Farewell to cock, we've gone to the dogs!

[muckefuck]

恭喜發財！新年快乐！Happy New Year!

We started off in grand style with sojutinis (this year's big hit: Soju Ginger Cosmopolitans), the best grade of pu-erh we could find, a bottle of Iron Boat wine, and a jug of Zhejiang daughter wine. The courses were pork tenderloin cooked in the best master sauce ever (what a different lemongrass and cardamom make!), duck from Sun Wah, baked salmon from Martin Yan, longevity soup with uncut Chinese-style noodles from Thailand, spicy pickles, cold marinated asparagus, spicy-sweet-sour napa cabbage, and steamed eight precious pudding with almond water for dessert. The only thing missing were the jiaozi, which apparently formed a nasty mess in the bottom of the skillet and had to be discarded. (But they were vegetarian, so no great loss.)

After everyone left, we collapsed in front of the tv for the Discovery Channel special on Qin Shihuangdi. Slightly better than I expected, actually, although they lavished their attention on palace intrigues and made scant mention of Li Si's innovations in standardisation and centralisation. Also, it wouldn't be a cable archaeological programme without some gratuitous narrative subplot about a Western scholar's quest to prove some Really Important Theory. On the plus side, it reminded me to add 荊柯刺秦王 (The Emperor and the Assassin) to monshu's NetFlix queue.

This time of year, I always end up reading some East Asian novel or other. We picked up Yu Hua's Chronicle of a blood merchant (徐三觀賣血記) in NYC almost a year ago, but neither of us had gotten around to reading it. At first, it began to look like To Live all over again but with a slightly different cast of characters, but it had two big advantages: (1) Less bathos and (2) way more humour. Like Yu's earlier work, it also follows the struggles of a Chinese family from the post-war period up through the Cultural Revolution, but they don't suffer as stoically as Gong Li in a Zhang Yimou film. When the going gets tough, the wife sits on the doorstep, sobs, and complains theatrically about her miserable fate to everyone within earshot.

The last Chinese novel that I enjoyed this much was Green River Daydreams (蒼河白日夢) by Liu Heng (劉恒), which managed to merge the forbidden-love and coming-of-age plots into a harrowing and entertaining story of life in the last years of the Qing Dynasty. It also had a similar mix of funny and sad, which is so much more appealing than unadultered misery.

Comments

[lifeandstuff.livejournal.com]

Completely off topic...

One thing I've seriously wondered about Chinese years and always been too embarrassed to ask (despite having plenty of native Chinese around me), is what's with this Year of the Dog stuff? More specifically, is that something vaguely amusing that Chinese will pay attention to on the first day of the New Year and we see on placemats while we are eating and then forget about?

Or, will, say, Chinese children when you ask them when they were born will say "I was born in the Year of the Dog"?

So, the real question is culturually do people internalize it in any vaguely meaningful way. If not, did they used to?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

From my limited experience, it seems to have about the same role as the Western zodiac. Some people take it very seriously, just as there are those with a Western background who will say things like, "Of course the relationship didn't work out, they were both Leos!" A minority think it's pernicious nonsense and a plurality think it's harmless superstition or entertaining foolishness, or something with a grain of truth to it--maybe all three at once.

I can't remember it now, of course, but we learned in class how to say, "What year are you?" My Thai dictionary lists an equivalent expression. It's something people joke about, make reference to informally, even make insults about. I'd be surprised to find someone in this day and age who called off a wedding because the horoscope didn't work out, but not to find someone who earnestly ascribed marital problems to zodiacal incompatibility.

I was born in the Year of Dog and I've been told that since this is "my year", I should be able to accomplish great things. I wish I believe that were true, because then I could make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.