《阅读理解2》Chinese New Year 2012: North and South traditions differ

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Chinese New Year 2012: North and South traditions differ, with Canadians closer to the south

I’ve been living in Beijing for four years now, and have come back to Vancouver twice, once for Christmas, and once for Chinese New Year’s. These two trips have made me realize that, for familiarity’s sake, my family has settled into doing things the same way for both holidays.

In cold of night, we’d hop into dad’s car and drive over to my grandmother’s gated community in Strathcona, Chinatown. Relatives would arrive in batches, crowding around the kitchen table for both takeout and home-cooked food, often including equal helpings of turkey and barbecue pork.

We’d watch Hockey Night in Canada or the CTV news channel, while aunts and uncles would distribute red packets or presents (if they remembered to buy them). Chinese New Year is our equivalent of Christmas, and there wasn’t much difference in the way we celebrated both. As descendants of Southern Chinese immigrants, my family was probably thought the same way as that of Chinese families everywhere.

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Two Chinas

And then I was introduced to China.

The country is cut down the middle by the Huai River and Qinling Mountains (or even the Yangzte River). The two halves, North and South, might share a national identity, but are separated by more than just rivers and mountains.

The differences, and there are many, start with geography. The north is dry and cold — its flat plains, deserts and grasslands don’t allow for good rice cultivation. Compare this with the warm, rainier climes of the south — its cascading mountains, rivers and chiselled valleys make for ideal rice-growing conditions — and you have a basis for two fundamentally distinct diets. Bread is more prevalent in the north, while rice is eaten as the staple food in the south.

It is customary then for Northerners to eat dumplings (jiaozi), made of dough, on New Year’s, as they look similar to traditional gold ingots, or tael. On the other hand, Southerners partake in “New Year’s cakes” (niangao), made of glutinous rice flour. The cake’s name is a homonym for “higher year,” so eating New Year’s cakes encourages us to “raise” ourselves for the coming year. Nevertheless, nearly all Chinese eat rice dumpling balls (yunxiao/tangyuan) during the Lantern festival, though the preparation of these dumplings in the north is different from that of the south.

Then there’s language. The flatness of the north has historically been conducive to trade, travel and migration, particularly during times of war. This vast northern expanse has, for centuries, promoted a constant coming and going of people and cultures, leading to the predominance of one common language: Mandarin, the official language, and its mutually intelligible (sometimes) dialects.

In the south, however, the abundance of rivers and mountains, coupled with long historic stretches of peace (the Mongolians, Manchurians and Huns of central Asia didn’t care to venture that far), kept these communities isolated from each other for long-enough periods of time that a rich linguistic diversity arose. Today, there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects in the south, categorized into groups such as Yue Chinese (e.g. Cantonese), Hakka, Min Chinese (e.g. Fujianese and Taiwanese) and Wu Chinese (e.g. Shanghainese).

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Television gala

Of course (as is tradition) these language differences are basically ignored during the broadcast of the state’s China Central Television (CCTV) New Year’s Gala, which is in Mandarin.

That’s why in the north, particularly in smaller towns and the countryside, literally every family would huddle around village television sets on New Year’s Eve to watch the program. In the rural south, however, where Mandarin is neither widely spoken nor the lingua franca, the show is not so popular. If you still don’t understand why, then picture a Catalan-speaking community in Spain watching a popular variety show in French.

Despite efforts by state television to make the program more accessible to the southern Chinese, much of the New Year’s Gala remains northern in flavour.

Xiangsheng, a typically two-person comedy routine popularized in Beijing during the Ming dynasty, is a regular staple of the show. In xiangsheng, the two performers typically banter, trading witticisms and barbs, usually in some form of Beijing dialect. Northeastern comedic actors such as Zhao Benshan and Xiao Shenyang have come to define the comedy skits of the CCTV gala.

Although skits from the northeast are phenomenally popular in the north of late, its humour is still, by and large, lost on southerners, particularly in pockets of the deep south, including the province of Guangdong. The almost comically thick, rural accents of the northeast province of Heilongjiang adopted by the actors for these skits tend to makes the dialogue even more confusing and difficult to understand for non-native southern listeners.

The show is hugely popular with overseas Mandarin-speaking Chinese communities.

“My grandma has tapes of the Gala going back to ’85,” says Caro Liu, whose grandparents and family immigrated to Philadelphia from Beijing when he was a kid. “Most important for me is that the whole family would get together to watch it. We all have fond memories of watching it in Philadelphia. It’s something we could all relate to, yet the culture would be so different from our immediate surroundings.”

Our family, which originated from Chaozhou (a city in southern Guangdong province), understood no Mandarin, and most of us had not even heard of this program.

Wang Jia, a Beijing native in her late 50s, says she stopped watching years ago, and the only thing that New Year’s reminds her of now is that she’s one year older.

Televisions are still not common in the countryside, which means that villagers would often cluster around a television in a single room to watch the show, adding to the festive atmosphere. But televisions were an even rarer sight before the economic reform of the 1980s, when they were non-existent. Good old-fashioned firecrackers would more than make up for that though.

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Pond hockey

A growing sport in China, ice-hockey is played on the frozen ponds of the north during New Year’s, but is, because of the lack of frozen ponds, non-existent in the south.

There’s also the rich spectrum of New Year’s customs in China, including the particularly distinct traditions followed by the numerous ethnic minority cultures, many of which can be found in Yunnan province to the south. These traditions vary from village to village, region to region, and do not necessarily connote a clear-cut divide between the north and south. However, some suggest subtle semiotic variations.

“I think celebrations in the north, at least in the countryside, tend to centre on one’s clan and ancestral ties,” says Chenming Fan, a northeasterner from Liaoning province who has spent time in the south.

Hong Kong and the surrounding Pearl River delta, including Guangzhou and Macau, in particular, have very distinctive Cantonese New Year’s traditions. “Before New Year’s, some parents would give their kids a red envelope placed under their pillows,” says Michel Chan, who’ve lived in Hong Kong for most of her life. “Also, if I were to visit your home, I’d bring a small gift, say, a box of New Year’s candy, and you’d hand me a red envelope of approximately HK$20 ($2.50 Canadian).”

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Southern influence

Because the source of Chinese immigration to Canada has historically derived from southern China and Hong Kong, the Chinese New Year’s that we find in Canada still has a southern character to it. Lion dances and dragon dances, a common sight in Chinatowns throughout the world, are not popular at all in Beijing and other northern cities. But thankfully, firecrackers and red envelopes are universal.

Some things in China are the same and some are not. I spent my last Spring Festival in Beijing, with Chinese friends who also decided not to return home (they call themselves ‘orphans’). That night, one of them taught me how to wrap dumplings in our small enclosed Chinese kitchen, while the New Year’s Gala hummed in the background.

There are some things I miss about being at home. I miss my mom’s niangao cakes, which she’d pan-fry with eggs until crisp on the outside and sweet throughout, as well as the sugared coconut, lotus roots and lotus seeds from the Eight Treasure dessert candy lacquerware platters, which she would keep lying around.

I also miss the assorted barbecue meats my dad would pick up at the Chinatown butcher, which he’d arrange in dishes around a big pot of congee that was also filled with plenty of pork. But as my Chinese roommate began to call me a “useless disabled person” (in the familiar way my mother does) — after accidentally dropping a dumpling into a boiling pot of tangyuan — I felt a bit more like home.

lamjin

distribute red packets 发红包
Chinese New Year is our equivalent of Christmas 春节相当于圣诞节
staple food 主食
Northerners 北方人
Southerners 南方人
rice dumpling balls (yunxiao/tangyuan)
the Lantern festival 元宵节

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China Central Television (CCTV) New Year’s Gala  央视春晚
a Beijing native in her late 50s  一位近60岁的北京人
festive atmosphere 节日气氛

laokeadet

学习了，尤其是总结的，都是常用又不知地道表达的词语。

小小桥

请教版主，中国新年可以说成NEW CHINESE YEAR吗？怎么好像见过这个说法呢？

lamjin

请教版主，中国新年可以说成NEW CHINESE YEAR吗？怎么好像见过这个说法呢？
小小桥 发表于 2012-1-26 22:19

                               
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你在哪见过？

lekongwen

应该都是说chinese new year吧，呵呵！从字面看，new chinese year是新中国年，好像是新发展而来的新中国的意思，跟新年好像扯不上关系吧，呵呵！

lamjin真是努力学英语，新年期间还不间断地学习着，可敬可佩！！要好好学习你的毅力！！

大家新年快乐！！！

小小桥

10# lamjin 刚才GOOGLE 了一下 确实没有 NEW CHINESE YEAR的说法  估计我是把LUNAR/SOLAR/chinese NEW YEAR记颠倒了  谢谢