I ducked involuntarily as the first set of explosions went off and made my way in double time to the street corner, where I had spotted an arcade that could be used for shelter. Running quickly in a crouched, military maneuver while inhaling gunpowder fumes, I was totally oblivious to the laughter and head-shaking coming from other pedestrians. It was only when I peered out from my hide-away that I noticed the looks of pity, usually reserved for idiots and foreigners, being cast my way. One child couldn’t contain herself and laughed out loud, pointing at me while dragging her mother over to look at this oddity.
“Ok, ok, only fireworks for Chun Jie-- you please not to be afraid,” said the mother, frowning and motioning to me with hand movements straight out of a traffic policeman’s manual.
Fireworks, Lunar New Year-of course!
After 12 long years of relatively quiet Spring Festivals, Beijing was once again home to fireworks mania, as the celebrations for the Year of the Dog shattered the city’s collective eardrums. And that dog will, no doubt, be terrified at the noisy intrusion into its otherwise sedate life.
The Beijing Municipal Government rescinded the ban on fireworks this year, allowing over 2,000 stores to apply for permission to sell the little powder kegs and Xinhua News Agency reported that local authorities had arranged the sale of 600,000 boxes of firecrackers valued at more than 100 million yuan ($12.5 million) for its citizens. That is a lot of money going up in smoke to make a lot of noise.
Two weeks before Spring Festival the explosions began in the capital. From my apartment complex in Jianguomen, I was regularly kept awake until midnight by what sounded like someone tearing giant pieces of bubble wrap, followed by explosions so loud my immediate thought was, “My God--we’re being mortared!” The sound was flat, as explosions are when they occur among high-rise buildings squeezed together into one block. There is no way those were crackers, I thought. If I had been back home in South Africa, the police would have been called in, as those sounds usually come from rival gangs disagreeing on issues and settling things with automatic fire. Ok, ok, so there are no gangs to speak of in Beijing. The closest I’d ever got to celebrating with fireworks was as a kid on Guy Fawkes night, November 5 and that was usually just a couple of squibs.
The detonations in the capital increased in volume the closer it got to January 29 and haven’t tapered off as I write this. With the lifting of the ban, came the added allowance that people could feel free to blow up their explosive caches inside the city, in other words from the Fifth Ring Road inward. Along with this the Beijing Government allowed 13 more locations in the suburbs to be firecracker zones.
Back in 1994 when the ban was slapped on the public, the reasons given were because of safety, security and environmental issues. Being an avid follower of the news, I am wondering in what possible way the world we live in, and that includes Beijing, is safer, has less security issues to deal with and is more environmentally stable.
Fireworks can be fun, but they can also be loud and very, very dangerous. Just ask the hundreds of people in Beijing who ended up having eye wounds from lighting firecrackers (substandard or not) from 1982 to 2005. This is, according to Song Weixian, an ophthalmologist with the well-known Tongren Hospital in Beijing. Despite warnings on packets and adult supervision, people, usually children, get hurt.
The Xinhua report went on to say, to ensure safety each person was only entitled to buy up to 30 kgs of fireworks during the holiday period from January 22 to February 12. Anyone who’s ever gone shopping will know how heavy 30 kgs is. It’s like buying enough explosives to blow up a bridge. How on earth do you ensure someone’s safety by saying it’s ok to buy the equivalent of three sacks of potatoes in items that are going to explode when you light them?
And if that’s not enough, Tang Yunli, a police officer with the Beijing Public Security Bureau, was quoted as saying authorities will keep a close eye on the sale of firecrackers to ensure the city does not run out of them during the holiday season!
Bottom line is that this is a victory for traditionalists, who have lobbied hard to ensure that this time honored part of Chinese culture remains. Chinese Lunar New Year and fireworks go back thousands of years, they say. It’s our right to continue this practice, they say. We are already losing too many of our traditions to Western influence, they say.
Perhaps they have a point.
So adopting the logic that when in Rome do as the Romans do I went out and bought my 30 kgs worth. They’re still sitting in my lounge. I just couldn’t bring myself to light those fuses.