Starting two weeks before the Chinese New Year, 70-year-old Chen Hsiang-chun (陳祥春) gets up earlier than usual. Once or twice a day, she visits the neighborhood market, where she elbows her way in through the crowds to pack her small portable cart with meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, and flowers. After returning home, she sorts out her purchases and begins early preparations for the rich assortment of dishes necessary for a traditional holiday season.
For the New Year’s Eve family dinner, as well as for meals on the following several days, friends and relatives—including Chen’s eight children and fifteen grandchildren—will be filling the house at all hours. Chen makes traditional specialties, including homemade sausages, cured meat, fried radish cakes, and a special New Year’s cake made of rice flour cooked in a bamboo steamer. Although she could buy these items ready-made, she believes her own are fresher and tastier. In addition, she prepares ceremonial meals for the gods and ancestors, which involve special pork, chicken, and fish recipes.
Although Chen and her husband live with their two younger sons, one of whom is married, they still do most of the preparations for the New Year themselves because the younger family members are busy working. But the older couple happily take on this responsibility. Chen’s husband, a retired school patrolman, does the required year-end house cleaning.
New Year preparations—Pasting “spring couplets” outside the doorway and shopping for special foods are just two of the many customs that are still a part of holiday festivities.
Once New Year’s Eve arrives, the couple’s children begin to take on their own holiday responsibilities. The three married sons bring their families back to their parents’ apartment. The crowd of people, including several toddlers, brings an air of festivity to the annual family reunion. The eldest son, a 47-year-old fortuneteller, brings some traditional “spring couplets,” poetic words written in beautiful calligraphy on strips of red paper that will be pasted alongside the front door. He makes them himself every year, using verses written by his father.
At about five in the evening, several large dishes are set out on a table in front of the family altar. Family members, led by the men, take turns worshiping at the altar. Holding three sticks of incense, each person first prays silently, then bows his or her head and places the incense sticks in a burner. The gods and ancestors are then given about half an hour to enjoy their feast before several people go outside to burn spirit money, yellow and gold squares of paper.
Finally, it is time for the mortals to begin their own feasting. Dinner consists of more than ten dishes, including some of the offerings. At the center of the table is huo ko, or hot pot, a large electric pot full of soup flavored with cabbage, meat, fish, and an assortment of other ingredients. The adults make the meal more jovial by toasting each other with small glasses of rice wine. After eating, drinking, and talking for an hour or so, everyone begins handing out “red envelopes” containing gifts of money. The married sons give envelopes to their mother and father and to each of the children. The grandparents give envelopes to each grandchild and to their only single son, who will be considered a child until he marries. Soon, the noise of firecrackers can be heard throughout the neighborhood, a sign that many families have finished their New Year’s Eve dinner.
Traditional New Year activities such as this lion dance are now joined by modern pastimes, including karaoke singing and overseas travel.
Afterward, the eating continues, with people nibbling on roasted watermelon seeds and other snacks, and everyone settles down to chat and watch the New Year variety show specials on television. Sometime before midnight, Chen will prepare shui chiao, or boiled dumplings filled with pork. Because the dumplings are shaped like traditional gold nuggets, they are a symbol of prosperity, and eating them on New Year’s Eve is thus a sign of good luck for the coming twelve months. At midnight, the sound of firecrackers suddenly becomes more intense as everyone welcomes the new year.
People throughout Taiwan celebrate the Chinese New Year much as Chen’s family does—as do Chinese throughout the world. The holiday can be traced back thousands of years, and many of the customs have been evolving since then. Early on, the New Year was set during the coldest part of the winter, when farming was impossible and families finally had time to relax. It was an appropriate time to thank the gods and ancestors for the harvest of the past season.
Last-minute rush—Since few people nowadays have the time to make their own sausages and New Year cakes, they spend more time jostling with crowds of other shoppers.
The date of the New Year, however, often underwent a change when a new ruler took power and started a new calendar based on the beginning of his reign. Finally, around the first century B.C., Emperor Wu adopted the Taichu Calendar, created by the great historian Ssu-ma Chien and based on the lunar calendar of the Hsia Dynasty (2205-1818 B.C.). Since then, the New Year and most other traditional Chinese festivals have been celebrated according to this calendar.
In 1912, the Republican-era government officially replaced the lunar calendar with the Gregorian calendar and encouraged people to celebrate New Year’s Eve on December 31 rather than on the traditional lunar holiday. But while the public gradually adopted the new calendar in their working lives, they continued to observe the New Year holiday according to the old one. Today, the Western New Year means only a couple of days off work, while the real celebrations still take place about one month later at the beginning of the first lunar month.
“Culture is a powerful unifier that cannot be discontinued by political means,” says Yuan Chang-rue (阮昌銳), an anthropologist at the Taiwan Provincial Museum. People not only use the holiday to worship the gods and their ancestors, Yuan explains, but also to solidify their personal and business relationships, for example by visiting old friends or clearing up unpaid bills. “New Year customs are meant to build connections among people,” Yuan says, “and between people and the supernatural.”
Unlike New Year revellers in the West, who enjoy a one-night celebration, people in Taiwan usually get four or five days off work, and the holiday season actually lasts for fifteen days, until the Lantern Festival, which falls on the first full moon of the lunar year. Especially in earlier days, when people couldn’t afford vacations during the year, the extended holiday provided a much-needed chance to rest up for the next farming season.
Chuang Po-ho (莊伯和), vice executive director of the Chinese Folk Arts Foundation and a credit specialist at the Chang Hwa Commercial Bank, believes this is still an important aspect of the holiday today. “It’s nice that the New Year forces people to take a longer break and be with their families, since people nowadays are terribly busy,” he says. “The more rest one takes, the better, especially when it’s cold around the time of the New Year.” Although Chuang used to visit old friends during the holiday, in recent years he has been in the habit of using the time to get as much sleep as he can.
While many New Year traditions remain intact today, the hustle and bustle of modem life is bringing some changes. Chuang Po-ho recalls a time when families put much more effort into preparing special foods rather than buying them ready-made. “I have fond memories about New Year cakes,” he says. “When I was little, people made them by themselves, or relatives and neighbors made them together.” Housewives would take a sackful of glutinous rice, which is often used for making sweet dishes, to an electric mill in the neighborhood. Afterward, they would hang the cloth bag of ground rice outside the house to dry. As the smell of rice filled the air, everyone began to feel the spirit of the New Year. “But today people just buy New Year cakes,” Chuang says. “And the ones for sale are getting smaller and smaller.” He buys New Year cake himself every year, but not necessarily to eat or even to use for offering to the gods. “It’s just a way of remembering the old days,” he says.
Today’s smaller families also mean that holiday gatherings are often not as large as in the past, when it was common for three or four generations to live together. Family reunions are also more difficult because relatives tend to be spread out. Many people have left their hometowns to settle in the island’s urban areas. Taking a trip back home for New Year’s Eve—one of the busiest days of the year for intra-island transportation—can mean waiting in line all night for a train ticket or spending long hours in traffic jams on the highway.
Nevertheless, the trip is still worth the effort for many people, including 40-year-old Hsiang Wen-ping (項文萍), personnel director at a primary school and the mother of two young sons. “We visit my parents-in-law only three or four times a year, including once during the New Year,” she says. They leave their home in Taipei early in the morning or the day before New Year’s Eve for a six-hour drive to Chiayi, in central Taiwan. Hsiang and her family usually use the opportunity to make a short trip to some scenic spot along the way. Once in Chiayi, they spend the time with relatives and old friends and visit temples. Although married women such as Hsiang are supposed to visit their own parents on the second day of the New Year, she is only able to do so several days later, when she returns from Chiayi.
Auspicious decorations and expensive treats such as fish roe help bring a festive air to the holiday season.
Many of today’s younger people, especially those who are not married, worry less about spending time with relatives during the New Year season. Once they have fulfilled the traditional requirement of eating New Year’s Eve dinner with their parents, they often spend the rest of the holiday with friends. Thirty-year-old Matt Chuang (莊建發), a senior bank clerk who lives with his parents in Taipei, spends much of the time playing poker or mahjong late into the night with about a dozen old friends. The visitors won’t go home until day breaks, and they meet again during the next two days at someone else’s home to continue the game. “It’s lasted for about fourteen years, since we were in high school,” Chuang says. “It’s the only opportunity we have for so many old pals to get together.”
Playing mahjong or other gambling games is actually a long-time New Year tradition for many families. The holiday season is one time when people feel that gambling—at least for small stakes—is healthy. “Gambling isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” says anthropologist Yuan Chang-rue. “Some deviate behavior is allowed during times of celebration since it can be cathartic.” In gambling, he points out, the traditional hierarchies in society don’t come into play; you can win even if you’re not a senior member of the family or the boss. “What counts is luck,” Yuan says. “Gambling functions as a kind of psychological escape from routine life.”
In recent years, however, many annual family gambling sessions have been replaced by more modern pastimes. Even watching television or going to the movies may seem outdated to those who enjoy karaoke singing. Many New Year gatherings end up with the family heading to the local KTV parlor, where customers can rent private rooms and sing along to the latest karaoke music video. Others rent the videos from a nearby store and take turns crooning away in their living rooms on their own karaoke machines.
Honoring the ancestors—Family worship rituals are an essential part of the holiday. Says anthropologist Yuan Chang-rue, “New Year customs are meant to build connections among people, and between people and the supernatural.”
A growing number of people, particularly those who are younger or who have small families, use their New Year vacations to travel abroad, especially to warmer climates. “Australia and New Zealand are the most popular destinations,” says Eric Chang (張家輝), junior assistant manager of Capital Travel Agency in Taipei. The United States and Southeast Asia are other popular choices. Most people who travel during the holiday try to leave after the family New Year’s Eve dinner, either later that night or the next day. “But more and more people don’t care about New Year’s Eve dinner,” Chang says. “They leave earlier for the sake of time and cost.”
Still, there are many people who wouldn’t dream of replacing the traditional family reunion with a vacation. “It’s important for Chinese society—which depends on the family system—that all the members of the family get together during the New Year,” says Yuan Chang-rue. “If the family system disappears, Chinese society will disappear.”