My participation was always from the periphery; I was merely an observer of the excitement of Chinese New Year but always the colour and intricacy of the preparations fascinated. The celebrants wore bright, new clothes, gave red envelopes and sweet talk was exchanged by those who had studiously ignored each other for the other eleven months of the year. Children were unleashed from the tough regimes which dominated their lives. Squares of thickened syrup and fruit and balls of glutinous rice with spicy fillings were offered with careless generosity. There was an increase in pilgrimages to the local shrines which smoked with incense and burnt cash and there was the proliferation of elaborate paper decorations.
Colourful, patterned paper swags swung above and around every entrance. Doorways boasted paper red columns painted with the gold characters of blessing and aspiration. Musicians’ dramatic swooping melodies competed with the myriad of bells which tinkled incessantly. Everyone sported paper creations bouncing on long strings and candles glowed inside tasseled lanterns.
Most wonderful to me was the dancing of the dragon. Its advance into one of the wider streets was heralded by several men drumming and clashing cymbals and then the ball-carrying acrobat appeared dancing backwards and tempting the dragon forward with a large ball. The dancer threw the ball made of twisted cane and decorated with ribbons in the air, flipped himself through a standing backward somersault, caught the ball and waggled it under the chin of the exotic dragon; a dragon with a huge paper face of multi-hued paper and great big googly eyes which rolled in their sockets; a dragon with a long centipede back made of a wide strip of richly embroidered and fur-edged silk; a dragon with as many as twelve legs. The legs underneath the large, outsized head followed the taunting ball as if magnetized and dragon’s other legs kicked and bucked as they contracted and stretched the brilliant caparison in artful sinuosity.
The athleticism of the dancers amazed me. They kept up the illusion of the dragon threatening and then being guided away from the fragile human dwellings for a length of time which seemed superhuman. Once I followed the dragon dancers off the main boulevard onto a grubby side-street and saw the unveiled men steaming and streaming with sweat. They panted, drank and laughed until it was time for Chinese Dragon to vaunt its vivid and illustrious plumage, and be beckoned away, in the next arena.