Potlatch Up The YinYang

HAPPY YEAR OF THE CHICKEN!!
新年快樂！　雞年行大運！

banqiao IMG_1336
fuzzy slippers & firecrackers: Originally uploaded by dahongdou.

Here in Taiwan, with Chinese New Year come endless banquets and house visits. This means traditional new year foods, fancy restaurants, red envelope exchanges, cookies, candies, and lots and LOTS of booze (glasses of single malt you can park a jetski in). In smaller towns and traditional (pagan, non-christian)families like mine, there are also a lot of rituals. Most of it surrounds ancestor worship with offerings of food and enough incense and "paper gold" burning to cloud the skies.

On the downside is the commercialism and focus on material wealth (發大財！！）. On the upside, there is the rare opportunity to sit down for shots with your great aunts, cousins you've never met, and uncles who are 5 years younger than you.

The banquet is one of many New Year customs attached to building and maintaining guanxi (關係--literally "relationships"). Along with the potlatch chinoise is the exchange of red envelopes (紅包-﹣hongbao) stuffed with cash (though only in even numbered totals, except for those containing "4," which is a homonym for "die"). There is a rich set of social etiquette associated with the hongbao, including all points on the spectrum between thank yous and bribery.

The second day of the new year is a traditional day for women to return to their homes. I spent the day doing some oldstyle house visits with my father and uncles. We went to the homes of all the women in the family to formally invite them to lunch on saturday. This kind of thing was more necessary in the past when wives lived very far away, were in farming families, and under the tyranny of mother-in-law's "open sky." In my family, these days, it is a ritual of gift giving and negotiation--how few drinks can we get away with before the next stop?[you're not ALL driving!] is it possible to NOT eat another meal? [you have to have SOMETHING to eat with your drink!]. The next day's potlatch ended with a drunken karaoke competition with the party on the other side of the dining room. my uncles won points for volume.

This year, the three day binge was followed, for many of us, by a three day purge. my guts still feel a little queasy. >yuck<

It's definitely the kind of holiday that leaves you needing a day off.