Bài đọc Vietnamese Lunar New Year

VIETNAMESE LUNAR NEW YEAR
Background
What is Tết?
“Tết” is a word of Chinese origin and a phonetic transcription of “Tiết” a Sino-Vietnamese term which means “the joint of a bamboo stem” and, in a wider sense, the “beginning of a meteorological period of year”.

The passage from one period to the next may cause climatic disturbances (heat, rain, mist) that must be exorcised by ritual sacrifices and festivities. Thus, there are many Tết throughout the year (Mid-Autumn Tết, Cold Food Tết, etc.). The most important of all is “Tết Cả” (“Big Tết” or simply “Tết”), which marks the Lunar New Year.

Tết occurs somewhere in the last 10 days of January or the first twenty days of February, nearly halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox. Although the Lunar New Year is observed throughout East Asia, each country celebrates Tết in its own way in conformity with its own national psyche and cultural conditions.
For the Vietnamese people, Tết is like a combination of Christmas, western New Year’s Day, Easter, American Thanksgiving, and everyone’s birthday. It is a festival of communion, purity, renewal, and universal peace.

Why is Tết a festival of communion?
For a peasant people attached to the earth since the distant past, Tết has been and remains first of all a festival of communion with nature. In the rhythm of seasons, it marks an interlude for farmers and rice fields to rest after twelve months of labour. Tết is not to be missed. For example, the eighteenth-century king Quang Trung, the leader of the biggest peasant revolution in Vietnamese history, celebrated Tết some days in advance so he could launch a decisive attack upon the invading Qing army stationed in Thăng Long (present-day Hanoi).

Tết is a festival of communion for the members of the same family and village. In former times, villagers hardly went outside their bamboo fences; those who could not return to their families for the first three days of the year felt deeply homesick, more than at any other time of the year.

All members of the family – grandparents, father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts – gather together to “eat Tết” under the same roof. Friends and relatives visit one another and exchange greetings and good wishes.

Tết is also a festival of communion of all citizens of Vietnam at home or abroad. The Revolution of August 1945 put an end to eighty years of French domination; Tết of 1946 was dubbed “Tết of Independence”. During his time as president, Ho Chi Minh wrote his Tết greetings each year in a poem, which he himself read for broadcast at midnight on the eve of Tết. These poems reflected the current problems and prospects of the nation.

Tết is also a festival of communion of the living with the dead. The ephemeral world of the living celebrates under the benevolent gaze of the ancestors, who are invited back from the Other World during the course of a ceremony to mark the transition from the old year to the new.

Relatives and friends coming to deliver season’s greetings also pay homage to the spirits of the dead, Vietnamese attend the tombs of their kin with pious care before the old year expires: they clear all weeds and replace the plantings on the tomb.
Those who died for national independence are not forgotten; in each village, their last resting place is a site of collective pilgrimage.

Why is Tết an occasion for purification and renewal?
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring again. Nature always renews its youth, returning to its primary purity and freshness. People, who are part of nature, follow the same course.
Tết, the first day of Spring, carries with it the connotations of rebirth that Easter has in the West. During this period of universal renewal and rejuvenation, Vietnamese feel the spring sap welling up within them; this has an effect similar to purifying Fountain of Youth. This partaking of cosmic life has given rise to special customs.

Every deed during the 3 days of Tết should be well-intentioned and finely realised, for it symbolises and forecasts actions during the coming twelve months. One abstains from getting cross and from using bad language. The most shrewish mother-in-law smokes the pipe of peace with her daughter-in-law. Quarrelling husbands and wives bury their hatchets. Children promise to be good; grown-ups hand the children gifts, which are often copper coins wrapped in scarlet paper since red is the colour of luck. The children are happy to get new clothes. Beggars are given alms.
The “new” world must be the best of all worlds. Once the holy resting time is over, activities resume with the “new” frame of mind after the “inaugurating ceremonies”: the “inauguration of the seals” for civil servants, the 2inauguration of the pen-brush” for scholar and students, and “inauguration of the shop” for traders.
For the Vietnamese, Tết brings