fai chun writing implements
Originally uploaded by tr[n]ty
[mouseover images for photo captions]
Hong Kong people are quite superstitious. Exam time is taken very seriously. There was a jing guo (勁過) [loosely translated as "superpass"] festival held in the last week of lectures. Even businesses cash in on it. I received free samples of Brand’s chicken essence (Eastern equivalent of Redbull) and Brand’s chicken essence and gingko biloba tablet supplements. I also got a superpass present: a hello kitty massager (for those sore backs one suffers when studying too hard with bad posture…)
The other day, alot of floors at St John’s decided to have their 勁過 dinners. It’s a special dinner held before the exams…
One of the traditions during the 勁過 dinner is to cut a whole roasted suckling pig. If you do not manage to cut your piece cleanly in half, that means that you will fail, so they say. Yes, the poor little pig was killed just for this…
I asked a mainland student from Beijing about the practice. Apparantly Northerners don’t do such odd things - it’s a southern Chinese practice.
I’m glad to say that my floor didn’t procure a pig just for this. We got watermelons instead. Maybe the feel of it is just not the same as having a pig…but at least my conscience felt better. We actually *ate* the watermelon after too. So at least the watermelon didn’t get hacked to bits for nothing…
After that, we went back to our floor and wrote fai chun (literally: waving at the spring). Good luck messages are written in calligraphy with ink brushes on pieces of red paper. And whatever message you write has to end in 過 (pass). There was quite a scholarly air - people were sitting around discussing witty phrases which fit the proper format (ending in guo and if possible, rhyming.) and writing in their best calligraphy.
My best calligraphy is quite ordinary “>_>
Actually I do better when I have a proper sample in front of me so that I can copy off off it…(just an excuse!)
More food and fai chun photos from that day: here. the slideshow link (which i recommend) is here.
Comments (2)
Wish I was there for the roast pig - yummy. Was the skin crusty enough?
What caligraphy message did you write?
papa
i didn’t have any of it. it was the roast pig from another floor. and after chopping it up they sent it to the kitchen straight away.
i just wrote messages that said ‘yaht ding yiu jing guo’…tt kind of thing.