Winter and New Year

Winter in Beijing is cold, dry, and usually hazy. The cold is normal for a northern city: usually below freezing, but not far below. The dry is especially dry; no snow or rain fell for the first eight weeks of 2007, and that’s normal. The dryness creates especially predictable weather, including a relatively gentle and consistent temperature drop in the fall. Beijing’s haze is mostly pollution, I assume, but it’s not as bad as Salt Lake in under an inversion.¹ Since there aren’t any clouds otherwise, if a recent wind has blown away the haze, the sky can be sunny and brilliant blue.

It’s cold enough to slow down outdoor activity, and traffic shifts away from bicycles to cars and buses. Schools hold recess inside, since Chinese are relatively unwilling to send kids out to play in the cold. It’s not cold enough to keep people home, though. Street vendors begin selling candied haw apples on a stick.

Except in the newest buildings, radiators supply most indoor heating. Buildings all over the city apparently turn on the heat at a designated date. As a result, the end of October was uncomfortably cold inside everywhere, but the heat finally went on in early November. Our apartment building is well heated; it was very comfortable in January, and slightly too hot by mid-February.

In December, Santa Claus shows up in many store and restaurant windows, and Christmas songs (usually pop songs based on carols) play in some stores. The songs stop by the end of the year, but Santa Claus and “Merry Christmas” signs stick around for most of the winter, some not even displaced by decorations for Chinese New Year.

Chinese New Year is a big holiday, of course. In Chinese, the holiday is called spring festival, which seems a bit optimistic given the time of year, but the name avoids confusion with the other “new year” of January 1 (which is also a three-day holiday). The holiday lasts for two weeks, with various days designated for various traditional activities.

Most people take at least a week off from work, and most join their extended families. Our neighborhood’s population drops dramatically during the holiday, since lots of graduate students return to their families. Streets throughout the city get quieter, and some restaurants start to close two days before New Year — the staff having left town to join their families, because they’ve typically moved to Beijing from somewhere else. Those who are left in the city go shopping at the supermarkets for dinner and party supplies.

When you look up information about Chinese New Year traditions, you often read about big meals with dumplings, family gatherings, and other such activities. We gathered with family and ate a lot. Few explanations of Chinese New Year mention the tradition of watching the CCTV variety-show special (sortof like watching a Dick Clark broadcast), but we did that, too. More significantly, many descriptions of Chinese New Year barely mention the best part of the holiday: fireworks!

I knew there would be no civic-organized, 4th-of-July-style fireworks show. I also knew there would be firecrackers. So, it made sense when roadside firework stands appeared the week before New Year, and when the occasional firecracker went off throughout in the week. My first hint that I didn’t yet get it, though, was the signs posted in our courtyard. They prohibited some kind of upward-shooting firework on the grass, which seemed reasonable enough. But it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen any other such signs anywhere. What kind of firework did the sign maker have in mind? And if it’s prohibited on the grass, does that mean it’s allowed everywhere else?

By early morning of New Year’s Eve, firecrackers explode every few minutes. The frequency builds up so that by nightfall, roar is constant, and the aerial fireworks start everywhere. It’s no time to go for a stroll on the streets of Beijing. By 11:00 PM, neighbors light serious aerial fireworks in the courtyards between buildings. The small ones go up 6 to 8 stories. The big ones go up 15 stories, at least, and explode into a pattern that wouldn’t fit in the courtyard. By midnight, the courtyards are full of explosions. Even if you’re still safely inside, it’s like living in the middle of a 4th of July show.

I don’t know when the fireworks die down. The roar is constant enough that it becomes background noise if you’re tired, and we were asleep by 1:00 AM. There was not much noise by early morning, but at dawn of New Year’s day, the firecrackers start again. Drifts of red firecracker wrappers begin to accumulate. The firecrackers are mostly spent by mid-day, but there’s another small run of fireworks in the evening, and then occasional outbursts for the following two weeks.

Most streets stay quiet for New Year’s Day and the following few days. Everyone is either at home or at a miao hui. A miao hui is a kind of fair with games for the kids, food vendors selling things on a stick, and other booths selling costumes and crafts. We went late in the day, so it was relatively uncrowded (i.e., there was a tiny bit of space between people). Oliver came home with a pinwheel, and Sophia brought home a plastic flower.

Both toys are interesting examples of cheap manual labor. The pin-wheel is hand-made using bamboo, chopsticks, straws, clay, rubber-bands, cardboard, etc. They are sold by lots of different vendors, and they’re all made essentially the same way, but small differences in design and materials that suggest that lots of producers are copying someone’s design — which was probably an improved version of someone else’s design, and so on.

Unfortunately, because I had to travel, we missed the lanterns of the lantern festival, which wraps up the holiday fourteen days after New Year’s Day. I did get back in time to see and hear one last, big round of fireworks that evening.