Letter from Boston Chinese Spring Festival By MASAKO YAMADA	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
中国の春祭り 雅子さんは、日本の読者からの、節分の日の面白い風習についての電子メールをもらいました。節分は立春の前夜です。さらに、クラスメートの中国人学生から旧正月を祝う電子メールを受け取った雅子さんは、中国の春祭りは「春節」と書く、と教えてもらい、節分と春祭りの間には関係があることに気づきました…。

On the day before "setsubun-no-hi," one of my readers e-mailed me and told me that it was lucky to eat "futomaki" while facing north-northwest. I thought that was interesting, but that holiday never meant much to me. During the same week, I got a very fancy e-mail message from one of my Chinese classmates saying "Happy Chinese New Year: February 7th!!" I've known for a long time that the Chinese follow the traditional lunar calendar, and that their new year always starts a little later than the Gregorian new year does, but I've never connected that with setsubun-no-hi.

It was only after another Chinese classmate, Qizhi, told me that the holiday was called "Spring Festival" that the pieces started falling into place. He wrote the characters for "Spring Festival" out for me ― they are the same as those for "shun-setsu" ― and that's when I realized that the holidays are the same. However, Qizhi told me that Spring Festival is the most important holiday of the year in China. This is very different from the case in Japan, where New Year's Day is observed on January 1st.

I'm not really sure when the Japanese started observing the solar calendar, and, hence, started to celebrate New Year's Day on January 1st. It certainly goes against the classical literature of Japan. I do remember that when I was in junior high school, we had to read different haiku and try to determine the season in which they belonged. We learned then that the "current" January, February and March are "classically" considered to be part of spring. In other words, a New Year's Day haiku, indeed, heralds the arrival of spring.

The history of calendars notwithstanding, the Chinese Spring Festival i.e. New Year's Day is an important holiday to the Chinese living in the States. I've had a lot of Chinese friends (mostly Chinese-American, Taiwanese or Cantonese) in college, so I've seen them hold parties and dinners among themselves, but the festival's significance is especially apparent to me now, since 1/3 of my classmates are directly from mainland China.

Qizhi told me that this was the first time in his life he'd spent Spring Festival away from home. He went to Peking University, the prestigious national university of China, but for Spring Festival, he told me that he always went back home to his small village in central China. He told me he missed that friendly atmosphere.

I went to Boston Chinatown a few hours before midnight on "Spring Festival Eve." There were lots of women carrying large bags of groceries, and little children setting off firecrakers in the streets. There are stores in Chinatown that sell fresh chickens (you point to a cackling hen, and they kill it for you), and I've read a news article that said that they are especially busy during Spring Festival.

Some animal rights groups have started to crack down on such stores in San Francisco, though, and the Boston storeowners are starting to worry about the effects of this movement. It's well known that the Chinese love good food, so it's understandable that they'd want fresh meat if possible, but one Chinese woman also mentioned that dead ancestors and gods above would never accept a frozen, plastic-wrapped chicken with no head and feet.

Such debate over "cultural issues" never seems to cease.

At one of the large American supermarkets near my home, I saw signs around the Chinese food section saying "Celebrate Chinese New Year: The Year of the Ox!!" That supermarket also sells futomaki, but I didn't see any signs saying "Celebrate Setsubun-no-hi"....

Shukan ST: Feb. 21, 1997

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