The Year of the Horse - Chinese New Year Down Under

 

When I read on-line that there would be celebrations in Adelaide's Chinatown for the Chinese Lunar New Year, I put it on our calendar. We've never celebrated Chinese New Years before. January 31st was the official date for the beginning of 4712 on the Chinese calendar, however the celebration which the Chinese call Spring Festival was being held on February 1st. Since the actual Spring Festival continues for another 15 days until the Lantern Festival, celebrating a day late didn't seem to be a problem.

Chinatown is adjacent to the Central Market in Adelaide on Moonta Street, … a pedestrian mall lined with Chinese restaurants and shops. It's not a large area comparative to San Francisco, New York or Sydney … just the one street, but the local crowds spilled onto nearby closed-off streets, spirits were high, the temperature was sizzling and we were in store for some fine entertainment. Because of the heat, the festivities didn't start till 4PM.

Traditionally, the Lunar New Year festival was a time to honor ancestors and local deities. Evidently, within China, regional customs and traditions vary widely. Sometimes family reunion dinners are held New Year's Eve. A thorough cleaning of the house is important to sweep away any bad luck and welcome new luck for the coming year. Red, corresponding with the element of fire is the traditional color for the Lunar New Year, symbolizing good fortune and joy. Bright red decorations, lanterns and globes were everywhere. We wore our red shirts … we need all the good luck we can get.

Food, craft and commercial stalls were set up everywhere offering everything from …. yum cha (afternoon Chinese tea with dim sum type dishes), mask painting and cold Tsingtao (Chinese beer) to yiros (kabobs), discount phone services and excursions for cage diving with great white sharks.

Some people were dressed in traditional Chinese finery for performances or just for the celebration. A stage was set up in the middle of closed-to-traffic Gouger Street and singers and dancers kept the crowd entertained.

Stores, kiosks and street vendors sold red trinkets and good luck charms to honor the day. It was an enormous ethnic street fair inviting everyone to join in.

The highlight of our day was watching a traditional lion dance (Shi Zi). The lion performs the traditional custom of "cai qing", literally “plucking the greens”. Unlike the dragon dance in which many people are involved, the lion dance is only two young men in costume accompanied by the beating of drums, gongs and cymbals which are synchronized with the lion's movements.

A pink-masked “laughing Budha” appears out of nowhere and teases the lion with his fan to the delight of the crowd. With extremely cat-like movements including licking his paws, crouching and curiously investigating his gift of greens , the lion moves forward. His eyes moves, his tongue moves, his tail wags and when he lies down, his whole body quivers as if he's breathing or purring.

Local shop keepers leave out “greens” to which a red envelope (traditionally containing a money gift) is attached. When the lion finally “eats” the greens, he spits them back out, but keeps the red envelope. The lion dance is said to bring good luck and fortune to all involved.

It is the Year of the Horse in the 12-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac. If you were born in the year of the horse (1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002, 2014), you're energetic, bright and intelligent. You have excellent communication skills and enjoy being in the limelight. On the downside, horses are known to be impatient, hot-blooded and sometimes pessimistic. They're not particularly good at managing finances and sometimes have bad tempers.

In order to accommodate being down under, the Year of the Horse has an equivalent Australian animal … it's the Year of the Kookaburra. What's your Chinese Zodiac sign? How about your Australian Chinese Zodiac sign? Check it out and its attributes.

Australian movies and books

While in Australia, we've been trying to watch movies and read books which enhance our understanding of the country, its history and its people. Without a doubt, the book we've found most fascinating and descriptive of Australia's founding history is The Fatal Shores by Robert Hughes. It is a painstakingly grim and accurate account of the the UK's settlement of Australia as a penal colony. We read the book before traveling to Tasmania's west coast and visiting Macquarie Harbour and the infamous Sarah Island. The squalor and execrable living conditions of the convicts were almost palpable as we walked around the island and vividly remembered its deplorable history. When we visited Strahan, the only town in the Macquarie Harbour area, we also saw the play The Ship That Never Was, a comedy (hard to believe considering the subject matter) based on fact about a group of convicts that escaped on a non-commissioned ship they were responsible for building. In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson is a light-hearted look at Australia from a travel writer's point of view. Bryon's previous book, Lost Continent, based on his travels through small town America whet our appetite for his humorous exploits in Oz...from cities to the bush to the Outback.

There are lots more Australian movies beyond Crocodile Dundee. We've recently watched the film, Van Diemen's Land, the true story of Alexander Pearce, aka the cannibal convict, who escaped with seven other convicts from the infamous Sarah Island. The group found themselves lost and unable to cope with the savage harshness of the Tasmanian bush. The film is brutal, but reckons to be a fairly accurate account of what may have happened as the men struggled to survive starvation and the wilderness.

We've watched The Rabbit Proof Fence aka Long Walk Home several times. It is the poignant, true story of three young aboriginal girls who were plucked from their family home by the government in 1931 and placed in a native settlement camp. The girls escaped and began a 1500 mile trek across the Outback back to their home village with a tracker close on their heels.

On the lighter side, The Castle is an Australian classic in which a working-class family's home is to be taken by eminent domain in the name of progress and the expansion of the Melbourne Airport. Filmed in 11 days on a budget of less than $20K, this film was evidently not widely distributed outside of Australia and New Zealand, but was quite the hit down under. You'd be hard pressed to find an Aussie or a Kiwi that hasn't seen it.

We just watched Kenny the other night on loan from a friend. It, too, is a comedy … off the wall. A fellow who installs and services port-a-loos at public events narrates his escapades in the business. Irreverent Aussie humor is evident and we really needed to concentrate on the dialogue to understand what he was saying. Beyond the accent, the vocabulary itself sometime required an Aussie dictionary. Yes, we have one!

As an FYI, there have been quite a few actors/actresses from Australia that we never realized were Aussies like swashbuckler, Errol Flynn, for instance, who was born in Hobart, Tasmania! There's a long list that you'll recognize like Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Dame Judith Anderson and Geoffrey Rush. It's the novelists and writers that surprised me even more like Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark (inspiration for Schindler's List), Paul Brickhill, The Great Escape, Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman and little did I know, Pamela Lyndon Travers' Mary Poppins.