元宵節 / 元宵节
yuán xiāo jié
“first night festival”
Yesterday (12 February) was the Lantern Festival, so I’m going to catch the topicality with my memories of the occasion, or I’ll have to wait another year (cf. nobody talks about Xmas in January.)
In Chinese, it’s “the festival of the first night” because it’s the first full moon night of the new lunar year (hence worth celebrating), being the 15th day of the lunar calendar month. (Every first day of the lunar calendar month is new moon, every 15th day the full moon.)
In English, it’s called the Lantern Festival, because this is when lanterns are put up in the streets — the round lanterns for the shape of the full moon, the light of the candle for the brightness of the full moon.
The big round lanterns are the public display ones. For children, there are small concertina ones, which can be collapsed once the festival is over and stored away, rather like the Xmas tree decorations for Westerners.
We were five children in my family, and six next door, so for Lantern Festival, we’d get together at my house (a bungalow) for the ritual.
The story we had learned as children was that on that night, the 天狗* tiān gǒu / “sky dog” / Celestial Dog will try and swallow the full moon when it appears, so we’d try and scare it away. Or, if we couldn’t see the full moon, it was because the 天狗 had swallowed it, so we’d try and scare it into spitting it out.
We’d walk in a row, one behind another, around the house with our concertina lanterns.
The first child in front would have an improvised noise-making contraption, something like a tin can or even just the lid, beating it with a stick. It could also be a tin can filled with stones, to shake and produce a rattling noise. (Children in those days, and in a third world country as well, had such simple entertainment needs.)
The rest of the children would chant something that doesn’t make any sense really, just some form of clamour to scare the 天狗. In my Teochew / 潮州 Cháozhōu dialect, it was “oh oh, teh niao teh”, over and over again as we circled the house.
We didn’t stick steadfastly to it — we’d stop when the full moon appeared (we probably wouldn’t even start if it was overcast or rainy, as we’d be there all night), or if we got bored, which was fairly soon, as it was so monotonous.
If a child didn’t insert the candle properly at the outset (there’s a little spike for pushing the base of the candle into), the walking would dislodge the candle and the lantern would go up in flames. End of the game for that child.
* (Chinese) 天狗: To be distinguished from the Japanese 天狗 / てんぐ / tengu, which is not quite the same thing.
(From googling) “天狗”是中日两国均为人熟知的妖怪，中国现代的天狗形象是生活在天上的狗，而日本的天狗则是半人半鸟或长着长鼻子红脸的狰狞形象。
(Google translate) “ 天狗” is a well-known monster in both China and Japan. The modern image of tiān gǒu in China is a dog living in the sky, while the Japanese tengu is a ferocious image that is half human, half bird or with a long nose and a red face.
(Singapore, 1960s)
