Year of the Goat - 羊年

 恭喜发财
Gong Xi Fai Cai

It's the Year of the Goat! Well... to be more (or maybe less) precise, it's the Year of the 羊 (yáng). It's caused some confusion this year, because in Chinese, "羊" actually refers to anything sheep-like including goats and rams. To add to the confusion, in Vietnam, this is definitively the Year of the Goat, whereas in Japanese it translates to "sheep" and in Korean as "ram". To avoid confusion, let's call it the Year of the Goat. Anyway, the Year of the Horse is over.

display at Siam Paragon

The Year of the Goat is actually my year! I was born in 1991, two cycles ago. I was kind of excited at first that it's going to be "my year", but I've been told that in Chinese culture, it's actually not good luck to be in one's Chinese year... But I'm also told that Goat Year is an inherently lucky one, so that's good. Not that I particularly believe in any of that, but it's fun.

making merit / posing for a Thai-style photo-op

Maybe I've mentioned before that Thailand loves a reason to celebrate. In fact, they recognize three new years here: Gregorian New Year, Chinese New Year, and Songkran (Thai New Year). In any case, Bangkok has good reason to celebrate Chinese New Year, Bangkok has a pretty substantial Chinese-Thai demographic. For whatever reason, culturally, my school is actually pretty Chinese. At least 90% of the female teachers wore Chinese-style dresses this week, and many of the men have been wearing red ties.

The morning assembly featured a short play put on by the students about a scene from "Journey to the West", one of China's most famous works of classical literature. After the assembly, we were encouraged by the Chinese teachers to go out of the assembly hall to where two small shrines had been constructed to make merit for the new year. The first shrine was an ancestral shrine, and the second was to the Chinese Taoist gods of heaven and earth.

This ended up being a major photo-op, as most things in Thailand are. To be honest, I've gotten used to that and have come to like this aspect of the culture. The Chinese department likes to take pictures of the farang teachers participating in Chinese culture, and as a matter of fact, I even appear in this year's Chinese Department calendar (in the month of March).

New Year Gifts: an orange and a chocolate coin for luck

Happy New Year for the second time from Bangkok, Thailand! I wish you all a very happy 羊年