The Tiger Chronicle: CNY

Showing posts with label CNY. Show all posts

Wednesday, 17 February 2016

A Very Special Monkey

http://thetigerchronicle.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/CNY

For those who are not familiar with the Chinese zodiac signs, I wrote about it in this post. This year being the Year of the Monkey, I decided to introduce Tiger to one of the Chinese classics, Journey to the West ( 《西游记》）

As with many Chinese children, Tiger's first introduction to this Chinese classic is through animation:

After seeing him become enamoured with the cartoon above, I told Tiger that the cartoon shows only a very selection of the monkey's journey, and that it is part of a very long Chinese novel. He immedidately asked me get him the story. I got him the abridged, single-book version of the classic to see how he got on with the story. At 528 pages, the abridged version gives a good overview of the actual novel but when I asked Tiger whether he read about the characters' encounters with certain demons, Tiger realised that there are many juicy and interesting adventures that are being left out, so he asked me to get him the unabridged, four-volume version:

Volume 1 - 576 pages
Volume 2 - 424 pages
Volume 3 - 464 pages
Volume 4 - 440 pages

Seeing Tiger read this Chinese classic novel in English translation (I read the original Chinese version) brings back memory of my own experience of reading Pride and Prejudice in Chinese translation at about 12 years old. Obviously it is always preferable to read a story in its original language as certain linguist nuances and subtleties are often lost in in the translation process, but where one's language skills are not up to the required standard to allow one to read the original text, then finding a good translated version is the next best thing to do.

When Tiger has read the four books through twice (it took him about a week), I showed him a TV series based on the book. While this classic has been adapted into movies and other performances many times over the years (the latest one being a new movie based on one of the major adventures from the book):

the 1986 TV version is the one that I think stays closest to the original novel, and the actor who played the monkey is acknowledged as unsurpassed in his interpretation of the character:

Journey to the West is the most popular, accessible of the four major Chinese classics. Even those who have not read the book would know about a number of the fantastical adventures of the main characters in the story. However, although the story is written in the form of a historical fantasy/myth, the story has a much deeper, spiritual meaning to it, in a very similar way that The Lord of the Rings is so much more than a fantasy story.

The following video is rather appropriate as a new year wish from me to you: may your year be full of wonderful adventures! I know mine will be!

(I know those are apes in the video but they belong to the same primate family as monkeys. Besides, they make me laugh, so that'll do for Chinese New Year. I'm sure Sun Wukong would approve!)

*Disclosure: some links are affiliate links, which means I earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

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Tuesday, 16 February 2016

Year of the Monkey

The Year of the Monkey started last Monday. The celebration usually lasts 15 days so we have two weeks to mark this significant Chinese festival.

As with last year, Tiger and I found an Chinese New Year-related activity to do in London. This time, the National Gallery had a short workshop on decorating the Peking Opera mask, so we went along and did that.

Although the workshop emphasised creativity, which Tiger exercised plenty of, his mask doesn't look particularly Chinese in colour or design, so I asked him to read the Origins of Chinese Art and Craft as well as Lianpu in order to look into the significance of the design and colours of the various traditional Peking opera masks to understand that they are not chosen randomly. We also found the following clip useful to give us a better understanding of this art form:

From the National Gallery, we walked to Chinatown to buy a few special items in preparation for the Chinese New Year as well as to eat a hearty meal. It is interesting to see that we have chosen exactly the same food as last year.

Once we got home, we started decorating the house by putting up various decorative items around the house, much like what people would do to decorate their homes for Christmas.

Many of the Chinese decorations have symbolic meanings that usually mean well-wishes and the ushering in of good fortune and prosperity for the family. Unlike a child who grows up in the East who will understand the symbolism behind the various Chinese decorations through sheer exposure to the culture in his environment, Tiger does not have such luxury so he has to find out about the symbolic meaning of the various decorations through reading books.

This year's New Year's Eve dinner was quite special in that I bought the 'Yu Sheng' (鱼生) from Chinatown.

This dish is like a raw salmon salad that is only eaten during the Chinese New Year period, and is a tradition of Chinese living in Southeast Asia. It is a dish to be eaten with family and friends as a way to welcome prosperity for everyone in the new year:

*Disclosure: some links are affiliate links, which means I earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

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Saturday, 7 March 2015

Our Chinese New Year Week

The Chinese New Year ended on Thursday with the Lantern Festival (元宵节). Compared to last year, my effort at this year's Chinese New Year celebration is somewhat lacklustre. However, I console myself that we have at least managed to focus on having Chinese dishes this past week.

The recipes have been adjusted for our dietary requirements:

We also pulled out our copy of The Warlord's Puzzle to have a play with tangrams, a 7-piece puzzle from ancient China that Tiger had a go with nearly five years ago.

The appeal of the tangrams is its deceptive simplicity. There are only three shapes and seven pieces. However, as we have found, to solve the puzzles are not an easy task. Tiger has been working through a tangrams puzzle book last week just for the fun of it. At first, he was quite frustrated with hiimself for not being able to solve the puzzles immediately but after a few rounds, he started to be able to visualise how the different pieces can be combined together in numerous ways. From then on, he was able to solve a few puzzles on his own.

I used the study guide that accompanies the book for activity ideas and the one that caught Tiger's interest most was that of writing a cinquain, which is a 5-line patterned poetry form that bears some resemblance to the nature poems written by ancient Chinese poets.

It appears that the patterned format of cinquains has a strong appeal to Tiger, so not only did he enthusiastically write three of them, he even went as far as editing and rewriting each one a few times before he was happy with the final result. In the process of editing his various drafts, Tiger happily highlighted to me that he was employing the write-in-the-margin lesson that he has learnt from Tolkien not so long ago.

We had time to have another poetry tea with a Chinese snack (sesame cookies) in the week, so I taught Tiger to recite another Tang poem about spring: "Early Spring" (早春) by Han Yu (韩俞)

This poem describes the beautiful scene of a street in Chang'an (长安), the capital city during the Tang dynasty, in the early spring drizzle. After having the meaning of the poem explained to him, Tiger was attracted to its sound and rhythm so he learnt the poem easily and quickily, and he even sang the poem alongside the clip above! Poetry, regardless of the language it is written in, portrays a sense of linguistic beauty and mastery to its reader/listener. I am very glad to see Tiger showing much joy and pride in reciting and translating classical Chinese poetry very well. After all, having an intimate relationship with classical Chinese poetry is part of identifying with the soul of the Chinese culture.

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Tuesday, 3 March 2015

Time for Another Chinese Tea

Since it is the Chinese New Year, we have a good excuse to do another Chinese-themed tea. As with the previous Chinese tea we had during the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节), our Chinese New Year tea was filled with traditional Chinese snacks:

Peanut butter mochi (花生米糬)
Sesame mochi (芝麻米糬)
Peanut dainties (花生酥)
Mung bean patties (绿豆酥)
Fuzhou cyrstal puffs (福洲水晶饼)
Pandan rice cake (香兰叶糕)

Alongside enjoying the snacks and drinking rose tea, Tiger learned a new poem -- <<春晓>> (Spring Dawn) by another Tang dynasty poet, Meng Haoran (孟浩然).

This poem depicts the poet's contemplation upon a dawn in springtime. Given that the Chinese New Year is also called the Spring Festival (春节) as it marks the beginning of spring in the Chinese calendar, learning this particular poem seems very appropriate.

Besides memorising and reciting the poem, Tiger also learnt how the poem can be depicted as a painting and a song,

as well as a piece of music that is popular during the Chinese New Year.

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Friday, 27 February 2015

Year of the Goat

Last Thursday was Chinese New Year's day. With everything that went on during last week's half-term, I very nearly forgot all about it because there was no hint of it at all where I live. Luckily, I have written it down on the calendar. Even more luckily, I looked at the calendar on Wednesday morning and realised that it was Chinese New Year's eve, which means that I ought to prepare a dinner that is more sumptuous than usual to honour the tradition of the reunion dinner, even though it was just the three of us having dinner together that night.

A last-minute panic grocery shopping trip ensued, followed by three hours in the kitchen. The result turned out acceptable:

The dishes we had for this year's reunion dinner are (with a few adjustments made for our dietary requirements):

The next day, Tiger and I spent the day celebrating Chinese New Year in our own way. First, we went to the Museum of London Docklands where Tiger listened to a few Chinese myths told by a very engaging English woman.

I always find it slightly weird listening to traditional Chinese myths told by a non-Chinese. Often, despite the best intentions, subtleties and forms of expression are lost in translation and there is certainly no denying the fact that a mind brought up on the Western traditions thinks very different from one brought up on Eastern traditions. The experience would be as authentic as having a Chinese person tell the story of Beowulf. Nevertheless, I am still very grateful to be able to find such opportunities for Tiger to be exposed to one-half of his culture, and for me to feel a sense of connection back to my own culture.

We also watched two traditional dances performed by a Chinese dancer.

The first was a peacock dance, a minority ethnic (傣族) dance:

the second was a ribbon dance, which is a traditional dance of the majority Han (汉族) ethinic group:

Tiger also made a red packet while we were at the museum:

After that, we headed to the sensible place to be on Chinese New Year's Day: Chinatown!

As it was raining, we ducked into one of the restaurants and had a delicious meal of not-quite-traditional Chinese food. We had the nian gao (年糕) in a fusion, "newly improved" form, and our main meal was the Nasi Lemak, which is a popular Malay rice dish found in parts of Southeast Asia. Even though we did not have the full traditional Chinese meal, we were very happy to tuck into what was in front of us.

Finally, I am sorry to say that, due to my poor organisational skills this year, we did not manage to make even one Chinese New Year card to send to our Chinese relations. It is really bad manners, and would have been perceived equally badly as not sending Christmas cards to our English relations. Mercifully, our Chinese relations have been very forgiving and accepting of our appalling lack of social graces.

We have since made up for my lack of logistical coordination by drawing something related to this year's theme:

by following the instructions from the clip below:

As always, Tiger has his own idea of what he wants to include in his drawing. It is not quite what I have in mind as a substitute for the Chinese New Year card (with a fighter jet flying over the goat and a massive explosion positioned strategically behind the goat's bottom), but at least he has the goat in there.

Chinese New Year is traditionally celebrated for 15 days, so we still have about a week to enjoy the festivity.

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Friday, 27 June 2014

A Week of Duality

It has been a week of:

being at home and going out; and
learning about two very different cultures

At Home with Chinese
We spent most of this week at home focusing on Chinese.

As the school year is coming to a close, Tiger has to prepare for his end-of-year Chinese exam and to complete the end-of-term projects set by his Chinese teacher.

There are six projects to complete, which contribute to 20% of his yearly assessment:
1. to draw and label various parts of the body;
2. to construct sentences using specific words;
3. to translate a Chinese nursery rhyme into English;

The nursery rhyme that we chose to translate is a traditional one to Chinese children, in much the same way as Jack and Jill is to a Western child.

4. to make a greeting card based on a traditional Chinese festival and write appropriate greetings inside the card;
5. to research and write about a traditional Chinese festival;
6. to research and write two sets of questions and answers about some geographical aspects of China.

Tiger wanted to make a Chinese New Year card because, being a typical boy who seeks the shortest way to get a job done, he finds that the illustrations of this year's (Year of the Horse) card can be easily done by a few brush strokes so that was what he did, using a reference photo from a google search and following along using gold paint. The result turns out alright, as seen in the red card above. The illustration shows a combination of the year 2014 with the word 'horse' in traditional Chinese character.

We decided to look into another traditional Chinese festival for our research project. There are so many festivals to choose from, but we decided to learn more about one that has just passed (the Dragon Boat festival) quietly in our household because I couldn't get all the ingredients together to make the rice dumplings...

Note to myself: please stay on top of the festivals!

Why the dragon boats and rice dumplings? Many traditional Chinese festive customs have to do with actual historical accounts. It is no different on this occasion:

Outside with the Vikings
We just managed to catch the last bit of the Vikings exhibition at the British Museum before it closed.

Although we're not officially studying the Vikings at the moment, the flexibility of homeschooling has allowed us the opportunity to visit this rare exhibition -- the first Viking exhibition in England in 30 years -- and to see for ourselves the longest Viking warship that has ever been found!

Hence, even though Vikings are not on our current schedule, we feel it is certainly worth taking a little time out to refresh our memory about what we've learnt about the Vikings (we studied them two years ago) in addition to looking at real Viking artefacts that we hadn't seen before.

While we were at the exhibition, we were treated to additional interaction with the learning coordinators, both inside the exhibition and afterwards, who provided more directions and suggestions on looking at the exhibits to the children.

I wasn't sure whether Tiger remembers what he learnt from two years ago, but he apparently does, as shown by his enthusiastic and accurate responses to the quiz at the end of the visit.

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Wednesday, 19 February 2014

Two Weeks of Chinese Food

Although Chinese New Year is now officially over, I want to make a record of the Chinese food that we have been immersing ourselves in during those two weeks of celebrations.

During the two weeks, the following cookbook was constantly used as a reference.

It is one of the best cookbooks I've found, as testified by the enthusiastic response from my fussy-eater, Tiger, who ate every dish I cooked from the book. Once again, I modified the ingredients according to our dietary resetrictions. Sometimes modifying ingredients according to our diet does not work, so I am very glad that it has in this case.

Friday, 14 February 2014

Chinese New Year: Dumplings and Lanterns

After the zodiac workshop at the British Museum, Tiger and I went around Room 33 to have a more detailed look at the artefacts and decided to each draw an item that caught our eyes.

Tiger also learned to make a simple Chinese lantern there, which was really timely for the Yuanxiao Festival (元宵节), which is also called the Chinese New Year Lantern Festival and falls on the 15th day of the first lunar month. This year it falls on Friday, February 14th. It marks the last day of the Chinese New Year celebration.

Since we are celebrating the 15 days of Chinese New Year, we decided to find out more about this festival.

We learned about the origins of the festival from different clips:

and also about the significance of the lanterns to the Chinese, and to the festival in particular:

We also learned about the riddles that accompany the lanterns:

And how the festival is celebrated slightly differently in different parts of the Chinese region. For example, the celebration in Beijing would consist of visiting the temple markets, fireworks, and admiring the displays of lanterns:

Whereas in Taiwan, the same festival is marked by the release of Sky Lanterns to the night as a sign of prayers to the heavens:

Armed with all the information that we have learned, Tiger and I decided to make a few lanterns to hang at home to mark the occasion. We followed the instructions from the clip below to make the basic shape of the lantern

before making a few improvisions of our own:

we added strips of gold cards and gold holographic cards to the top and bottom rims of our lanterns to make them look more like the traditional ones that we have seen;
I stuck strips of yellow yarn to the bottom rim of the lanterns to make them look like tassels that usually line the traditional Chinese lanterns;
I printed out the riddles from Marie's post and cut them into strips using an craft scissors that has interesting patterns; and
I threaded and sewed the riddle strips to the lantern handles with red thread so that each riddle hangs in the middle of the lantern.

Tiger enjoyed looking at the riddles and trying to solve them. I told him that they are meant to be pondered over for the night, rather than being solved immediately. He has been slightly tormented by a few of the riddles since they were hung up.

The other significant aspect of the Yuanxiao Festival is the eating of dumplings, called yuanxiao (元宵) in Northern China, and tangyuan (汤圆) in the South. From what I understand, the Northern version is usually savoury with its filling being marinated minced meat, while the Southern version is sweet with fillings such as red bean paste, sesame paste or peanut paste.

Tiger made some tangyuan following the instructions found in video above.

While Tiger's tangyuans were cooking, I added the packet of commercial tangyuan that we bought from the oriental supermarket on Tuesday to let him make some comparison. The tangyuans were served in a bowl of hot, sweet soup made from boiling together 100g honey, 500ml water, and six slices of ginger.

I decided to also make the Northen yuanxiao for Tiger to compare them to the sweet tangyuan above.

Yuanxiao (Northern savory dumplings)

Ingredients:
DOUGH

50g sago, soaked for 6 hours in cold water
225g glutinous rice flour
cold water

FILLING

225g minced lamb
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon honey
1 tablespoon water
1 tablesppon organic ginger wine
1 spring onion, finely chopped

Method:

Drain the sago in a sieve for 30 minutes and mix with the glutinous rice flour. Ad the cold water slowly and knead until the dough is smooth.
Mix together all the ingredients for the filling. Set aside for 35 minutes.
Roll the dough into a long sausage shape, about 2.5cm in diameter, and cut into 1cm pieces. Flatten each piece of dough and place about half a teaspoon filling in the cnetre. Carefully draw the edges of dough over the filling, seal and shape into a small ball by rolling between the palms of your hands. The dumplings may be made in advance and refrigerated.
For four servings: bring about 1L water to a rolling boil, add 1 teaspoon sea salt and any leftover fillings to make a savoury soup. Drop in the dumplings, one by one, and stir very gently to prevent them from sticking together. Cook vigoursly until they all float to the surface, then reduce the heat and simmer for 5 more minutes. Scoop them into individual bowls and cover with some of the soup. Serve hot.

Our verdict:

We prefer the savory yuanxiao, which tasted like normal dumpling soup. Its dough is thin and has a nice slightly-chewy texture.
The tangyuan was dough was overly chewy and thick, which spoilt the taste for us. However, we liked the sweet ginger soup very much.
We think the harder texture of the tangyuan is caused by adding the normal rice flour to the glutinous rice flour. Next year, we shall improve our tangyuan by using only glutinous rice flour, as we have done when making the yuanxiao.

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Thursday, 13 February 2014

From Zodiac to Dragon Bones

This year is the Chinese Year of the Horse. What does that mean?

How did the idea of the 12 animals come about? Tiger attended a workshop at the British Museum that focused on the traditions of the Chinese New Year. The workshop took place in Room 33 where the children listened to stories about the Chinese zodiac and identified symbols of the zodiacs in the artefacts in the room.

Back at home, we learned more about the background and details of the artefacts we saw in the museum by exploring the Ancient China and the Early Imperial China websites.

Tiger also verified the story of the Chinese zodiac he heard at the museum by reading the following book:

and watching the following clip:

The Chinese zodiac is significant to the Chinese people in that not only is it a way of keeping track of the passing of each year, each animal is also believed to bear certain personality characteristics that are shared by those who are born under the same zodiac sign -- a similar concept to the Western astrology. Such characteristics featured strongly in the traditional Chinese society to determine one's compatibility with another in terms of business dealings and even marriage.

Tiger wants to remember the sequence of the 12 zodiac animals so I printed out the template found here so that he can refer to them as he recites a Chinese rhyme to help him remember the sequence.

The following clip is a very creative depiction of the story of the 12 zodiac animals using a combination of Chinese ink painting and the pictograph characters:

Since the clip above got us curious about the development of the Chinese characters from ancient pictographs to the present-day script, we found it useful to watch a few clips on the zodiac characters' developments, such as:

Following that, I made a sequencing and matching game for Tiger to match the 12 zodiac animals in pictures to their corresponding forms of Chinese characters in order of evolution from ancient pictographs to modern scripts, i.e.

clip art zodiac animals --> paper cutting zodiac animals --> Oracle Bone script (甲骨文) --> Small Scale script (小篆) --> traditional Chinese characters (繁体字) --> simplified Chinese characters (简体字) --> pinyin (拼音)

The Oracle Bone script is one of the earliest form of Chinese writing. Its discovery is absolutely fascinating, as shown in the following 3-part documentary:

Looking at Oracle Bones inscriptions (where the bones are sometimes called "dragon bones") also inspired Tiger to investigate the differences between the Western dragon and the Chinese dragon in terms of:

different social perspectives between the Western and Chinese dragons
different depictions between the Western and Chinese dragons
different dwellings between the Western and Chinese dragons
different physical features between the Western and Chinese dragons

Being born in the year of the monkey, Tiger felt it would be highly appropriate for him to watch an animated film about his favourite character, Sun Wukong, as a finale to his study of the Chinese zodiac.

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The Tiger Chronicle

Pages

Wednesday, 17 February 2016

A Very Special Monkey

Tuesday, 16 February 2016

Year of the Monkey

Saturday, 7 March 2015

Our Chinese New Year Week

Tuesday, 3 March 2015

Time for Another Chinese Tea

Friday, 27 February 2015

Year of the Goat

Friday, 27 June 2014

A Week of Duality

Wednesday, 19 February 2014

Two Weeks of Chinese Food

Friday, 14 February 2014

Chinese New Year: Dumplings and Lanterns

Thursday, 13 February 2014

From Zodiac to Dragon Bones

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