Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

Spring Festival

Today is the official start of the Spring Festival in China, the biggest holiday in the country. As I type this all I hear are the explosions of fireworks across my aunt’s apartment complex. It’s loud. Most sound like mortars going off, like the air just convulsed and bellowed. Then some disturbed car-alarm goes off.

In the morning I went with my uncle (my aunt’s husband) and Lisa to buy fireworks. He decided to go to the poorest area of Beijing, where the fireworks are the cheapest.

The ride first brought us pass a vast swath of bare land. Rubble —clobs of stone and brick — mounded all across it. There once were farms here, mainly just plain brick one-story homes. The few that still stand look lonely and old as if from another era, like they too will become another pile of crushed dirt.

My uncle told me developers had gotten rid of all the homes there to build new developments, likely more modern high-rise more apartments. “What about the farmers?” I asked. The land, he said, is usually leased by the farmers. Thus they can make a good deal of money from whoever builds there.

We then reached the poor neighborhood. What my uncle called “farm area” even as we were still within the city and no livestock or farmland in sight. The streets were crowded. Thick electrical lines strewn in the air across the alleyways. Outdoor markets with clusters of people surrounded in narrow corner ways. All the buildings are one-story or two, and old-looking. I wonder if this neighborhood will one day too change and become another piece of bare land ready for development.

I was surprised when my uncle bought an entire box of fireworks, heavy and large enough that I had to help him carry it to the car. Perhaps more fireworks than I’ve bought in my entire lifetime. Even more impressive was how he managed to easily barter his way to maybe a third or half the price of each firework he bought.

Later in the evening, we went to see my grand uncle, my grandfather’s brother to celebrate Spring Festival together. I’ve only met my grand uncle once before when I was in Beijing in 2004. A former doctor who taught at a university, he’s in his mid 70’s, retired and in good shape. He does remind me very much of my grandfather, especially, his voice, which sounds almost exactly alike.

I suppose tonight was a bit more special for me. This was my first time celebrating the start of Spring Festival in China. The festival is a two-week long holiday that marks the start of the Chinese New year. I’ve sort of marked the occasion in China with my parents and the local Chinese school, but it’s never really quite been in the pantheon of holidays I celebrate. I frankly had to wikipedia Spring Festival in order to remember when it was held and what it was about.

For most of the night it was us watching a national television program celebrating the day while fireworks crackled in the surrounding neighborhood. But near midnight we fired off some fireworks. So was the entire neighborhood. It was so loud that my grand uncle could barely hear me when I told him I wanted to go back up and grab my camera. There was smoke everywhere. These weren’t just the hand-held firecrackers people were lighting. These were the heavy-duty kind, the ones that are used in firework shows. Bright flickers of neon light shot through electrical powerlines above, over parked cars and bursting near windows up in my grand uncle’s apartment complex. They sure know how to celebrate with fireworks in China.

Tomorrow I’m off to Taiwan, to see my family there. I’ll be there for about ten days.