XIN NIAN KUAI LE – HAPPY NEW YEAR

Best Wishes for the Year of the Horse

The full pdf of this newsletter is available at: NZCFSNelsonJanFeb14.pdf

We hope you have had a relaxed and enjoyable holiday season with family and friends and are looking forward to a wonderful year ahead.

The Year of the Horse, the seventh symbol on the Chinese calendar, officially gallops in on the 31st of January and, to avoid the pressures of the long holiday weekend, we are going to celebrate the Chinese New Year, with our usual Banquet and Annual General Meeting, a few days later. We hope you will be able to join us for this auspicious occasion.

Let’s saddle up and race off to start the Chinese New Year with another superb banquet:

Sunday 9 February .. Eastern Cuisine Restaurant .. 5:45 pm

To book please ring:

Barbara Markland ph. 544 4712 by Tuesday 4 February

text: 021 447 180 or e-mail: [email protected]

The Eastern Cuisine, 275 Queen Street, Richmond, is well-known for its great banquets, and they give us exclusive use of the restaurant, provided we have a minimum number – this has never been a problem in the past! Your family members, friends, visitors, and guests are all most welcome to attend this celebration.

The cost for the Banquet is $30. The usual beverages (juice, soft drinks, beer and wine) will be available for purchase from the restaurant and if you wish to bring your own wine, the corkage fee is just $5.

To make things easier for the restaurant, members and their guests will pay for the banquet at the door – by cheque or cash only please. If you wish, you can pay beforehand, via internet banking – see below.

Other payments, such as for corkage and drinks, will be made directly to the restaurant.

You are also invited to make a donation towards the He Ming Qing Scholarships on the night and buy tickets in the raffle for an absolutely magnificent box of Chinese tea – tickets will be just $2 each, or $5 for three, so do remember to bring some change.

It would be very much appreciated if everyone could be there by 5.45pm to enable the brief AGM to begin at 6pm. The banquet will commence about 7pm. In between, we are planning some entertainment for you.

If you prefer, you can pay directly via internet banking to the NZCFS – Nelson Branch bank account at Westpac 03-0703-0369680-00. Please make sure you enter your name as the reference and then email both Barbara Markland at [email protected] and Treasurer, Royden Smith, at [email protected] so that they can then confirm payment has been received.

LAST MEETING – PAM FRAHM in SE CHINA: At our last meeting for 2013, Pam took a large and enthralled audience through SE China, from Guangzhou to Shanghai via Jiangxi and Fujian Provinces, with her stunning photographs and wonderful anecdotes. The Hakka Roundhouses and Jingdezhen, the home of Chinese porcelain, were real highlights and ensured that lots of us wished that we had been on that fascinating tour too! Thank you, Pam, for a wonderfully evocative and visual presentation.

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING: Items on the agenda during our brief AGM at our Banquet will include: the President’s Report, the Financial Report, the Election of Officers, and any General Business.

New committee members would be very much welcomed. Nominations for all positions will be taken at the meeting but, if you might be interested in helping, you can contact President Christine to find out more.

2014 SUBSCRIPTIONS: As our Branch accounts are reasonably healthy, the Treasurer will recommend at the AGM that our subscriptions remain unchanged and subscriptions will become due thereafter:

That Nelson Branch subscriptions for 2014 remain the same as 2013:

Single ~ $15          Couple ~ $25          School ~ $25          Corporate ~ $30

2014 BRANCH MEETINGS and EVENTS: Please mark these dates on your calendar and keep them free for our Branch Meetings during 2014:

14 March          2 May          20 June          8 August          10 October          21 November

23 – 25 May (National Conference)        28 September (Chinese Garden Spring Festival)

NATIONAL CONFERENCE 2014: The 2014 National Conference and AGM will be hosted by Hawkes Bay Branch at the Havelock North Function Centre from 23 – 25 May. The theme of the Conference is “Voices for Youth”, and Hawkes Bay President, Sally Russell, and her dedicated team have been working hard on preparing a very interesting and entertaining programme. Sally says, “Quite simply, we want you to have a great time with us” and they are very keen to showcase the Hawkes Bay region. Registration forms will be available soon and more details will be in the next newsletter.

MEMBER NEWS:

• It was with considerable sadness that we record the death of long-time member, Jim Roxburgh, just one day after our November meeting. Jim has had the longest association with China of any of us as he was born in Shanghai, where his father was a marine engineer. We will very much miss his affable presence at our meetings and send our heartfelt condolences to Dame Alison and family.

NEW YEAR CELEBRATIONS HAVE BEGUN: Several Branch members took advantage of the invitation from the Nelson Chinese Society to join them for their celebration of the start of the Chinese New Year on Saturday in the Victory Community Centre. 

It was a delightful family occasion with some excellent entertainment from the Nelson Chinese community, a local drumming group and some visitors from Christchurch. 

It is great to see the Nelson Chinese Society going from strength to strength and we very much look forward to continuing to work with them to support Chinese cultural and language activities in Nelson.

For those of you with access to Facebook, more photos of the Chinese New Year party are available at:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/207290959423113/

N.B. The Nelson Chinese Society’s after school Mandarin classes for younger children start again at the Elma Turner Library on Monday 10 February. Contact Lillian for more information: [email protected]

HOMESTAY FOR HUANGSHI SCHOLAR: One of our delightful Appo Hocton Scholars from Huangshi is looking for a suitable homestay from the end of January, 2014. While something within walking distance to NMIT would be best, and she is quite happy to do her own shopping and cooking, there may be other options on an appropriate bus route. If anyone knows of a friend/acquaintance/family member who might have a suitable place available for her, please contact Barbara Markland as soon as possible (email [email protected] or ph 544 4712).

NZCFS TOUR TO NORTH EAST CHINA 2014: According to Chinese astrologers, the Year of the Horse is “an excellent year for travel, and the further away and off the beaten path the better”! So, in 2014, the NZCFS brings you another exciting China travel opportunity.

Departing in late May, for 21 days, the next NZCFS Tour follows our recent pattern of offering new, more compact, regions and covers the North East region of China. This will be a fascinating tour: exploring the historical influence of the Russians and Japanese in Manchuria, visiting amazing scenery such as the sacred mountain at Taishan, and the Changbaishan volcano, a 3,000 metre mountain and nature reserve on the North Korean border, as well as discovering regional cultures and cuisine as far north as Harbin.

Fully escorted throughout by one of our well-travelled NZCFS members and by a brilliant Chinese guide, the tour represents excellent value at just $6,950 (subject to currency fluctuations) and includes all accommodation, food, and tips in China, and domestic flights from Nelson. More details, including the full itinerary, are on our website at: https://nzchinasociety.org.nz/15126/explore-china-the-northeast-tour/

For those wishing to be part of  the tour group or who would like more information, please contact Ann White: email: [email protected] or phone: 03 614 8944.

A CAMP WITH CULTURE – Lori Brudvik-Lindner reports on this very successful holiday event:

“Wow, Mom, I didn’t know China was so interesting,” said my Chinese daughter, Wren Ying Brudvik-Lindner. 

For three days I watched her, and fifteen other children aged from 8-15, fully engaged in Chinese cultural projects. Calligraphy, brush painting, knotting, paper cutting, lantern making, chopstick challenge, tai chi and mega dumpling making were all part of this recent summer holiday children’s programme.   

Each day students immersed themselves in Chinese culture – accompanied by a green tea break and lunches of fried noodles, fried rice, dumplings and fruit. As the days unfolded, creative arts and crafts decorated the tables, adorned the walls and hung across the hall – brush-painted pandas, Chinese lanterns, zodiac papercut images – an artistic and cultural feast for the eyes. 

This wonderful opportunity to bring Chinese culture to life for Nelson children was sponsored by our Nelson Branch with assistance from the Confucius Institute at the University of Canterbury. 

Rebecca Wu and Dongrui Pang were the very capable teachers for our Chinese Culture Camp with tai chi expertise from Ron Moorhouse; and serious administrative and kitchen support came from Christine and Bruce Ward, Jeannette Jones and Lori Brudvik Lindner.

We look forward to offering this programme next year to our community. If you are interested in being involved, please let us know.

This will be the last of these superbly insightful letters from Ferry and Aukje in Zhangye, Gansu Province, as they have now finished their time teaching English at Zhangye University and are on their way home via Hainan Island and time with their family in Japan. We look forward to welcoming them back to Nelson mid-year and hearing much more about their time in China. Thanks, Ferry and Aukje.

A BIG BANG!

– from Ferry van Mansum and Aukje Both

Chinese New Year is just round the corner and the best wishes for the coming year come with loud noise from lots of fire crackers and large fireworks that explode with a big bang. It is not so much the beautiful unfolding of many colours in the night-sky as the number of decibels generated that will rate the success of the pyrotechnics. We just read in a Chinese newspaper that if the air quality in Beijing does not improve – it already had more than 30 days of unacceptable high levels of particles in the air this year – fireworks will be forbidden there this Spring Festival. That must be a huge disappointment for many Chinese, because happiness is celebrated with noise.

In Zhangye, when the coal fires have done their job warming the chilly morning air, and before they are started up again around six o’clock in the evening, we are blessed with clear blue skies. We are also able to share the happiness of couples getting married, restaurants being re-furbished, shops opening, new high-rise buildings reaching their summit and successful businessmen receiving the keys of their brand new big SUVs, any day of the week and at all times of the day or night. In particular Saturdays are heralded by the sound of big firework cannons and long strings of firecrackers and the acrid smell of billowing clouds of blackish, brown smoke. We are just back from a stroll into town and today we walked from one celebration into the next. A deafening experience. Not only does the blast from the fireworks join the ever present sound of honking car horns and loudspeakers from shops repeatedly advertising their wares, the airwaves from the fireworks also set off the alarms of cars and electrical scooters parked nearby. Total chaos.

Here, in the west of China, people tend to be more superstitious than in the more developed east, so they feel the need to wake up the gods of luck and a trip to the fireworks shop is called for. Fireworks are such a part of everyday life that most people don’t even stop to look where all the racket comes from. Even we are almost getting used to it; we no longer jump out of our skin every time when the street in front of us erupts into a war zone, but we still interrupt our conversation, plug our ears and look at this amazing phenomenon. Last week friends and employees of a newly opened restaurant in a pedestrian area filled with market stalls rolled out and lit hundreds of fire crackers, showering the restaurant with lots of good luck, but also blessing us and all the market stalls with floating pieces of burnt paper, smoke and ash.

While I am writing this I can hear the distant pops of yet another celebration, reminding me that we are here in Zhangye, where for good fortune and happiness we do not have to wait until New Year. We are getting our doses daily with every big bang.

Whether you will celebrate the Chinese New Year at the end of January or the western New Year on the first day of that month, whether you will explode into next year or slip into it quietly, we wish you a happy 2014 and we will catch up with most of you in the second half of it.

THE YEAR OF THE HORSE: In Chinese astrology, the Horse year is considered a fortunate year that brings luck and good things. The Magical Horse has supernatural powers, is heroic, strong, and can even fly through the heavens, bringing peace and blessings. The Horse is a true hero in China because important battles were won due to the power and strength of the Horse.

The Horse is a symbol of travel, competition and victory. The Chinese say that the best flyer in the sky is the Dragon and the best runner on the ground is the Horse. That’s why the Horse is connected to speedy success and Shenzhen is the city in China that best represents the characteristics of the Horse.

Horse years are:     1906      1918      1930      1942      1954

                                 1966     1978      1990      2002      2014

People born in Horse years are bright, cheerful, popular, and fun loving. They find people and crowds exciting, and love parties. The Horse’s childish innocence, sunny disposition, and natural charm attract many friends. They pursue freedom, passion and leadership.

Horses like social activities, because they like to show themselves off. Sometimes, the Horse is a little self-centred, but this doesn’t mean that they will not be interested in any problems except their own.

They have ingenious communicating techniques and, in their community, they always want to be in the limelight, so they have good friends and are well liked by many people. Although they sometimes talk too much, they are cheerful, perceptive, talented, earthy but stubborn.

The Horse is a highly intuitive animal, so people born in a Horse year follow their hunches. Their keen judgment and natural intuition often help them make the right decisions throughout their life. Usually they don’t need to struggle in order to succeed and obtain the fine things life has to offer.

Horses have a carefree nature and need ample room for self expression. The Horse person is patient up to a point, but they can be hot-tempered. If pushed too far, the Horse person can lose their temper as they cannot bear too much constraint. When constrained by rules, proud Horses will rebel, refusing to be corralled or tamed. Then they lash out (just like a horse) at others, which can undo the good relationships they have built up with their good social skills.

Horses will tell you exactly what is on their mind; they are frank and dislike hidden agendas. So this is the time for issues to be out in the open, especially with family members. The time for secrecy was the Snake year, not now in a Horse year.

The Horse year is about freedom, returning to nature, and enjoying life and life’s adventures. Horses won’t always want to focus on work because it’s easy to be distracted by fun, good times, and parties. Keep in mind, this year, that Horse energy is free-spirited, wild, wilful, and independent. Horses don’t care about money and live large, so in a Horse year they might be tempted to overspend on fun – anything to keep up with the spirit of living for today. It’s easier to move on to the next adventure than face reality or clean up a mess.

Personality: popular, friendly, carefree, optimistic, pleasure-seeking, imaginative, inquisitive, capable, practical, energetic, and impulsive.

Ideal Horse occupations include: business, agriculture, art, publicist, sales representative, journalist, language instructor, translator, bartender, performer, tour operator, librarian or pilot.

Compatibility: Best with: Tiger, Goat or Dog; Worst with: Rat, Ox, Rabbit or Horse.

Some famous Horses include: Nelson Mandela, Paul McCartney, Genghis Khan, Rembrandt, Louis Pasteur, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Boris Yeltsin, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Emma Watson, Oprah Winfrey, Jackie Chan, Barbara Streisand and Leonard Bernstein.

~ edited from various websites too numerous to mention, courtesy of Google…