Went to Flushing to see the Lunar New Year parade, it was… rather disappointing and boring, the most memorable performance was a traditional Korean music band with twenty some Korean aunties and uncles playing nabal, janggu, taepyeongso and buk in gorgeous Korean clothes. Well, I have to confess that the dim sum before and Dan Dan noodle after the parade were both stella and made the journey worthwhile and justified.
I always wonder why there is no real Chinese carnival in China and anywhere there is Chinese community, and most of the festivals and celebrations around are just way too predictable. The dragon boats lion dancing and red lanterns are beautiful and colorful, the moon cakes rice balls and Buddha’s Delights are delicious and flavorful, both somehow there are always something missing, the sense of amusement, the spirit of entertainment.
We all live in the invisible shackles, the country 国 is with the enclosing box 口 as territorial boundary, the home 家 is with the roof 宀 for sheltering and separating, even the word for spirit is with 神 the deity with the altar or offering table 示depicting the offering to gods. Whenever there is any occasion for celebration, the responsibility and obligation we owe to our five thousands years of beings and hundred generations of ancestors jump up onto our shoulders with no mercy.
Maybe that’s why there are so many Chinese restaurants around, from small Peruvian town in the Amazons to sleeping Ladakhi village in the Himalaya, almost an obsession. ‘There is no objection to his rice being of the finest quality, nor to his meat being finely minced’, 食不厌精, 脍不厌细, Confucius said. We are devoted to bring the master’s teaching to perfection, no confusion for sure.
As the train from Flushing back to Manhattan passing through Queens from one neighborhood to another, somehow my thought drifted back to the time of Christopher Columbus the Italian explorer and Zheng He the Chinese admiral. Almost one hundred years before Columbus initial exploration, the Ming dynasty Moslem eunuch set off for his voyages to South Asia and East Africa to impose the imperial control, to impress the foreign peoples, and to find out the whereabout of the turn-tail prince. Seven voyages, tens of thousand of lives, expenditure equivalence of two years of GDP, the emperor was finally contented with the confirmation of the pretender’s death, and a giraffe from Africa recognized as the legendary kirin, and maybe the most important legacy – the bird’s nest.
Every grand Chinese restaurant offers bird’s nest banquet for Chinese New Year, along with shark fin and sea cucumber. I wonder how many of them are really captured from the cliffs by the strait of Malacca, and how many are made somewhere in a New Jersey anonymous factory? And after all, it is not more Chinese New Year any longer, as the Korean aunties and uncles indicated in the ribbons on their traditional robes, The Lunar Calendar.
Wang Yanming was the Chinese Neo-Confucian scholar from Ming Dynasty, there are probably less Chinese than Japanese heard about him today, not to mention study of his philosophy and political view. The Dragon Boat festival was to memorize the Chu minister and poem who warded into the river in protest against corruption, it was South Korea nominated to be Intangible Culture Festival in UNESCO. Maybe it’s time for we Chinese to learn from the others about festivity and celebration?
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