Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 15, 1991 TAG: 9102150485
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SU CLAUSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
"They're supposed to be good luck," said Victor Fu, president of the Hong Kong Students Club of Virginia Tech.
Fu and other New River Valley students and professionals from Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan will be observing the birth of the Year of the Sheep with potluck feasts, music, games and even videos this year.
Most groups will defer to busy academic schedules, celebrating the New Year a few days later on the weekend. No sizzling fireworks will drive away evil spirits. No sesame branches will be burned to thank the kind deities. But children will receive the traditional red envelopes of lucky money. And friends will come together with hopes for the new year.
In this new Year of the Sheep, Ping Wang, president of Virginia Tech's Students and Scholars of China Association, hopes to see his country become a more benign place for human rights and democracy.
He and Fu are among about 120 Chinese students at Tech.
Though Wang was in the United States during the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989, he sided with the protesting students in China. He traveled to Washington to urge Congress to condemn the Chinese government's massacre of the demonstrators.
"We still have hope that one day China will be a safe, just place to live," he said. "It is good to have hope in the New Year."
Wang, a geology graduate student from northern mainland China, will celebrate the new year on Sunday, after an intense week of classes and a day of preparation. The Year of the Sheep is supposed to be characterized by mildness, leniency and the absence of wrath - a very good year, he says.
Wang can remember when New Year's was a 15-day celebration and relatives would gather for days of feasting, merrymaking and fireworks.
In an earlier celebration of a Year of the Sheep, children would dress in white and adorn their heads with sheep ears. His grandmother would set out pictures of angels, burning them after the holidays. The smoke would take them back up to heaven where they would report the worthiness of Wang's family to the heavenly king, she told him.
Some Chinese children were told not to sweep the floor or wash their hair on the first day of the new year because that would sweep their fortunes away.
"I don't practice that," said Fu of the Hong Kong group. "My mother said not to listen to those stories."
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which officially ended in 1969, the Chinese Communist Party discouraged such New Year's celebrations as being old superstitious.
The "Anti Four-Olds" Campaign of the Cultural Revolution attempted to eradicate old ideas, old superstitions, old customs and old lifestyles. Nevertheless, the three-day New Year's holiday is sometimes the only vacation workers in modern China receive.
Radford University art graduate student Xiao-gang Zhu, 36, one of three Chinese students at Radford, will be celebrating quietly with Chinese friends in Dublin. He said graduating from college during the Cultural Revolution has branded him with a stigma he has come here to undo.
"During those years, the government didn't think much of a university education. I taught at one of the best universities in China, but because I received my degree during those years many scholars assume I didn't learn much," he said. "That's not true. I was a serious student. But I have to get a degree in the United States to prove I am qualified."
Zhu enjoys the relative wealth of living in the United States, with a car and an apartment, but plans to return to Shanghai where he can resume the profession he loves.
"Yes, I can understand why the students were protesting at Tiananmen Square, but I would have discouraged them to have pushed so hard," he said. "That's because I am older. When I was young, I might have felt the same way."
The Hong Kong students' potluck dinner Saturday will be followed a few days later by a discussion about the future of Hong Kong, which will revert from British to Chinese rule in six years.
"Many of us will try to immigrate to Canada, the U.S. or Australia, while maintaining our Hong Kong citizenship," Fu said. "We would like to return to our homeland, but after Tiananmen Square, we know that it will be tough to live under Communist control."
After members of the Hong Kong group finish a New Year's dessert of sweet sesame dumplings, they will pull out a game of Scrabble - in English - to continue preparing themselves for their new lives.
Chinese New Year's celebrations open to the public include special dinners through Saturday at the Hawaii Kai, China Inn and Charlie's Chinese restaurants and an open party Saturday at the Blacksburg Recreational Center hosted by the Virginia Tech Taiwanese Student's Association. Call 552-5966 for information.
by CNB