With Chinese New Year right around the corner, students reflect on foreign New Year experiences

Fireworks, dinners and parties. That’s essentially New Year’s Eve for most Stanford students and for most of the globalized world.

Ushering in the New Year with a bang isn’t just an American tradition. In major cities around the world from Hong Kong to Dubai, the New Year consists of extensive displays of fireworks and classy partying. Many international students at the Farm celebrated the New Year overseas.

“In Hong Kong, you have a huge skyline that just lights on fire,” said Masato Kuok ‘13. “You have fireworks on the harbor and on buildings,” he said. “The most popular is the IFC building where the fireworks go from bottom to top in the countdown. I watched the countdown on the 31st and partied [on] the rooftop of a building next to IFC.”

Dubai, despite having experienced a tough year financially, welcomed the New Year in style.

“New Year in Dubai was amazing!” said Julie Saffarian ‘13. “Dubai is pretty intense. They try and make it really big. Everything is big there. The fireworks were really amazing.”

However, not everyone celebrates New Year’s Eve in the same way or even at the same time. Cultural differences, quirky traditions and national realities color the celebration and reinforce national identities around the world.

Puerto Rico offers a rich example of how traditional celebration can coexist with the western ritual of party and fireworks.

“We’ve been Americanized in many ways,” said Sara Rodriguez ‘13. “For example, with the whole, ‘Oh let’s all kiss and hug at midnight.’ There are also fireworks and parties.”

Whereas celebrations on Dec. 31 are homogenous with the rest of the global world, Puerto Rico has another unique holiday in the summer to mark the passage of time.

“We do crazier stuff for other occasions,” she added. “On San Juan Day, people throw themselves backward in a body of water seven times to have good luck for the rest of the year.”

Nishant Parekh ‘13, a native of Mumbai, declaimed some of the realities of life in India and the dangers of Mumbai during the New Year.

“It’s so easy to get away from the cops in India that there is much drunk driving,” Parekh said. “People pretty much pay the cops a few dollars and get away with it. When they ask for your license, you slip a bill under the license and you can go.”

Puerto Rico also has some New Year’s troublemakers.

“A negative thing about New Year’s in Puerto Rico is that some idiots shoot into the air and bullets come down crashing from the sky,” Rodriguez said.

“In the metropolitan areas, we tend to stay indoors because we don’t want bullets crashing on our heads,” she added in a joking manner. “It really isn’t that bad though.”

In Bangladesh, according to Rajendra Kumar ‘10, Dec. 31 has little relevance and is not widely celebrated.

“Most people in Bangladesh really don’t care about the 31st of December,” Kumar said. “New Year is a very western thing. Our New Year is on April 14. Bangladesh in that way is insulated from the global culture.”

Now, a little more than a month after we’ve kissed away 2009, a different New Year is upon us: Chinese New Year, meaning a whole series of cultural celebrations.

In Taiwan, as in China, the New Year is traditionally celebrated sometime between January and February, depending on the year.

“Since the Lunar Chinese New Year is in February, celebrating New Year on New Year’s Eve is more of a thing for young people,” said Vincent Chen ‘10, who spent Dec. 31 in Taipei. “Most of the Taiwanese still consider the Lunar New Year to be the official New Year.”

The Stanford community is not insulated from the local cultures of its students and faculty. This coming Sunday, several groups on campus are co-hosting the “Stanford Chinese New Year Party.”

No, it’s not your usual New Year party — there will be no fireworks, no drinks, no frenzied parties. It is, instead, a popular cultural event that year after year attracts over 700 people from Stanford and the Bay Area.

“It’s our chance to show the Stanford community what Chinese culture is about,” said Yuankai Ge, a graduate student in electrical engineering and co-president of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford (ACSSS), one of the student groups organizing the event. “This year, we have 12 different performances, including drama, dancing and wushu.”

Celebrations matter. They reflect a sense of identity and remind us that the struggle to compromise the global and the local is at our doorstep even here at Stanford.

“Last week I attended a meeting with all the student association leaders,” Ge added. “There are about 40 countries or regions represented and they were all planning their own holidays. It’s great, people can then explore other cultures and see [Stanford] as a global village. This is what we hope.”