‘Sheng Dan Kuai Le’

Our title phrase is used for “Merry Christmas” in China so I ran down its literal paraphrase knowing that the words used often reveals how a phrase transforms its intended translation. “How are you?” is translated to ni hao ma in Chinese. It literally means ni = you, and hao = good, with the ma as an interrogative marker, a question mark (?) in English.

So, ni hao ma is a query understood more like “You good, Man?” in Jamaica, or in Uptown Chicago. In our case though, “good” is meant to be a substantive noun, a concrete term like a “lake”, rather than a feeling of wellbeing, so to be asked if one was in “good”, it means, is one “in the morally enjoyable Jell-O?”

“Happy” as in peace and contentment sounds common in the Zhongwen formula of platitudes but “merry” is more of old English knights alluring their ladies of the court to the dark corners, so how do the Chinese handle “Merry Christmas”? Sheng Dan Kuai Le is the common Christmas greeting.

I do not read Hanzi well enough to read the phrase, nor would I understand it if I saw it, so I went with the verbal one. Kuai le = happy, beyond merry-making, as I thought. Dan = be born, and Sheng = noble, sacred, noted, with the first and third meanings traceable to the old English and French nobilis that goes back to Latin’s gnobilis which eventually relates to the Greek gnosis for wisdom, make “noble birth” an appropriate meaning.

Thus, Sheng Dan Kuai Le is “Happy noble birth”, not exclusive of Jesus birthday but in fact, it is also a wish at being contented for having sufficient food and receiving a special gift on a specific day. In a more profound sense, it is an affirmation of the nobility of birth itself.

Christmas Day in China confirms the awesome reality of existence, not a belief statement in the redeeming historical sacrifice of a crucified Jew on behalf of the sins of the world in the foothills of Golgotha, as related by Christians in the year-round telling of the birth as incarnation of the infinite into the temporal to the resurrection from the empty tomb, but a grounded assertion into reality rather than the illusory.

The common Chinese phrase used to greet folks on their birthday is sheng ri kuai le. Ri = this day, is specific to a 24-hour period, so one receives the wish as saying, “enjoy the sanctity of this day!” One’s birth is noble, sacred, and notable by the anglicized medieval definitions of the Christ birth, and theologians of our time take each occasion anytime reality intrudes on illusion as word-becomes-flesh (humanly concrete), rendering it as a Christ-event.

A recent article on the Jesus of history once again revived the pessimistic result that accompanied that quest when in our fascination for verifiable knowledge, we launched into the academic quest for the historical Jesus. The enterprise is well intentioned and the result a great corrective to the illusory historicism that accompanies the Gospel stories written more than a generation after the fact, canonized as holy writ two centuries later, but it also points to the worthlessness of reducing the story into historical certitude. It can’t nor does it need to be in order to establish the veracity and humanity of its claims.

However, the search for the historical Jesus is not our Christmastide concern as it is the Christmas greeting in China whose absence of familiarity with the story, in spite of the favored Jesuits of Loyola banished from the court for interfering in the affairs of State; and missionaries in their foreign quarters who followed the Qing’s unequal treaties; they shared their message along the West’s imperialism providing the arrogant raison d’etre for the ecclesiastical structure and practice that messengers came with to accompany their message deliveries.

Because the practical Chinese treat Christmas week as ping an ye (to be safe and sound), close to ping guo (apple), the cellophane wrapped apple is widely and visibly abundant.

Nevertheless, someone coined the phrase in our title that nobody understands in the quest for the historical Jesus, nor the Vatican’s performances of the rites and rituals that once carried the Christ-word of redemption to the dread-filled Euro-Anglo-American soul, but the bosses at the Chamber of Commerce take the Xmas’ renminbi value and injects it into commercial history, making some of Deng Xiao Ping’s economic postulants richer than others.

The hawkers at our famed corners of Shenbei prefer “Jingle Bells” and “White Christmas” in their repertoire of Yuletide music, and the imagery of Christmas as a winter holiday fits well into the Snow and Ice Festival of Dong Bei, particularly the one in Harbin north of us where structures are often chiseled to size.

But I will take the Christmas greetings for a good ride this season in its clear and unmistakable affirmation of the nobility of birth universally applied; it leads to the wellness unto life that is the hallmark of writing of this opinion column. Here, have an apple!