My second year in China, my brother called to chat. The conversation worked its way around to the "what time is it there?" point that most trans-time-zone conversations get to, and I said "it’s exactly the same time it is in Connecticut, but tomorrow morning."
"So you’re in the future?" he asked.
"Compared to you, yes. Twelve hours in the future."
"What’s tomorrow like? Oh, oh, wait — what are the newspaper headlines for tomorrow?"
I explained that it didn’t work like that. Just because it’s tomorrow in China doesn’t mean calling there gives us a psychic reading on the future. And that’s fitting. Fortune cookies notwithstanding, China is a country more about tradition than predicting the future.
He was disappointed but understanding.
In particular, relying on China for predictions on the new year won’t help, since Chinese New Year comes after ours. This year, Spring Festival, or Chunjie, falls on Jan. 26.
My first Chunjie in China was a bit startling, though I’d gotten used to some of the differences between Western and Chinese holidays during the fall. If I’d had Chinese ancestors, for instance, I might have participated in the burning of "ghost money," or fake paper currency, to ensure they weren’t living the afterlife in poverty during Ghost Festival.
My school had a Ghost Festival celebration culminating in "the sailing of the paper boats": We released folded paper boats, each carrying a single candle, onto an outdoor pool, and watched them burn and eventually sink.
An eerie reverie fell over the students as the boats floated away — eerie particularly if you’d tried to teach a class of squirmy, talkative fourth graders just a few hours earlier. (My students were barely recognizable when they weren’t wiggling out of their chairs or shouting "a hamburger!" in answer to a question.) — and it seemed we were all caught up in the past and our memories.
Chunjie, the biggest, oldest, loudest and most future-oriented Chinese holiday, doesn’t involve sailing paper boats, but it does involve paper, in the form of red scrolls inviting luck and fortune hung around doorways.
Chunjie also involves fire, which I was completely unprepared for.
Walking back from town around Chunjie, I came across pair after pair of children giggling conspiratorially — and almost all of them grasping some form of explosive.
This was alarming at first. If the kids, some of whom seemed barely old enough to toddle a safe firecrackering distance from their homes, hadn’t been so intimidatingly intent on setting them off, I might have demanded to know where their mothers were and marched them all home.
If I had, I probably would have encountered a bunch of moms wondering how the foreigner got in rather than what their kids were doing with sparklers and Roman candles. They all knew what their kids were up to; in China, everyone gets in on Chunjie firecrackers. They’re meant to ward off evil spirits, and kids are taught how to use them, mostly safely, practically from infancy. They symbolize Chinese connections to the past — to ancestors and past life events — while ushering in the future.
I learned this after a traditional dinner banquet and special variety-TV-show viewing at the headmaster’s house, when he invited me to join his family outside. He brought a giant wheel of firecrackers, the equivalent of a few thousand cap-gun caps, and lit the end. We all stood back as it spun and sparked, the lit end traveling inward on a spiral heading for the center.
Watching the spark travel toward its end was just as good as "watching the ball drop" for putting the old year to rest; and it was the closest I’ve ever gotten, or expect to get, to being able to predict the future.
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