Sunday Snapshot: Chinese New Year
I confess to having missed last week’s blog post because of Valentine’s Day. Perhaps not the best excuse, but I’m increasingly feeling the importance of sacred time away from work, and especially away from the computer.
But another important event that kicked off last Sunday was Chinese New Year. It’s the year of the Tiger, and festivities in San Francisco’s Chinatown were in high gear yesterday. My partner and I did the Chinatown City Guides Walking Tour, and dancing dragons and loud fireworks were definitely the order of the day. But one of the highlights of the tour was Kong Chow Temple, located three steep stories up. Taoist temples are on the top story to be close to the heavens.
Inside was a woman in her eighties (at least) hand-crafting colorful paper into what seemed to be little houses. Another younger woman sat at her side writing single characters onto red ribbons. It’s interesting to try to make sense of what you think people are doing when you don’t know the custom or the language. The structures the older woman was creating were transferred almost immediately into a huge incinerator. A lot of work to be immediately burned, I thought. Our guide told us that people choose to burn things they think their ancestors need in the afterlife. This might be houses or cars or money, but in this case it seemed that this woman was fulfilling many requests for houses, presumably on the behalf of others. Another man was carting in plate-loads of incense from the balcony, dumping them onto the fire on top colorfully burning paper. The room smelled of incense and smoke, but the work being done inside the temple was methodical and singularly dedicated and mesmerizing to watch.
Thinking about spending a whole day (or who knows—maybe days or even months) creating something that’s solely about ritual, in this case burning the very thing your fingers are working fast and furious to create, gave me pause. Then, later in the tour, we stopped by the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, where I witnessed yet another elderly woman methodically working, this time rolling fortunes into soft cookies. The guide told us how this tiny little shop, with just a handful of people working, produces 8,000 cookies a day.
At the temple I’d felt a little bit floored by the notion of destroying what you create, and yet isn’t eating the very same thing? I consumed the fortune cookie maker’s cookies and got great pleasure, and similarly I imagine the person or people who ordered the paper houses to be burned felt content and satisfied at the result of their efforts. Food for thought: What kinds of rituals do you participate in or know about that are intriguing, mindful, eye-opening?