hoping to go to film school in Beijing for directing); and two other 20-something men, whose names I now forget. Most people went by their online handles, not their real names. We had a large dinner where everyone ordered one dish and then we split the bill. After all it ended up being fourteen dishes ordered and split eleven ways, the bill was about 25 RMB, or about 3.70 USD, per person. Not an expensive meal by any means (including beer and soft drinks).

After we had finished eating, we went to the bookstore that the woman who had organized the event worked at. We had been trying to figure out where to go to watch the chunjiewanhui, or the chunwan as it is called. The chunwan is a 4 – 5 hour production of singing, magic, comic routines, and dances performed by famous Chinese stars. It's been a staple for 30 years and has turned into something people just have to have turned on for New Years Eve (though they don't necessarily enjoy it). We ended up watching it on a computer in the café part of the bookstore, as most other places that we could watch it were all closed.

While watching the chunwan, we played a game called "Killer" (in the US we call it "Mafia"). It's a game where (in this version) one person is a killer and the rest our townspeople trying to figure out who the killer is. The first night while everyone is "asleep" (closed eyes) the killer can select someone to kill. The next day the townspeople and the hidden killer in their midst have to try to find out who the killer is based on doubts, personal opinions, and accusatory/defensive statements. The night and day pattern continues until the killer has either killed off all the townspeople or the townspeople discover who the killer is. I played several times, ended up being the killer three times in a row, then played as the story teller for the rest of the evening, the person who acts as the narrator during the game. I find a most of the post '80 generation knows how to play this game.

We watched the chunwan waiting for a famous comedian to perform. Last year his sketch produced several phrases that have become very popular. The thought was "we can't miss this or tomorrow everyone will be talking about it, and we won't know!" Unfortunately his sketches have been getting worse and worse each year. This year no one was impressed. After his depressing sketch we decided it was time to go outside to set off fireworks.

It was about midnight at this point and the entire area was alive with people setting off fireworks. It was incredibly loud, the kind of Chinese New Year that I really enjoy. Everywhere you looked there were explosions of all colors and sizes. While the fireworks, individually, are not as large as say a fireworks display that a city in the states puts on for the Fourth of July, but they are bigger than the fireworks that families in the states can personally buy for the Fourth. When you imagine thousands of families all buying these kinds of larger sized fireworks, you end up with a fireworks display on a magnificent scale.

It was an interesting evening for me as it was an entirely new experience for the Spring Festival. My previous two New Year's celebrations in China were spent with families, arguable very "traditional" ways to spend the New Year. The first was my host family when I was studying abroad here in 2007; the second was a friend of mine's family in the countryside of Guizhou last year. The holiday is a time for families to get together, but sometimes one forgets that not everyone has the opportunity to go home. I got to see how people spend the evening when they can't go home. While untraditional by Chinese New Year's standards, it was still a way for those unable to go home to enjoy the New Years traditions: a big meal with a large group of people, together talking and enjoying time together, despite never having met previously.