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Happy Spring Festival!
Sheen Nee-en Kwye Luh!
(2009: Year of the Ox)

Symbolic Chinese Foods for the New Year

Food plays a major role in Chinese New Year celebrations. On the night before the New Year, families hand out oranges, prepare harmony trays filled with nuts and other snacks symbolizing good fortune, and later partake in a meal of fish or other "lucky" foods. These Lucky Foods are served throughout the two week celebration.

You may be asking, what gives a certain food symbolic significance? Sometimes it's based on appearance. For example, serving a whole chicken during the Chinese New Year season symbolizes family togetherness. Noodles represent a long life, and an old superstition says that it's bad luck to cut them. Both clams and spring rolls symbolize wealth; clams because of their resemblance to bouillon, and spring rolls because their shape is similar to gold bars.

On the other hand, a food may have special significance during Chinese New Year because of the way it sounds. For example, the Cantonese word for lettuce sounds like rising fortune, so it is very common to serve a lettuce wrap filled with other lucky food. Tangerines and oranges are passed out freely during Chinese New Year as the words for tangerine and orange (jiew zih) sound similar to luck and wealth, respectively. The same goes for pomelos. This large ancestor of the grapefruit signifies abundance, as the Chinese word for pomelo (yoh zih) sounds like "to have."

As mentioned, fish also play a large role in festive celebrations. And at the risk of homophonic hyperventilating, the word for fish (yiew) sounds like the words meaning wish and abundance. As a result, on New Year's Eve it is customary to serve a fish at the end of the evening meal, symbolizing a wish for abundance in the coming year. For added symbolism, the fish is served whole, with head and tail attached, symbolizing a good beginning and ending for the coming year.

And lets not forget about those sweet, steamed cakes that are so popular during the Chinese New Year season. Cakes such as Sticky Rice Cake have symbolic significance on many levels. Their sweetness symbolizes a rich, sweet life, while the layers symbolize rising abundance for the coming year. Finally, the round shape signifies family reunion.

The end of the New Year is marked by the Festival of Lanterns, which is a celebration with singing, dancing, lantern shows, and yes, more fireworks. Traditionally, Chinese parents prepared lanterns for their children to carry to school during the first days of the New Year. This symbolized their hope that the children would have bright futures. Another interesting tradition is the posting of riddles called ‘Lantern Riddles.' They are written on pieces of paper and posted on lanterns or walls, and anyone solving the riddle is awarded a prize.

Let's Eat Out Tonight

There's a common expression in China that phonetically sounds like this: Meen ee shir way tee-en. Food is god. I had a taxi driver once tell me, "Americans make good soldiers. Chinese make good food." I'm pretty much apolitical, so I didn't have much to say about why we Americans are reputed as warriors, but I did readily agree that Chinese are the lords of the kitchen.

Chances are, there will be times you'll end up at a Chinese restaurant, and one look at the menu will be a bit discombobulating: unless there are pictures included, your options of entrées will be listed in pictographs commonly recognized as Chinese characters, which to most westerners are an undecipherable encryption that dampens enthusiasm, as well as your appetite. But no worries! You can eat out using our phonetic English guide. We'll provide you with many words and phrases in the next several newsletters to allow you to order many items you'd like to order. We'll begin with the basics, then move into specific vegetable and meat dishes in our February and March issues. Let's begin!

Expressions

Why Learn Mandarin Using English Phonics?

Simply because it's the fastest and easiest way! Allow me to explain:

Phonics is the branch of language study that deals with specific speech sounds, their production and combination, and their written symbols, or phonograms, (what we commonly refer to as letters). Linguists classify these sounds into a number of abstract categories called phonics, which are a family of closely related speech sounds regarded as a single sound and represented in phonetic transcription with specific, learned symbols (again, referring to letters). An example would be the family sounds of r in bring, red and round. Any differences between such sounds are due to the modifying influence of the adjacent sounds.

Phonemes are the building blocks of early reading. As children, we were all taught how to decode written language - breaking them into parts that make each sound. There's an entire study of this broad subject, and plenty of written by men and women far more knowledgeable on the subject than myself, the likes of Priscilla Griffith, Marilyn Jager Adams, Theodore Harris and many others.

My point is that the English alphabet is a sound/symbol system, not a pictographic one like Chinese. At an early age, we were all programmed to break words into syllables and then into individual speech sounds (phonemes). We have been taught a specific system that is very difficult to by-pass in later years. It's not impossible to re-wire our inner programming; it simply takes a lot of time and specific effort.

When China adopted the Pinyin alphabet as the Romanization of their traditionally pictographic alphabet, they were unintentionally requiring native English learners to associate their Pinyin phonemes with their own unique sounds… Can you see where the wires cross here?

What this means is that the native English reader/speaker must unlearn English phonetics in favor of relearning phonics based on Chinese Pinyin. In other words, native English speakers normally need to spend months unlearning one system (programmed into us since early childhood) to relearn another.

In addition, Pinyin is based on a system that English readers find extremely confusing because some of the phonemes are phonetically pronounced similar to those used in English, and others are not!

With SPEAK E-Z CHINESE In Phonetic English, you can simply by-pass the complex Pinyin system with user-friendly words, phrases and sentences in phonetic English. And in addition to simplifying the learning process, we hope we've made both the book and the downloadable lessons fun and practical. Let us know what you think!

In The News...

Bleak Spring Festival For China's Migrant Workers

By Tham Choy Lin

BEIJING, Jan 9 (Bernama) -- This time last year, Qi Xiaochuan and her husband were looking forward to going back to their village in eastern Anhui province for the Spring Festival.

This year, the husband will board the train alone to usher in the Lunar New Year with their only child, a teenage son.

"I have to keep working, I'm the only one earning now. After this week, my husband's job is finished here," Qi sighed.

"Our son wants both of us home for the celebration but I cannot. We have to repay relatives who lent us money to buy a house back home," she said.

For 13 years now, Qi has worked as an 'ayi' or domestic maid in Beijing, taking on hourly paid tasks, dusting, mopping, washing and ironing while her huband, also a migrant worker, worked from project to project in construction.

Two years ago, the couple decided to purchase a 250,000 yuan flat near their village, a decision they cannot put off any longer because of rising property prices, borrowing 100,000 yuan from relatives instead of taking a mortgage to save on paying interest.

From their tiny rented room north of Beijing, Qi noticed that the many migrant workers had already left the neighbourhood and more said they were going home.

In a call home, she was told by her mother that in recent weeks, many people had returned to their village and some were planning to take up farming again.

China's migrant workers, estimated at between 150 million and 200 million, are among the hardest hit by the global economic crisis.

Three decades of economic reforms have triggered an exodus of rural labour to production and construction jobs in cities but the financial and economic turmoil is slamming the brakes.

The world's factory workers have lost millions of jobs as slumping exports forced the shutters down on hundreds of thousands of mainly small-and medium-size plants and cut backs at bigger manufacturers.

Rising unemployment among migrant workers and university graduates, whose numbers also run into several millions, is posing a social risk for the government.

The official Xinhua News Agency warned of "social unrest" unless the problem is tackled urgently.

"Unemployment among university graduates and migrant workers, caused by the global economic downturn and the shrinking export industries, will put much stress on the Chinese society in 2009 even social risks," the Xinhua-published "Outlook Weekly" magazine quoted Han Kang, one of the country's leading economists, as saying.

Already, there have been incidents of unrest from migrant workers demanding unpaid wages and losing their jobs overnight.

State media reported that as of end November, some 670,000 small firms had closed and more than 10 million migrant workers were out of work.

Data compiled by the Agriculture Ministry from 10 provinces and municipalities show that about 7.8 million migrant workers had returned home earlier than in previous years for the Spring Festival.

There is competition for jobs like Qi's from an unlikely source.

In export-heavy southern Guangdong province where millions of factory jobs have evaporated, local media reported that more than 2,000 graduates, including master's holders, have applied to become domestic helpers in the past six months.

In Shenzhen, the poster city of China's economic reforms, a warehouse worker, who only gave his name as Wang, is unsure if he will still have a job in the coming months.

"It has not been as busy in the last few months. I am going home to Guizhou for the Spring Festival but I will come back. I hope I still have a job, my boss has not told me anything," said Wang who earns 1,500 yuan (RM750) a month.

Sherman Chan, economist at Moody's Economy.com, said labour market conditions were set to deteriorate.

"The employment component of the PMI (purchasing managers' index) fell for the fourth straight month in December, reflecting the recent layoffs as factories shut down or scale back production. New orders remained weak in the final months of 2008, foreshadowing even softer demand for workers in early 2009," Chan said.

China has announced a 4 trillion yuan (RM2 trillion) stimulus package as it seeks to keep its economy running on a "relatively fast" track with measures to pump up domestic spending and infrastructure construction.

"Spending is not for people like us...who knows how long before my husband can get another job. In the meantime, he will stay back in our village and 'chi xi bei feng'," Qi said, using a Chinese saying that literally means eating air or having no income.

"But we are not going back into farming. The work is too tiring," she said.

Sexy Beijing - "Hardhats in Beijing"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVABgEtL4HE&sdig=1