Chinese New Year: Save the Date Every Year

Chinese New Year was celebrated on Feb. 2 in a small but effectively loud celebration in Chinatown. 

Like most ancient legends, the story of Chinese New Year varies, but here is what I was able to gather.

There was once a horrible monster that ate one kind of animal every day of the year. On the first day he started with humans. The people called him Nain, or “year,” and they would begin every year by running into the mountains to flee the terrible beast who rose out of the sea. 

Until one year an old man came into the village and told them he could defeat the beast, and they didn’t need to hide anymore. Whether the villagers fled, leaving the old man alone to defeat the monster, or stayed and joined with him seems to vary in telling. But I prefer to think they stayed, because the Chinese New Year parade reflected this group spirit.

In Philadelphia, young men dance under the traditional dragon costumes. One under the head, leaping and crouching, while the tail follows along, a teenager crouched at tail height. The dragons are accompanied by a masked figure who dances with the dragons, sometimes taunts, and, alarmingly, rolling in the fireworks that spark and bang on the ground. 

The fireworks are what drew the parade from business to business. At the door of each business, the dragons go through a ritual of beseeching the owners to come out. Eventually, strips of red fireworks are rolled out on the ground or hung from a window. When the fireworks begin to pop, the dragons leap into them, stomping and shaking as they explode at their feet. They lower their faces into the explosions and tousle their mains in the sparks. When the fireworks have finished, a cabbage is reached for by the dragons and then torn into pieces before being thrown into the crowd. 

The dancing and shaking in the face of fireworks is hard work. One young man steps out from under the head, holding his eye. “One hit me in the eye” he explains. There is a small convoy of teenagers following behind the dragons wearing yellow sweatshirts. They are just as important as the dragons. A dancer stays under a dragon for only one or two store fronts before a friend comes to lift the monster from his shoulders.

In the ancient village, the old man scared the beast away by setting off firecrackers, and covering the village in red. The monster was scared of the bangs and the vibrant red color, so by the end of the night the villagers had scared off the monster. 

Now, every year on the first day of the New Year, the Chinese decorate their homes in red, and fill their streets with noise to keep the beast at bay. 

Perhaps what is most striking about a Philadelphian Chinese New Year is the diversity of the performance. Not only are the streets packed with the diverse range of people who live in Philly, the performers themselves appear to be a variety of races, from White to Indian to Chinese. The store fronts they stop at are Vietnamese, Thai, and Japanese. I’m not sure what to conclude from this. The diversity is certainly beautiful, an inspiration to the American tradition of welcoming immigrants into our mixing pot. 

But does it make the Chinese New Year any less Chinese? Or does it simply add its own American and Philadelphian flair to it?

Photos by Khaliha Hawkins

Sources: Chinese traditions, Chinese culture