Susan Sun: New Year nostalgia time again

As Chinese New Year (January 29) is approaching, I rang up Uncle Bin's family in China the other day. No one seemed to have time for me.

The spring cleaning, festival decorations, new dresses and hair-dos, outrageous bargains at the flower market, fireworks, red money envelopes, delicious dishes, festival snacks and so on all demand handling with seriousness, precision, style and fun.

They are to be done for days, weeks, or even months leading up to Chinese New Year, and continue for weeks. Who would blame my relatives for wanting to hang up the phone quickly at this time of the year?

Yet, year after year, I've never failed to ring them at their busiest time.

I hassle them to tell me all that has been happening with the festival. They report in a matter-of-fact manner, but I do not let them stop till this end of the phone is filled with nostalgia for my good old days in China.

I just keep on doing these little "clings" every year during Chinese New Year. I don't know when I shall give it up.

"Don't you celebrate Chinese New Year in New Zealand?" relatives ask.

Indeed we do.

Well, actually, we start the celebrations off on the way home from work on New Year's Eve, I explain, and end it a few hours later, right after the family reunion dinner.

Some lucky ones may have a Chinese yumchar lunch with a bunch of colleagues on the following day, officially concluding the festival.

"Celebrate the festival in a day?"

Yes, in practice, we telescope a festival into a day. I believe the Hindus do it too with their Diwali, the Muslims with the end of Ramadan, and the Thais with their Songkran.

There is no satisfaction celebrating a festival in such a truncated, perfunctory manner. What is absent is all that excitement, art, creativity, extravagance, partying, craziness, drunkenness, laziness, and endless visits to and from friends and relatives - all of which are so universally ingrained in festivals.

According to the last census, nearly 700,000 New Zealanders were born overseas, and more than half of them live in Auckland. These people and their New Zealand offspring form the ever-growing diasporas of Chinese, Koreans, Indians, South Africans, and so on in New Zealand.

The chances are these geographically and culturally displaced people may also kill their festivals in just a day or an evening if it happens to fall on a weekday.

In the company of my fellow culturally displaced souls, my misery is suddenly not as overwhelming as I thought. Maybe I should stop blaming the communists who drove me away from my homeland in the first place. Come to think of it, if it weren't the communists, it would have been other forces.

Haven't war, famine, political oppression, ethnic cleansing, government corruption, economic ills, lack of opportunities and personal fulfillment, better lifestyle, or simply boredom already successfully "displaced" many people from their homelands to this part of the globe?

Global migration began long before we knew it, let alone approved it. Humans never seem to cease to venture out and search for betterment.

When people disperse in droves, it seems that the original rituals and trappings of their festivals are left behind where they belong.

You mourn it for all your life; you awkwardly try to merge, halfway through, into festivities of your adopted homeland; you come to accept that there will be no more festivals you can celebrate with substance and style.

Anxiously, you dearly wish that your children, who were given two sets of festivals from day one, could enjoy them to the fullest, like you did in childhood. But would they?

In the meantime, I am preparing red money envelopes to give to my children in the Chinese New Year in the customary way. They will at least convey my wishes for the children to be healthy, well-behaved, and successful in their studies in 2006.

* Susan Sun is a senior lecturer in Chinese at the School of Languages, Auckland University of Technology.