Lanterns Ho!

It's the Lantern Festival, the last night of the two week Chinese New Year celebration, which means up here in Beijing there will be zero lanterns but several million fireworks, firecrackers, and drunks mistakenly shooting off their thumbs. I am up very early, getting ready to trek across town with two sets of gifts for the Mas, the elderly couple who have been my close friends and surrogate grandparents to Lulu for the past thirteen years. He's crippled and she's battling a serious and fatal disease. It makes me very sad to think that they're in decline, and that the most I can do is show up on an auspicious day with a gift in my hands. At the same time my dear old friend Jane is ill---TB---and while we can't work out the legalities of my taking her son into my home right now, it looks like I've acquired a six-year-old son for the summer. So I guess this holiday period really is my first and last vacation for quite some time...Lulu and her friend will be in town all summer as well (yay, free babysitting) and as I recall there is very little rest with a six-year-old around.

Back to Lantern Festival. It's a bigger deal in other areas and some cities will have parades, where people have beautiful and fanciful lanterns in fantastic shapes, make of bamboo and paper and lighted with real candles. Many Beijingers, not being into the aesthetics so much, will settle for buying a kid a cheap plastic mass-produced toy (usually one which has the "benefit" of an electronic squeaker or siren as well to make it "more fun") which breaks after five minutes. This may take the form of a fat baby in a red diaper atop a fish, or a string of firecrackers, or a drum. In my compound--filled with wannabe Yuppies--the few children who are here are being raised by grandparents who are torn between giving the grandchild--the family God--whatever they want, and not wasting money on foolishness. Most of them did not have lanterns in childhood--too non-PC, not able to afford it, etc---and they'll just stay at home tonight and watch TV (free) and scold their grandkids for not evidencing signs of genius yet. The parents? Just getting back to their corporate-sponsored luxury apartments in downtown Beijing, fresh from that trip to San Ya at the company expense. Did I mention that most kids here--at least half--are raised only by grandparents? And that these grandparents didn't raise their own kids, and are fairly clueless? It makes for an interesting sight.

I've always wanted to attend a Lantern Festival parade but when I'm in a part of China that really celebrates it, something always happens, such as a drop-in guest who thinks it's a waste of time and just wants to practice Oral English ("My ear is wicked!") or rather spectacularly, a wash of vomit from Lulu from the time she had appendicitis. I am content to see pictures for now. I will get to a real Lantern Festival celebration some day, I'm sure--hell, next year I should throw a party and make my own --- but tonight, it's me, the pile of homework I have to whittle down, and two little dogs refusing to come out from under the bed until the damn firecrackers stop. (Good luck with that one.)