Celebrating the Rabbit's arrival in a rainforest

As I gazed at the ink-wash that was the night sky over Malaysian Borneo's rainforest, I lamented its silence and its monochrome. It was the first chuxi (lunar new year's eve) my wife and I had spent outside of China since we moved to Beijing in 2006.

I knew the skies of China's capital - thousands of kilometers away from the swath of heaven I was staring up at - were sparkling with fireworks. Its air was shuddering with the percussions of perhaps millions of pyrotechnic detonations. And jubilant crowds were swirling through the smoky cracks between Beijing's buildings, cheering on the Year of the Rabbit's arrival.

I was pondering how surprised I was at how much I missed the hullabaloo, especially the way the skies danced with sparks and crackled with countless explosions, and about how something seemed just wrong about spending this night beneath an unconscious sky, when - BOOM!

The fiery spider legs of a bottle rocket radiated from the source of the concussion above. It was as if the sky was responding to our disapproval of its leadenness.

Then, another blazing flower bloomed above the jungle canopy. And another. And another.

But, little did we know, these fireworks were heralding the onset of full-on Malaysian celebrations of the Chinese Spring Festival, which, to our surprise, would rival anything we'd seen in the festival's country of origin.

Arriving in Kota Kinabalu city from the remote rainforests, we found the town was decked out for the Year of the Rabbit's arrival.

Dozens of billboards and signs were printed with portraits of government leaders - the first we saw was of the minister of transport - conveying Chinese New Year wishes. The streets downtown basked in the glow of thousands of red lanterns slung over the roadways.

The most decorated place we saw, oddly enough, was the Little Italy restaurant. The walls of this Mediterranean eatery in Malaysia were loaded with such adornments as lights shaped like Chinese characters that spelled out auspicious new year's wishes and rabbit-shaped paper-cuts. Vermillion garlands and string lights with tiny traditional lantern-shaped bulbs were coiled around every post and pillar. And two massive papier-mch dragons slithered through the air in the center of the main dining hall.

Never in our years in China had we seen such abundance and variety of Chinese Spring Festival dcor as we were seeing in this country, where about 25 percent of the population is ethnically Chinese.

My wife and I were discussing this when our conversation was interrupted by the clanging of cymbals that announced the start of a lion dance across the street - something we'd had to seek out, rather than have come to us, during the Spring Festivals we'd spent in various regions of China.

Also, we had never seen a Chinese city as shut down for the festival as the Malaysian settlements we traveled through. Block after block of buildings was shuttered. Our quest for a morning cuppa took us past nearly a dozen locked up cafs until we finally found one that was open - the only store still doing business in a massive multistory shopping complex. It was similar in the "tourist agency district", a compound of several dozen travel companies, in which a single outlet was still operating.

While this Spring Festival wasn't spent at the homes of our Chinese friends as in previous years, in almost every other way, it was the biggest celebration of the holiday we'd yet participated in.

The experience made me eager for the seemingly inevitable day when Spring Festival is celebrated around the world (and not just in the Chinatowns that speckle most corners of the globe), in a way similar to how Christmas has been creeping into non-Western and predominantly non-Christian cultures, such as China's.

Hopefully, when that day comes, nobody anywhere in the world will have to spend a chuxi beneath a silent, dark night sky.

China Daily

(China Daily 02/16/2011 page20)