Writing Chinese New Year Poetry

Chinese New Year follows the lunar calendar, and the date varies each year with the phase of the moon. This year it falls on Feb. 18.

In my childhood, Chinese New Year was the most special event of the year, and one of my happiest memories is about helping my father compose poetry and write New Year scrolls for families in our village in China.

During Chinese New Year, Chinese families follow a tradition of pasting New Year scrolls, called duilian or chunlian (spring couplets), around their front doors and other doors inside their homes. Duilian consist of two lines of poetry written in traditional calligraphy in black or gold ink on red or various colored paper.

The content of traditional duilian poetry expresses a person's spiritual aspirations, feelings and thoughts of hope, faith, and respect towards the divine. Others are prayers for good health and good luck for the coming year.

To create the poetry and calligraphy is not easy to do. The requirements for a duilian are two lines, containing the same number of characters, usually ranging between five to ten characters in length. The rhythm and the meaning of the two lines must match up.

Traditional Chinese characters have deep meaning, making duilian a form of ancient Chinese culture, and writing good duilian has always been considered a measure of a person's education and moral level.

Sometimes the duilian are written by the family members themselves, if they have the talent for it. Often people ask others to help them.

Below is an example of a duilian , loosely translated into English:

May the shining stars bless our generations.
May our great virtue always bring success.

When I was little, during the Cultural Revolution, my father, who was a professor, was labeled as an "intellectual," and as punishment we were sent to live in the countryside in the northeast of China.

We lived in a small village by the name of Taihe, meaning "very quiet and peaceful village." The place was indeed very isolated, surrounded by mountains and rivers, and a long distance from Changchun, the state capital of Jilin Province. Winters were very cold with temperatures dropping down to an average of minus 20 degrees Celsius.

The villagers did not have much education, so it was hard for everyone to get help creating their New Year duilian . After entering the twelfth month of the lunar calendar, people would flock to our house, bringing their red paper, to request my father to write their duilian for them. There were over a hundred families in the village, and every family's duilian had to be different.

From the time I was seven years old, I would assist my father in creating duilian . I remember gradually learning from him how to write a poem and practice my calligraphy. Sometimes my father would say the first line, and I would create the second.

Duilian are said to have originated about three thousand years ago. When working on our calligraphy together, my father would tell me the ancient myth that was recorded almost 2,000 years ago during the Eastern Han Dynasty.

The story goes that in the northeast of the Dushuo mountains there grew a huge peach tree. Within the branches of the peach tree was a mystical portal that was used by tens of thousands of ghosts. It was therefore called the "Ghost Door." These ghosts often came out from this door to kill innocent people.

There were also two brothers, named Shenshu and Yujin who possessed great powers. They guarded the door and saved many people. Whenever a ghost came through the door to harm someone, they would catch the ghost and feed it to the tigers.

The two brothers made the area safe and also planted many peach trees in the mountains. Consequently, they were much beloved by the people, and it is said that after they left this world, they became two Gods whose job was eliminating ghosts. And so they became known as "Door Gods" through the long Chinese history.

After Shenshu and Yujin left, people found that the peach trees they had planted also had the mysterious power to eliminate ghosts. So people used the peach wood to carve them into the shape of "Door Gods." After some time, people simply used the peach wood to make two plate strips on which they drew pictures of the "Door Gods," and put them around their doors to safeguard themselves. This was called Peach Couplet or Taofu.

These types of traditional stories are deeply rooted in ancient Chinese culture in which the people had belief in the divine nature of things and in the receiving of blessings for virtuous behavior. You could say that duilian's content is a reflection of the society's moral and spiritual standards.

In today's China, due to the influence of atheism from the Communist regime, people have become more materialistic and are no longer as spiritually oriented as they were in the past. Consequently, many duilian's contents are now more oriented to people's desire for money, fame, and power and not so much to express spiritual virtues as done in the past.

Every time I wrote a duilian, I felt as if it became a part of my being. It woke in me reverence for God or Buddha and values of goodness, as well as a love for poetry and ancient Chinese tradition.

I always enjoyed watching the villagers' faces light up when they came to pick up their scrolls. I think pasting the duilian around their doors put warmth into their hearts. It chased away the evil spirits, and also made winter seem less cold, as the New Year had finally arrived—and with it the beginning of spring and all good things.

Working with my father and being able to contribute to our community was a very wonderful experience for me as a child that has had a lasting effect on my life—and made me realize the great joy in giving to others.