the bastard strikes again.

[kaigou]

Yesterday when I was at the market, I realized I'd forgotten the single most important reason to NEVER LEAVE THE FREAKING HOUSE (at least for the month of December): the goddamn christmas songs everywhere.

Okay, some songs aren't entirely christmas songs, but they fit the mood, like in the aisles at the locally-owned (since 1897! it trumpets) hardware store and hearing Billie Holiday singing I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm. I could do without ever hearing The Little Drummer Boy ever again for the rest of my life (if only I could be so lucky) and no I don't care who covered it, I still hate that damn song. Most hymns I can let go in one ear and out the other, although I do find it somewhat disturbing, to this day, that Little Town of Bethlehem is in a minor key with some pretty depressing modulations in there; even as a child I had the impression that the song was saying the entire event was going to go south and fast, possibly with multiple deaths and some foreboding hints at a sequel.

So I'm gritting my teeth while I'm searching for the sweet potato chips CP likes, and doing a passable version of keeping my internal conversation loud enough to drown out the worst of the auditory pap -- until I get to the check-out counter. The girl is ringing me up, and I'm just standing there, card in hand waiting for my turn in the dance, when I realize the song playing overhead and wishing I had the ability to throw a curse back through time to whomever though such unadulterated tripe would make for a great holiday song, and then suddenly -- for what might even be the first time ever -- I don't listen to what the song means. I just listen to what it says.

I ask the clerk, do you hear that?

Clerk: what?
Me: the song. The song that's playing.
Clerk: Uhm. Yeah. *confused but pleasant* What about it?
Me: the words. What they're actually saying *points to ceiling-speakers*
Song: Where nothing ever grows / No rain nor rivers flow / Do they know it's Christmastime at all?
Clerk: Uhm.
Me: My god, that is the most freaking xenocentric, ego-freaking-tistical, culturally-biased goddamn line and I've been hearing this song for how many years now and I only just realized it? Who wrote this crap!?
Clerk: *stops ringing stuff up, totally distracted* I think it was a bunch of people.
Me: A bunch of freaking morons, you mean. Come on! *points to ceiling-speakers, listens to refrain* So basically the message is that everyone's miserable but if they just knew it's Christmas that they'd be happy, or something?
Clerk: It's supposed to be a christmas song.
Me: Yeah, but we're assuming the people they're singing about actually care whether or not it's christmas. If they're not christian, then the answer is probably, gee, not freaking much.
Clerk: *not even trying to keep track of ringing stuff up*
Me: Okay, honestly, Chunyun is way better.
Clerk: *stares* What? *mumbles* I don't know what that is...
Me: Chunyun! *manages to keep straight face* No way! Chunyun! What kind of heathen are you?
Clerk: Uhm.
Me: Four out of every five persons on this entire planet celebrate Chunyun! It's the biggest holiday! It's when you're with loved ones, celebrating, giving gifts, spending time together after not seeing them--
Clerk: *tries to smile* Uhm, it's Christmas?
Me: *cracks* Actually, it's New Year's. Chinese New Year's. But man, see, when January 18th or whatever rolls around, you could be happy but you'll be miserable because you don't even realize it's Chunyun! You'll be lucky to make it through the night alive, you'll be wretched and pathetic, but noooo, if only you knew it's Chunyun!
Hispanic guy behind me in line: February 14th.
Me: Hunh?
Clerk: Valentine's Day?
Guy: Chinese New Year's. It's February 14th.
Me: Whoops. Okay! Miserable on Valentine's day, how's that for irony.
Clerk: How do you know when New Year's is?
Guy: Because my wife is Chinese... *grin* And we always celebrate Chunyun.
Me: AHAH. I rest my case.

I still hate that song, but at least I feel better now that I have a rant practiced and ready for smoother repetition the next time I have to hear it while in line. Or maybe this year I'll finally wise up and have my iPod with me, with headphones, and just tune out the entire listening experience. Who knows what else might set me off...

Comments

[kaigou]

Technically Chunyun, if I'm remembering this correctly, is a two-week or three-week stretch of time. It's like a really long Boxing Day, and it starts just before the New Year and ends just after the entire two-week New Year's thing. It's basically when you're supposed to go home and see relatives, but it's really exploded in the past decade with China opening its borders for easier traveling into and around the country. The drawback is that the start of Chunyun nearly cripples the Chinese train, bus, and airline system because that many people at once is, well, wow. I think it's something like more people are travelling in Chunyun than the entire number of tickets purchased on the British railway system in an entire year. My mind can't even wrap around that one.

Haha, I'm a heathen, but I was a heretic first, and what's the good of being a heretic if you can't scare the natives?

[fromastudio]

*wikis* I wonder if Chunyun is a China thing rather than a Chinese thing per se - I'd never heard the term (although 'chun' + 'yun' is pretty intuitive, obviously!) or even the concept, and neither had either of my parents.

and to be fair (because I believe in giving the culturally monolingual some benefit) the equivalent of Chunyun is probably more like Advent. so the poor beleaguered clerk probably had some good reason to be bewildered. (I couldn't have told you what Advent was several years ago. and I'm Christian. not even heretical unless one takes the kind of high view of scripture that assumes everyone else is taking the low view. )

[kaigou]

I think it's actually pretty universal, though probably only known by that name if you're PRC -- I mean, "going home for the holidays" is something pretty much anyone does if/when they get a chance, right? Hundreds of thousands (or more) xtians travel home for xmas, as well. Plus when you're dealing with anything Chinese, there's always the issue of a single event being known by a variety of names because of the variety of dialects.

Even so, if I'd not been able to pull up an actual holiday in my head, I would've made one up, to demonstrate the arrogance of saying that an entire people are unhappy and miserable because they don't realize it's someone else's Big Holiday Event. The poor beleaguered clerk had all the earmarks of being standard issue from around here -- a romance-language first name on her tag, fair skin and pale hair, a teutonic cast to her face shape, and a cross hanging on a chain around her neck. In her defense, it'd probably never even occurred to her that the majority of the world is not xtian, seeing how much it's near-universal in the States -- but here's hoping that an interaction like this will make her think twice on that in the future.

The ultimate irony, of course, is in squalay's reply, which points out that the song is about the Ethiopian famine (I'd forgotten that detail) and that Ethiopia is one of the world's oldest xtian states, as in politically xtian, not just "has a plurality of xtians" but formally has had christianity as its official religion.

Really, the entire song is made of fail, to the point that I don't think I could come up with anything that comes anywhere near close. Even with a made-up holiday!

[fromastudio]

to be more accurate, we do celebrate fifteen days of the New Year with an emphasis on the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth (called Chap Go Meh/Fifteenth Night in my dialect). that period is more or less what is being described as Chunyun, I'm guessing, going from the Wikipedia article.

[kaigou]

And not everyone calls Christmas, 'christmas', as well -- there are large chunks of the world that call it Yule, instead -- a term I'd heard in hymns growing up but never knew was an actual alternate-name for the event.

[fromastudio]

to clarify, the equivalence here is referring to a temporal sense - the actual characters for Chunyun suggest that as originally coined the phrase refers to the practice of travelling and not the festivities themselves. How you have heard the phrase used is of course a different matter; I can only say that I'm not familiar with the phrase. 春节 chunjie is pretty standard, as is plain 新年 xinnian。

I would not expect my typical classmate in primary school to recognise, even now, the phrase 'Yule', or even connect it with Christmas. And by that same token I wouldn't expect most Australians to recognise what 春运 chunyun was, or even 春节.

That's like, you know, saying 'Yule' or 'Christmas' instead of '圣诞节'shengdanjie to someone who didn't speak English. And in either case I wouldn't expect the person to feel particularly enlightened or even curious about the experience.

[fromastudio]

incidentally, apologies if I've been giving conflicting definitions re: what I think Chunyun might be or involve -as I said, I hadn't encountered the phrase before and I was trying to narrow it down to possible usages and definitions.

[kaigou]

I think the term itself is a predominantly PRC one, and the impression I get is that the majority of my flist that's of Chinese heritage is either Taiwanese or Singaporean, with some formerly-of-Hong-Kong mixed in. I could be off-base on that, but for the most part, the majority of discussions I've ever had with folks concerning China and/or Chinese language stuff indicates that most of my flist is more likely to know traditional than simplified, and more likely to give me the Cantonese than the Mandarin, which says to me, "not-PRC".

Hell, I'm not even sure someone could be in PRC and even get to Dreamwidth, but I suppose that's a different issue.

[kaigou]

The hidden humor in here is that my brain actually went completely!blank! on what the word was for New Year's. (Gawds, my professor would've just shaken his head at me and made that clicking sound with his tongue.) I could vaguely remember it was something-nian and woosh, there went the rest. I suspect chunyun stood out b/c a) it'd been in recent research, and b) it amused me greatly to think of all those poor travel-service folks dreading the upcoming onslaught of two billion people trying to all take the train at the same time. Man, the nightmare!

And in either case I wouldn't expect the person to feel particularly enlightened or even curious about the experience.

The issue isn't whether or not some retail clerk is going to spend any amount of time curious about someone else's holidays -- the issue is, to me, that there's hopefully one less person in this country willing to take for granted that it's right and proper to treat our customs as universal and those who fail to follow those customs as somehow lacking or ignorant in some way.

That, simply put, the Western/US world is not the center of the universe in any cultural, religious, or political sense, and that parading around with that assumption only reveals oneself to be an arrogant xenocentric, even jingoistic, moron.

[fromastudio]

I do appreciate and applaud the sentiment; the method strikes me as shaky at best, but I've never lived in any sort of context that didn't inherently have a plurality of cultures happening and am probably not the best-qualified to judge how one goes about the process of worldview change. in any case it is satisfying to eviscerate not-very-well-written songs!

A lot of PRC Chinese do, in fact, speak Mandarin only as a secondary dialect (or language, or whatever one chooses to call the artificial thing that is Mandarin), which is something I find hilarious when attempting to converse in Mandarin with certain Chinese people from other backgrounds; I don't speak Mandarin very well, and often neither do they!

Singaporeans, incidentally, formally study simplified Chinese and spoken Mandarin AFAIK; the Taiwanese speak Mandarin but write in traditional; but a vaster majority probably speak either Min Chinese (Hokkien) or Cantonese as their traditional, regional dialects. That would be true of the PRC peoples as well; but of course the Mandarin schooling and media and indoctrination has been going on more intensively in China and it's achieved lingua franca status over there. The prevalence of Cantonese tends to be more due to the cultural dominance of Hong Kong film/TV/music, to the point that a fair few PRC people I know pick up Cantonese when they come over here to study. And of course a substantial number come from the Guangdong region itself; Cantonese is their dialect. But the world is going the way of Mandarin, more or less; which is a great relief since four tones is much easier to manage than six or nine or whatever number Cantonese has.

incidentally I did post a fair bit of fanfic on LJ in Shanghai when I was there on language exchange a few years back. so yes! I suspect DW would not be imposssible.