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Fireworks in Nanjing

With its sights and sounds, Chinese New Year celebration provides an exciting introduction

Sarah Lu '07

Nanjing, China

There's a point, in settling into new surroundings, where you realize you're actually where you are. And while I started adapting in little ways as soon as I arrived in Nanjing, for some reason I could really only concentrate on a few new things at once.

My first two days, I focused on remembering my 16 CIEE-Nanjing counterparts names, getting a handle on the toilets (sometimes dubbed 'squatty potties') here, finding food and learning how to drop it a little bit less.

So, I didn't realize I was in China?-and not just an environment with lots of new people, different toilets, and delicious but slippery food-for a while.

Today, when I felt that moment of awareness that I am actually in China, sparks flew. When I say sparks flew, I mean magnesium compounds exploded in the alley just outside the window where my CIEE-Nanjing counterparts and I had just begun our Chinese language placement test at 8:00 a.m.

Tang Laoshi, the CIEE-Nanjing resident director administering our test said, "We'll wait a little for them to stop. Today is a big holiday for the Chinese people, so there will be a lot of fireworks today and some people like to get started early."

We waited a couple minutes for them to crackle out, then Tang Laoshi started the tape player delivering the listening comprehension part of our exam again.

Today-my third day in Nanjing-I realized I am really here. Today is the last day of Chunjie-the two-week Spring Festival-that begins with the New Year. In China, New Year's isn't just a one-day thing-the festivities last for weeks.

I heard firecrackers pop sporadically all day. But around 8:30 p.m., as I returned to the Xi Yuan (Nanjing University's foreign students dormitory) with three friends, the fireworks really got going.

The four of us collectively half lunged/yelled as, without warning, people right behind us lit fireworks blasting at close range.

My normal reaction upon hearing a loud boom on a city street at night is fear. For a split second I looked around and felt the urge to duck and cover.

But something interfered with my initial reaction: remembering where I was and what was going on, my friends and I laughed and said, "Xin nian kuai le!" (Happy New Year).

I took a break from writing this to watch the fireworks with my roommate from our 16th floor window.

Shooting up from the street in front of the Xi Yuan, fireworks reach their apex of flight and explode right at our eye level.

Only a few feet in front of us, the fireworks boom, flare up into spheres of colored sparks and shimmer down.

The fireworks show to which my roommate and I have the best seats, comes to an end.

In an alley half a block away, people set off a few fireworks of a different variety-a red paper lantern keeps them aloft about twenty or thirty feet in the air for a while, as green sparks shoot out from the bottom.

Looking out upon Nanjing's cityscape from the 16th floor, fireworks go up in distant streets and alleys here and there, and I see light flicker on the facades of buildings for a few moments at a time.

Having never missed a Fourth of July fireworks show in all of my 21 years, I've seen a lot of pyrotechnics. But I've never watched the sparks fly from above before.

Having studied Chunjie within a holiday-themed chapter of Integrated Chinese in a 200-level Chinese class, I've known the fourteen strokes comprising the characters Chun and jie for about a year.

But I couldn't really write about it until today.

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