Time twist, time turn, time off, time on

My wife who is a CHC nurse of Chinese descent worked until shortly before midnight Saturday night. That was New Year’s Eve on the lunar calendar. With the firing of the baozhu-baoshung (cracking bamboo, traditional name for firecrackers), bianpao (stringed firecrachers) and ertijiao (double bang) already in progress downtown Garapan when I went to take her home, we decided to park at the American Memorial Park lot to watch the aerial display. The accompanying popping and booming sounds elicited enough “wows, oohhs, and aahhs” to turn this sleepy head into a giddy juvenile pyrotechnic maniac, so we decided to move closer to the action.

Paseo de Marianas was a central launch pad for all sorts of colorful projectiles. The parking lot at the Fiesta Resort offered a convenient spot to wallow in the cacophony and view the spectacular flashing nitrates, save that an hour past midnight, some visibly inebriated revelers across Coral View Avenue started shooting their roman candles horizontally, hitting buildings and park cars. We saw a conscientious Japanese tourist stamping out burning paper on the road and sidewalks, presumably a reflex action of one who lives with the tinderbox combination of flammable wood and paper in traditional Japanese dwellings back in the Land of the Rising Sun. And sure enough, an animal pen at the “zoo” adjacent to GIG caught fire, and the screaming masseuses along Coconut Street managed to hail one of CNMI’s white and blue, and before long, the red siren-blaring truck came along to douse the incipient conflagration.

Kung Hei Fat Choi was, of course, the much-intoned greeting to usher in the newness in time. This greeting will ring throughout the next 15 days as the Sino-community observe this celebrative season of the year. Since commerce is patently the language of the Chinese community, the promised vitality of the newly inaugurated Chinese Community Center and its resident Chinese Association of Saipan being now led by no less than one of the energetic premier business moguls of Saipan’s Tan Holdings, its president, Jerry Tan, can only add impetus to the urgent need to revitalize the island’s economy. Kung Hei Fat Choi, indeed!

Not to be outdone is the no-sleep on New Year’s Eve Sehe Bok Manibadseyo Hanggok crowd, the other organized economic powerhouse on island. With a membership exceeding 2K, the Korean Association has become a dominant force in the visitor’s industry and the wholesale and retail trade. The community itself, non-obtrusive with its presence on island, is nonetheless, formidable in numbers and a power to reckon with. Hardly new to the islands, the Koreans were Imperial Japan’s workforce before World War II in Japanese occupied territories in the Pacific. Along with the Okinawans, denizens of Cho-sun, the Land of the Morning Calm, they have a history of toiling and sweating quietly along the Marianas shores. Generally, they have kept on the same style.

On the other hand, it does not take much for the Pinoys to get into a celebrative mood. Though now oblivious to the fact that indigenous groups in the Philippine archipelago used to mark time by the lunar rotation, descendants from the land where Asia wears a smile are only too eager to oblige any cultural event that makes merry sounds and colorful displays. Bold, bordering into reckless, a thumb or two are often reported badly shaken or shattered after a mishandling of the exploding nitrates. Merriment in music and dance, the fast-feeted and loose-jointed ubiquitous Pinoy is the companion to have and the competition to beat!

In any case, the passing-away-ness of the old is hardly a preoccupation of this celebration. The focus is on the new. The past is summarily consigned to the annals of human history, to be revisited again, perhaps, later. For now, everything from the food grilled, boiled and broiled on the sidewalk must be fresh, whole and spanking new. This is not to suggest that the past is ignored or discarded. It is to suggest that linear time as normally observed in the West is treated cyclically in the East. Thus, the 12-year cycle of animal-labeled years, convenient categories for parlor games, but hardly a determining gauge of human history and destiny.

It is thus no surprise that the ancient primary symbol created out of the villages around the Huang He River to signify the meaning of human existence is that of the yin-yang. This is the understanding that life is held together by the balance, equilibrium and harmony of opposing forces, particularly human forces. Time is observed as the marking of patterns and the recognition of chaos. Continuity and change, constancy and dysfunction, regularity and aberration are realities occupying two sides of the same coin. They are not qualities of the external situation, they are characterization of the mind. The conflict generated is a contradiction in the mind; its accompanying anxieties are more psychological than actual. The quality of existence is best savored in the taste of the food, the joyous blasting of sounds, the simplicity of sight, the embodiment of silence, and in the calibrated, balanced, equilibrated and harmonized relationships in social discourse and connections. The gift of this human understanding is the paradox of holding two opposing ideas at the same time without lose of verve and nerve.

While it is a New Year celebration, in a real sense, there is not such thing as new year. Time as substantive entity is metaphor. No one loses time. There is no time; people make time. Our identified time, whether measured through the solar or lunar rotations, is simply embodied life constantly conscious of life’s processes, marking nature’s patterns and the punctuating the vibrant human explosions along the way.

The Year of the fire Dog is but a culture’s management tool. There is nothing deterministic about it, nor is there practical assurance about the consequences of Feng Shui, other than its demonstrated aesthetics. The horoscope signs and meditated beliefs on significant events as well as tragic occurrences are but auto-suggestive projections at play. There is not much weight in reading one’s future on the lines of a palm, the arrangement of bird entrails, the alignment of the stars and planets, or the placement of one’s dwelling in relationship to the direction of the four winds.

Time and the events that it contain of which historical accounts are based and written are but constructs of the mind. People make or refuse to make decisions. They are said to be free when they make decisions themselves. Sadly, most exercise their freedom by letting others do the deciding for them.

So then, led us have a New Year. For sanity and order in social relation and association, let us manage time. Let us organize space. Let us define roles. Let us embody symbols, empower style, and dramaturgize our story.

May you have a prosperous year. Literally, may you please graciously receive the blessings that new life brings. Kung Hei Fat Choi! Sehe Bok Manibadseyo!

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School