My friend Lei had been away for a couple of days at his company’s annual staff party in the southwestern province of Sichuan, an event that held no joy for him. The message he sent me when he got back had a picture of a doorway with decorations in the form of calligraphy on and around it.
“Is there enough space around your door for a set of these? I’ve got a set and you might be the only person I know who can accept it,” he said.
Half an hour later he was on my doorstep with two long strips of red paper with black calligraphy, known as couplets, to be hung on either side of the door for Chinese New Year, which falls next Tuesday. He was also carrying a square piece of red paper with a single character 福 (fú), meaning good fortune, to hang on the door itself.
When I asked him how the staff party had gone and if he enjoyed meeting his colleagues from other cities, he told me he hadn’t spoken to any of them.
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“I was just with the colleagues from Beijing, the ones I see every day,” he said. “It’s a video games company, we only talk to people we know.”
During his free time, Lei went off on his own for a walk, during which he came upon a Protestant church. He asked if he could go in and they were happy to show him around and told him about their activities.
“They said that Sunday is the best day to come because that’s when they have most events,” he said.
As he was leaving, they gave him the couplets which he was now getting ready to hang outside my door. The reason I was the only plausible recipient he could think of was because of their messages:
“The cup is overflowing with divine grace.”
“Spiritual growth thrives under divine guidance.”
These were, he said, unmistakably monotheistic sentiments that neither his family nor any of his friends could associate themselves with. I asked him if everyone who stood outside my door would think this was a Christian household and he said they would.
“But you are, aren’t you, in Ireland?” he said.
I started telling him it was a complicated question but he interrupted to ask me for a ladder, a measuring tape, a pencil and some kind of adhesive. Then he told me to take a picture of the couplets and to ask ChatGPT which should be on the left and which on the right, something it answered with apparent confidence, explaining that they were a call and response.
Beijing is already emptying out in advance of the nine-day public holiday that will see hundreds of millions of people make billions of journeys across China to be with their families. Everyone is scrambling to get a train ticket or to get on the road in order to be home in time for New Year’s Eve on Monday.
“We’ll make dumplings during the day and leave a few in the pot for the kitchen god and then we’ll eat everything – chicken, fish, so much food in the evening,” my friend Anyu told me before he took a train to his hometown in the northeastern province of Jilin.
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He will stay there for two weeks, meeting friends from secondary school who will be home from cities all over China and abroad. At 29, he is in no hurry to settle down but his mother and her friends feel that time is marching on and he expects them to produce one or two potential dates for him.
“If they suggest someone, I’ll meet her and we’ll probably have a nice time complaining about work. That’s what people my age do,” he said.
Lei is a Beijinger and both sides of his family have lived in the capital for generations so he will not be travelling for the holidays. Like big-city natives all over the world, he relishes the annual emptying out of his city and he is full of tips about which shops and restaurants will be open and which provisions to stock up on early.
As we were fixing the final element of decoration, the fú, to the door, Lei suggested that I turn it upside down. This is a common practice based on a pun that ends up meaning that good fortune arrives at your home.
All this talk of good fortune made me wonder how soon I could take the decorations down without attracting bad luck.
“You leave it up until the next New Year,” he said.
“But since yours doesn’t mention that it’s the Year of the Horse, you never have to take it down at all.”
