It was the Year of the Ox when I moved to Hong Kong to live and work as a research fellow. Although I had been fairly unsuccessful in my study of the Chinese written and oral language, this study has continued to give life to my curiosity and feeling of kinship with the history and culture of Chinese peoples. I continue to try to learn the language and think about how I feel related to billions of people who I don’t know and would not be able to successfully communicate with through words.
During the pandemic, I have grown increasingly interested in the Chinese New Year (中国新年) as a festival that organizes and orients. Particularly, I have been thinking about the ways 中国新年 configures and celebrates deep ancestral, social, and environmental ties connecting past, present, and imaginaries of the future—an expanse of shared ideas to think with beyond the throwing of a party, the flipping of a calendar, the lust for pigskin.
中国新年 spins helix and animates community, connection, story. Its cycles and phases align with a twelve-year sequence of Chinese zodiac animals. 12 February 2021 begins The Year of the Ox (牛年), represented over a repeating cycle of five years across a sixty-year span, aligns with the Five Phases (五行) or elements of 火 (Fire), 水 (Water), 木 (Wood), 金 (Metal), and 土 (Earth/Soil).
中国新年 is a repeating cyclical configuration of many cultural elements through which interpretation and meaning provide frameworks to make sense of lived experience which is further stabilized by exchange and social bonds between kin, community, nation, and globe in successive helical turns.
