...

Last week I had the joy of celebrating my first Lunar New Year, packed full of Chinese activities. In this post, I give a brief overview of the fun-packed day we had!

Calligraphy Class

First of all, we had a class in Chinese calligraphy, with a traditional brush. With magical calligraphy sheets, we were able to write on them with just water, so then the characters would fade and disappear after a few minutes. (Unfortunately this means I have no photos of our work!) Our teacher Ka-yee taught us all about the history and development of Chinese characters, from Oracle Bone script to today. It's fascinating to see how the shape of the strokes change depending on the medium used to write them.

We learned how each of the characters is made up of other pictographic elements. For example, the word for peace (平安) is made up of two characters. The first (平) represents balance, and the second (安) represents a woman under a roof, meaning settled. So with balance and settledness together, these characters make the word for safety, security, and peace.

Lion Dance

In the meditation hall we met a beautiful lion! With some drumming to wake her up, she came to life and started dancing all over the hall and coming to meet us. It's amazing how emotive the lion is as it moves around, blinking and wiggling its ears! I even got to have a go as the bottom half of the lion—which is harder than it looks!

Lunch

At lunchtime we had a veritable feast courtesy of special guest chef Herman, all served with his famous chilli sauce. There was rice; corn soup with tofu; stewed vegetables with bean curd sheets (really delicious!); and chow mein.

The Oracle

N.B. I am not an expert on the I Ching! This is just a quick description of my experience.

With cups of tea in hand, and palo santo in the air, we gathered in a small circle to have readings from the I Ching (or Yijing). The I Ching, known as the Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text from 1000-750BC.

To have a reading, you hold a question in your mind, and throw three identical coins into a box six times. The combination of heads and tails on each throw is used to generate a hexagram. The hexagrams then correspond to readings in the I Ching, which describe the current situation, some advice, and the situation you're moving toward.

Personally, I've never subscribed to, nor had much faith in, any sort of divination system (although I appreciate the artwork on tarot cards). However, while we had our readings, I noticed how the I Ching produces extremely specific answers to each question—so specific that they simply wouldn't make sense if replying to a different question. As for my own reading, I must admit that the response was scarily poignant to my current situation, and I try to hold its advice close to mind.

Spring Roll Masterclass

After so consulting the I Ching, it was time for Chef Herman to teach us the art of spring rolls! (Did you know they're called spring rolls because they're eaten in spring?) The method is very simple, you take a sheet of rice paper and lay it out in a diamond. Then add just the right amount of filling—ours was a mix of glass moodle noodles, vegetables, and shiitake mushrooms. Then you simply roll them (with a specific knack that's difficult to express through text) and seal them with a dab of water. Finally, they're all deep fried until crispy, and served with sweet chilli sauce.

Mahjong

I always thought Mahjong was a simple game of matching tiles with the same symbol—probably from playing some DS game. The game we played was actually very similar to poker—collecting tiles (as opposed to cards) and trying to make specific combinations. There's an enormous amount of mathematics that goes into this, calculating which tiles are most likely to lead you to a win. There's also some rules around taking discarded tiles from others, and it can get quite intense! I'm certainly nowhere near an expert from our short couple of games, but I can certainly understand how some people can get very passionate about mahjong. (I'm also aware that there are other versions of the game, but I'm not sure of the differences.)

Dinner

Usually at Being Peace, dinner is a lighter meal mostly made of leftovers Not so on Lunar New Year! Herman provided ginger rice; sweet and sour popped tofu; stewed veg with shiitake and enoki mushrooms; soft tofu with seaweed; and our spring rolls from earlier. What a feast it was! To be honest, I was still full up from lunch time—but that didn't stop me from having seconds at dinner. It was just so beyond delicious, that afterwards I felt so stuffed it was reminiscent of Christmas dinner!

---

Thank you for reading and Happy New Year! I hope that the Year of the Horse will be an auspicious one for us all. I've read that for my zodiac, it should be a blossoming year, 'when things are finally coming together,'.