New Year's Day

When the sun rose on New Year's Day, the fireworks started again.  Compared to the noise levels the night before, it seemed anemic and half-hearted....like a few people stayed up to greet the sunrise, and then immediately crawled back into bed.  By 10:00 a.m. it was relatively quiet and safe to go out onto the streets.   The streets were covered with the red confetti of exploded firecrackers and littered with piles of charred cardboard tubes from Roman Candles.  The biggest piles were in front of the apartment complexes. 

We met up with a couple that is new to Suzhou, and took them up the Tiger Hill.   We were hoping that there might be some kind of spectacle going on there....like dragon dances or performances.  No such luck, though.  The garden was nicely decorated with lots of red and gold lanterns.  And there were a lot of people there.  But nothing of unusual value associated with the New Year.

It was a pretty day though, and a lot of people had brought their families out for a walk through the park.
I'm pretty sure that they were predominately local folks, and not the normal bused-in-tourist crowds.  The normal tourists should be spending the holidays at home with their families.  The Tiger Hill visitors we saw were probably Suzhou people - people desperate for a chance to get out of the house after being locked up with family for the last 24 hours.   It was an opportunity to burn a few calories and get a break from endless games of mah jong or the ceaseless chattering of an Aunt or Uncle.

After walking Tiger Hill, we took a canal boat back to the ShangTang Street shopping area.  It was packed with people too.  The shops were tempting people with holiday gifts....like food or year-of-the-dragon charms.  Probably 95% of the stores in Suzhou were closed on New Year's Day, but here most every shop was open.    Tradition stands no chance when pitted against profit motive.

Food is a popular gift for the holiday.  Fresh fruit is probably the most popular of all the food gifts.  Miniature tangerines seem to be specifically linked to the holiday.  In the photo below you can see the fruit baskets and tangerines on display. 

Tulips are also linked to the New Year holiday.   It's too early for them to bloom naturally, so people buy the bulbs in December and force them to bloom indoors.  The  photo below shows some of the large tulip displays that were seen at Tiger Hill.

And, of course, there were red lanterns hanging up everywhere.  Just as Christmas brings out the evergreen trees everywhere, so too does Chinese New Year bring out these red decorations.

New Year's Eve

China is known for fireworks.  The reputation is well-earned.   Once the sun set on New Year's Eve, then the fireworks started.    Once they started, they really didn't stop for a week.  There were periods when they slowed down.  But they never really stopped.  We went to bed with the sound of fireworks outside.  We were usually awakened by the sound of fireworks breaking out again at dawn.

The Rainbow Walk down along JinJi Lake had a good crowd for New Year's Eve.  A number of people came down to watch the normal water and light show.  The show was scheduled for each night during the holiday period.  Prior to the show, they had a special fireworks display out over the Cultural Center.   The festivities began each evening at 8:00 pm.   That is the top photo.

 After the water show, the JinJi Lake area had a lot of people hanging on to send up paper lanterns for the new year.  The photo above shows them out fighting the wind and drizzle.

The public displays were a minor fraction of the fireworks.  The majority were set off by individuals. They were going off all over the city, as far as the eye could see.  It seemed that a lot of folks came out around 7:00 pm to shoot them off.  I assume this was to break up the boredom after they'd finished their main family meal.   There were explosions everywhere.  They echoed off of the buildings so that every "boom" was followed by three or four reflective booms.  If you were outside, you couldn't carry on a conversation for the noise.  If you were inside, you had to talk over what sounded like rolling thunder.

The fireworks peaked at about 9:00 pm and then tailed off to a calmer pace.  But this was just a pause.  As midnight approached, it seemed as though the dogs of war were unleashed.   Our apartment is 14 stories up in the air, and from our windows we can see pretty far off across the city.  As near and far as the eye could see, fireworks were exploding.   They exploded right next to our apartment windows.  And they exploded all the way across the city to the limits of the horizon. 

If you are old enough to remember the First Gulf War, then you probably remember the images televised by CNN from Baghdad.....of the anti-aircraft guns lighting up the night skies.  It was kind of like that.  But instead of anti-aircraft, it was the Roman candles and flash/bang rockets set off by several million Suzhou revellers.  The photo above is the closest I can come to a representative photo......you kind of see the many flashes of fireworks out over JinJi Lake as far as the eye can see.

A Walk Around Town on New Year's Eve

 New Year's Eve, by the lunar calendar, fell on Sunday, January 22.  With the coming of midnight, and New Year's Day, the year of the Rabbit would end and the year of the Dragon would begin.  It was not a very pretty day in Suzhou.  The skies were grey and it drizzled rain the entire day.  But it was tolerable enough to take a walk around town.

 The New Year's Holiday is a big deal.  It is the most significant holiday of the year, by far, in China.  It's tempting to compare it to the Christmas season, because there are a lot of similarities.  It is a time of family gatherings and gift giving and special foods.  And just as Christmas traditions vary from country to to country, so too do the New Year traditions vary between the regions of China.  But the analogy to Christmas only goes so far.  The Lunar New Year share similarities with Christmas, but it is not the same.

Tradition demands that the New Year holiday be spent with family.  Family means extended family....including grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  In the old days, the New Year gatherings would be huge family reunions.  These days, due to the one-child policies, there are fewer aunts and uncles and cousins.   But still, the expectation is that everyone get together beginning on New Year's eve.  For several days the families gather and they eat the special holiday foods and they play cards and mah jong and they honor the memories of those no longer living.

They also shoot off a lot of fireworks.  But that is another story.

The mandate to spend the holiday with family, more than any other factor, determines the character of the holiday.  The New Year holiday is a time of travel nightmares. In the week before new year,  1 billion people strain the roads and the railways and the airports to the breaking point.  And a week later they strain it all again when they return home.   In the old days, China was mostly farming communities in which families could reunite by walking a few blocks within a village.  In these days of urbanization, people flee the large cities to return to their ancestral homes.  Or they pick a neutral tourist location for all the family to gather.  

Regardless, the travel statistics are stupefying.  The airports are clogged by tens of millions of travellers, much like the U.S. airports at Thanksgiving.  But by far, the biggest portion of people travel in China by train.  Imagine if one day, the entire population of the U.S. woke up, ate breakfast, and then all went to the local train station.  That is what it is like.  Over 300 million people travelling by train.  A few hundred million more travel by car and by bus.

I'd heard horror stories about train travel.   Train tickets go on sale two weeks before scheduled departure.  They open up 30 extra ticket windows for the holiday, but people still end up waiting in line for two days to buy train tickets.  I went to the Suzhou railway station on the after noon of New Year's Eve and found it to be much less dramatic.  As the second photo shows, the railway station was crowded....but not much more so than on a normal day. 

One possible explanation for the relative calm at the railway station; this was the first year that the China Railway System provided an on-line option for booking tickets.  The newspapers said that, during the week before the holiday, the on-line ticket booking web sites were getting over 1 billion hits per day.

 In Suzhou on New Year's Eve, things were relatively calm.  Relatively dead is perhaps a more accurate description.  Since Suzhou has grown rapidly in the last 20 years, it means that most of the people are from someplace else.  Most of those people had gone back to someplace else....and the town was comparatively deserted when I took my walk around Suzhou.

A lot of the doorways were decorated for the holiday.  The Chinese doorway decoration is not like those we saw in Japan.  In China, the typical decoration is as set of three banners that frame the doorway - a vertical banner on each of the left and right door jambs and a horizontal banner across the top.  The banners are inscribed with a poem or a good-luck saying.  They are almost always written in gold letters on a red background, as shown by the photo above.  Red and gold are auspicious colors.

 Food is a big part of the New Year's Eve celebration.  My understanding is that people sit down together for a big meal, and then graze for another 6 or 7 hours as they wait for midnight to come.  I stopped by the Auchan Supermarket to get some things and it was crazy with last minute shoppers filling out their menus.  The Auchan in Suzhou is the largest supermarket I've ever seen in my life.  It has 110 check out registers, and all 110 were being used.  The people were 5 or 6 deep at each one.  I swear there were 20,000 people in that store.  At least that many.  I kid you not.

The photo above shows a lady who had already gotten her shopping out of the way.  I found her on a side street in the old city, drawing water from a well to wash her vegetables.

 Not everyone in Suzhou was on the ball for the holiday.  The photo above shows a doorway for which the owner needs a wake-up call.  Not only is the "Merry Christmas" decoration over a month old, but the rabbit decorations are a year off.  2011 is the year of the rabbit.  2012 is the year of the Dragon.

Finally, the photo above has nothing to do with the holiday.  But I thought it was interesting.  The photo shows how the horizontal surfaces of an apartment have been fitted out with broken glass to discourage climbers.  The use of broken glass is not unusual - you see it all over Suzhou (and other countries) to top off walls.  It is a cheap substitute for razor wire.  But the owner of this apartment is clever.  He has set full sheets of glass in the top of the wall.  They serve as both deterrent and as a burglar alarm.  No one can climb on top of this wall without causing the full panes of glass to break off and shatter noisily.  And of course, after breaking, the panes of glass will leave some nasty shards for any burglar to climb over.

North Temple Pagoda

Many of the holidays in China are based upon the lunar calendar.  Like the Easter holidays of the Christian world, they end up being moveable feasts when you overlay them onto the Gregorian Calendar.   The holidays may land in mid-week or on week-end and, from one year to the next, they may even land in different months.  Working people, though, like to have a predictable vacation schedule.  So  businesses and factories manage the variability by shuffling the workdays during the holiday period.

The Lunar Year of 2012 began officially on Monday, January 23.  The government-mandated holidays for China were the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  Traditionally, though, people consider the entire week to be a holiday - beginning on New Year's Eve and lasting through the fifth day, which this year would be Friday, January 27.  So no one wanted to work Thursday and Friday, January 26/27.  If you tried to make them work those days, very few would show up.  So most businesses and factories in China shuffled the days as follows:

1. Saturday, January 21 became a workday.
2. Sunday (New Year's Eve) was a normal non-working week-end day.
3. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were official non-working national holidays.
4. Thursday was a non-working day, in trade for the day of work on Saturday, January 21.
5. Friday was a non-working day, in trade for a day of work to be done on Sunday, January 29.
6. Saturday was a normal non-working week-end day.
7. Sunday, January 29, became a workday in trade for Friday, January 27.

The good news is that, as a result of all that shuffling,  people get to be off work for a full seven days-in-a-row.  The bad news is that the week before and the week after both turn into six day work weeks.

I didn't work on Saturday, January 21.  I started my holiday early.  I took a day of vacation and went to the North Temple Pagoda in Suzhou.

The North Temple Pagoda is part of a Buddhist complex in the old city of Suzhou.  It sits on the same street as the Humble Administrator's Garden, but about a three quarters of a mile to the West.  The pagoda is nine stories tall, and rises about 240 feet into the air.  In the North of the old city, it is the tallest structure around.  It is one of several buildings within the Buddhist temple complex, which is still and active place of worship.  Monks live in the temple dormitories and meditate in the adjoining gardens and walking paths.

The current version of the North Temple Pagoda was built around 400 years ago, during the Ming Dynasty.  It is not as old as the pagoda at Tiger Hill, but it is about one-and-a-half times as tall.  And it is in much better repair.  Tiger Hill Pagoda is an architectural ruin that tilts and looks to be in danger of falling over.  You are not allowed to go inside.  North Temple Pagoda is still a functioning building that you are allowed to climb to the top.  The stairs are steep and dark and booby-trapped with lots of head-bump hazards.  But once at the top, you get a great view in all directions of the old buildings of the old city of Suzhou.

All the photos above are taken from one point or another within the temple complex.  I think you can figure them out based upon the preceeding story. 

That Perfect Gift

The New Year Holiday is a time of gift giving.  All of the stores were clogged with display tables filled with gifts for exchanging.  The photo above shows one of my favorites.  What do you give to the person that has everything?

You give them SPAM !

And the photo below shows the perfect gift for that gourmand on your list.  Spam and canola oil.  The lucky recipient will be able to fry up perfect little slices of crispy-meaty-goodness.

In fairness to my Chinese friends, both of these gifts were on display in front of a Korean market.

The Holiday Party

Back in China, it seemed that the whole country was anticipating the coming New Year holiday.   The Chinese Calendar, or Lunar Calendar, is based upon the ancient principles of measuring time by the phases of the moon.  Though the country officially has been using the Western (or Gregorian calendar) since 1912, the lunar calendar is still the basis of many of the more important aspects of life.  Auspicious dates for weddings or business openings are based upon the traditional lunar calendar.  Also, many of the traditional holidays, such as the Moon Festival and Dragon Boat Day are based upon it. 

The Lunar New Year is the biggest of them all.  "Spring Festival" they also call it.  It is a seven-day public holiday that begins on New Year's Eve - this year on January 22.  Tradition requires that everyone spend the holiday with their family.  So in the week before the holiday, all forms of travel become insanity as a billion people hit the roads, the train stations, or the airports.  The public holidays end after the 6th day of the new year.  Then everyone is supposed to go back to work.  So the travel insanity begins again.   And even after that, there are rituals that continue up through the 15th day after the New Year.

End of Year Parties are another part of the tradition.  Prior to the New Year holiday, every business of any sort is expected to throw a dinner party for ALL of its employees.  The idea is to have a celebration amongst colleagues before everyone sets off to visit with family.  There is a certain rigor to these celebrations.  At minimum, they are expected to distribute year-end bonus money to all the employees.  But there is also an expectation that everyone entertain each other by displaying their talents...or lack of talents. 

My company's End of Year Party was held on January 12, a Thursday.  Any date after that would have been a poor choice, as many people needed to begin their journeys home in the coming week-end.  As things go, our's was fairly late in the season.  In the first two weeks of January, every Chinese restaurant and hotel banquet facility was booked solid with private parties - for both evening and lunch.

Everyone that works in our factory was invited.  Everyone came.  Production was shutdown for the night.  Since Chinese parties often involve large quantities of alcohol, and since people often continue after the party with late nights of karaoke, everyone was given the next day off to recover.  (In trade, though, everyone was expected to work on Saturday.)  Around 300 people work in our small factory.  There were tables for 300 people and the tables were full (See second photo).  The venue was a large hotel, with a large banquet facility,  on the North side of town.

The dinner lasted about three hours, including the entertainment.  Each department was assigned a performance of some kind or other.  It started with a dragon dance, performed by the management team. (Top photo).  This was followed by the only professional performer - a gymnast that was hired by the worker's council.  (That would be the third photo.)   After that, it was all done by people that had a day job.  They had all been practicing at nights, after work, for the preceding six weeks.

There were probably about 12 or 15 performances during the night....I lost track.  The fourth photo shows the Supply Chain Team performing a skit on the history of our factory.  This particularly photo shows their take on the events of the 1970's.  It was tongue-in-cheek humor....poking fun at their history and themselves in ways I never would have expected before coming here.  The fifth photo is analytical labs performing a Spanish dance routine.  Notice that no expense was spared on costumes.

No matter where you work, you work with people every day and normally don't think much or learn much about their hobbies or their talents or their passions.  That was one of the most fun things about the performances - learning who the really good singers and good dancers and latent comedians were.  The other fun thing was the total absence of fear of litigation.  In the U.S., most of the performances would have been nixed by the lawyers out of fear of discrimination lawsuits.  Jokes were made that were mildly offensive, as all the best jokes are.  Young men danced shirtless and young women danced in tight dance costumes.  And two days later, everyone went back to work with each other with no one having made a harassment complaint.

Also, each table was provided with beer and wine and Chinese rice wine and white liquor.  Most everyone drank responsibly.  A few had a little too much, but not enough to be belligerent or troublesome.  Buses and taxis were provided for all.   No one drove.  No one fought.  No one vomited.  There was no need for anyone to sign a liability waiver.

The last photo is of a lady who works in the production department.  Every year the site has a karaoke competition, and for the past few years she has been the winner.  I didn't know this until someone told me.   I thought she was a hired professional.  She had a voice that could cover about 25 octaves or so.  She performed a song of one of the Western provinces, where Chinese and Arab and Indian music all fuse into the regional style.  She is even dressed in the ethnic costume and hairstyle of the region.  In the U.S., I would have been happy to pay money to see her perform.  Here, she is just another employee with a hobby.  Two days later, she was back at work on the production line.

Home to Suzhou

On Sunday, January 8, we had to get up early to catch a flight to return to China.  As I write this, it is almost 3 weeks later and Suzhou sounds like a battle zone, due to all the fireworks being set off for the Chinese New Year festival.  This means I still have to catch up on nearly three weeks and bore you now with a bunch of Chinese New Year stories.  Apologies for falling so far behind.

It was a clear blue day when we took off from Osaka airport.  About 30 minutes into the flight, Theresa snapped the photo above, of the Japanese coastline.  It was only when we got back to Suzhou that we realized that the photo shows the bay and the city of Hiroshima.  It's a perfect match to one of aerial photos on display in the Peace Park museum.  Ground Zero is about one third of the way up from the bottom and one quarter of the way from the right side.