I've been meaning to write on here, and yet, life, tiredness has taken over. But here I am! I've been thinking about Lunar New year, and Chinese New Year and wanted to write about it.
Upon seeing a student wearing a traditional Vietnamese dress, it brought upon my own memories of celebrating Lunar New Year a couple of years ago. I am not a drop of Asian or Chinese but the way I learned more about this special celebration was through my Mandarin language class in college. I learned how to say new year phrases, learn about traditional food and dishes that are eaten, and decorations that are put up. Actually, the Chinese word for Spring 'Chun' or 'chuntian' is put upside down as a form of decoration for the new year.
One time, I participated in a Lunar New Year celebration on my college campus; it was to learn how to write Happy New Year phrases in Chinese with black ink on red paper. Red is a lucky color, and that's why children would usually receive hong bao or a red envelope with money inside.
That was a fun and enjoyable time, to learn how to write out happy new year phrases with other classmates. The boy who liked me (I write 'boy' since he was a few years younger than me and still looked like he was in high school lol) was also a classmate of mine, and though he was half Chinese himself he didn't particularly like or was good at learning Mandarin. I really enjoyed it and I felt like usually we were paired up for class work.
I felt like that class invigorated my life during my time there and I felt like learning the language (though it wasn't always easy) felt effortless and enjoyable.
And that's the thing, I still want to feel and be that way. After all these years of on and off again of learning and studying Mandarin Chinese, I would still like to become better at and continue call it my passion, hobby and my best-spoken foreign language.
I recently checked out a book from the library of Chinese reading and learning. I have yet to dive into it.
Xin Nian Kuia Le! 新年快乐
