[Editor's Note] What Ever Happened to Chinese New Year?

When we crossed into 2000, how excited everyone was about the millennial countdown. But now that the first Lunar New Year of the millennium is here, you don't see the media making a big deal out of it. It doesn't seem like anyone has any particular expectations about the "millennial Year of the Dragon." This seems to prove once again that in this age of the global village, the spread of information technology is pushing everyone into the same "collective madness." People seemed confined to thinking, discussing, and acting in the framework of global fads.

The Chinese New Year was a vital link in the agricultural lifestyle of our ancestors that lasted for millennia. At the end of a year of hard work, the holiday was something like a reward to oneself. The whole family gathered together, young and old, to eat, drink, and play without restraint, to relax and let go emotionally.

Even just 30 years ago, as Taiwan was making the transition to an industrial society, there was still a special atmosphere about the Lunar New Year; people felt excitement and expectation. But today, who still has expectations for this tired old holiday? At most, it allows office workers a slightly longer holiday to spend with their families.

Looking around at my friends, some plan to use the holiday to catch up on sleep, others will go abroad, and others will write that report they've been putting off. People with kids have the headache of deciding where to take them; every year they set out full of excitement, and every year they return home disappointed after spending the time locked in traffic, swearing "never again!"

In modern life and thought, besides being a vacation, does the Lunar New Year still have any special meaning for Chinese? Do we still even need to celebrate this holiday?

In answering this question, it would be useful to first compare the Chinese New Year to the Western Christmas holiday. You'll find that though many Western countries have a more mature industrial society than ours, they still preserve many Christmas traditions. This is still an important holiday for families to get together and for friends to visit each other. Christmas carols fill the airwaves, and TV and movies all feature Christmas themes. Even that old saw A Christmas Carol is dragged out year after year and people never seem to get tired of it. The spirit of Christmas-generosity, kindness, love-is continually extolled.

When we look at Chinese New Year in comparison, what do we see? What do families, schools, and society teach about New Year's values? Chinese have always put the most emphasis on family, on friendship, on loyalty, and on keeping one's trust. In what way are any of these tied in together to that most important Chinese holiday, Lunar New Year? It seems that now people only think about how tiring it is to prepare the New Year's Eve feast, and we observe only the superficial forms. People are frequently little inclined to family reunions, with everybody's nosing into everyone else's business. Many people in fact deliberately avoid the lunar new year now, escaping abroad or using the excuse of being too busy.

Why is it that Chinese, with an ancient culture, cannot find any spiritual meaning to the New Year holiday? Is it possible that it has never been anything but eating and drinking? No wonder these days, when you can gorge yourself every day of the week, no one seems to value it.

Yet, who can deny that the happy feelings we had as children were about much more than just extra food on the table? How can we stand to let the holiday lose meaning year after year, so that our children will never have that New Year feeling in their childhoods, and even one day, maybe the Lunar New Year will disappear completely from Chinese society.

Today, when people have their history and culture strained through the mass media, it is up to us to raise the call to once again place emphasis on the Chinese New Year. We have to find new meaning within the tradition, especially at the spiritual level. New meaning does not necessarily mean new things, but rather new forms of expression and a new attitude. For example, people could write pop songs with a New Year theme. There could be storytelling or performances of New Year stories, ancient and modern, amusing or moving. There could be activities which express what the New Year is all about-abundance, completeness, generosity, warmth-or that capture the special character of a family unit. We should not simply have concerts and galas, targeted at a certain age group, that are merely souped-of versions of the mindless partying that one could do any day of the year.

In this era of the global village, boundaries are fading. This should enrich our cultures and pluralize them, not weaken them or make them all uniform. But in modern Taiwan, of the traditional Chinese holidays, there are only a few left which have a special character. The Taipei Lantern Festival held in recent years has been an example of a successful effort to remake tradition. But the Lunar New Year seems to be fading away. Our generation has the responsibility to seek renewal for this holiday, and to revive the joy with which it was traditionally associated.