Letters from China No 20

13^th January 2009

Well, we’ve had bad taxi drivers and even badder, but the one today sure took the biscuit for nail-biting rear-ending, horn-blasting, lane-switching (I won’t call it lane-changing) and what I believed to be the after-glow of a very garlicky lunch was more than likely the whiff of some of China’s finest moonshine (they call it white wine here, but in reality it’s 99% white spirit or could be described as a sort of home-made rocket fuel). Anyway, it was with great relief that we convinced him to drop us at the campus gates rather than braving his driving around the campus narrow roads – thankfully all the students have gone home for the holiday.

It’s still cold and frosty at night, amazing as we’re almost on the Tropic of Cancer. In fact a lake in Hong Kong iced over two nights ago – now that’s something! As we approach the Chinese New Year I thought it might be interesting to describe how the years were given the names of animals. After trying to decipher the childhood stories of my students, I finally came up with this. Just before the Lord Buddha was about to leave this world, he asked all the animals to visit him before he died. Well, not all the animals came and the story goes that the Rat asked the Ox to let him ride on the Ox’s head and just before they arrived he jumped down and was the first to arrive. The Lord Buddha decided to name a year in honour of each of the animals in the order they arrived at his home, so now we have the Year of the Rat followed by the Ox and subsequently all the other animals. There is no Year of the Cat, apparently the Cat and the Rat had an arrangement that the one who woke first would waken the other and they would travel together to the Lord Buddha’s home, but the Rat woke first and didn’t waken the Cat, so the Cat overslept and didn’t arrive in time. That’s why cats hate rats, according to Chinese mythology.