If there’s an area where culture change and borrowing are rapid, it would be in the area of doing things for good luck.
And if there’s a best time to be looking at all these cultural developments, it would be New Year.
The many beliefs and practices around the New Year tell us that people all around the world do feel uncertainty about what’s ahead, and want to feel they can do something to stave off misfortune.
Magic underlies many of the things people do. Put simply, to have a happy New Year, make sure you’re happy the first day of the incoming year, especially right after midnight.
I doubt if that many people still believe that firecrackers and gunshots ward off evil spirits; people just want noise and the happiness it connotes for the New Year. (This last New Year’s Eve, I saw a new kind of “good luck”: Firecracker enthusiasts rained out the would-be firecracker and gun-firing enthusiasts. Which was as well, because we had far fewer firecracker and gunshot injuries this time around.)
Among the practices for the New Year, what has always intrigued me is the use of fruits. Growing up in a Chinese-Filipino household, I saw how these practices changed through the years with the influences of both cultures.
Non-Chinese Filipino households made sure they had 12 fruits displayed, and I suspect the 12 comes from the number of Jesus’ apostles. But there were variations in the numbers; the Chinese-Filipino households would say 7, others 9, and many do use 12.
Looking back, and this includes interviewing older friends, I see that the use of fruits for luck goes back many years. My friends recall a time when the fruits were mostly local, including “tsiko” and “tiesa” and pineapple (but not bananas!), with a few of the expensive imported apples and oranges.
No one really knew what meanings were attached here. You did it because the elders said you had to.
Then at some point, people began to specify that the fruits had to be round, to symbolize money. That extended to using polka-dotted clothing, which came in all varieties including neckties, but not, as the song goes, the itsy-bitsy polka-dotted bikini—at least not for New Year’s Eve.
Then fruits from China began to flood our market, especially for New Year. No longer was it considered “sosyal” or upper-class to have apples and oranges, because now you could get them even from the public markets. I was surprised this year to see even persimmons being sold on the sidewalk.
Mass media helped to propagate Chinese beliefs through media-savvy feng shui practitioners like Hanz Cua, whose billboards you see throughout Metro Manila. I found one internet article quoting Cua about 10 good luck fruits, now imbued with Chinese cultural meanings that I used to associate with the Chinese New Year (coming up on Feb. 5 yet).
The Chinese emphasize meanings from word sounds, and the local ethnic Chinese use both Mandarin and Minnan Hokkien languages. Thus, pineapples are lucky because in Minnan they’re called “ong lai,” which sounds like “fortune comes.” On the other hand, Cua says apples are good because they are called “ping” (actually, “ping guo” in Mandarin), which is the same sound for the word for peace. We should send crates of apples to our politicians with elections coming around.
Other “lucky” fruits are chosen because of their colors—orange or yellow being similar to gold. And, yes, the preferred shapes are still round.
The cheap Chinese fruits made it easier to get to the desired number of round fruits, but this New Year fruit craze reminded me of how our own fruit industry remains so underdeveloped, with strange paradoxes.
In the cities, the Chinese fruits are now generally cheaper than local fruits. And yet, many of our very good local fruits rot away in rural areas because of the lack of farm-to-market infrastructure.
There’s also another paradox here: While the Chinese flood our markets with their fruits, even to the point of dumping, their demand for imported exotic fruits is contributing to prices for such going up for local consumers. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post has carried several articles on the durian boom in Malaysia, because the Chinese consider it the king of all fruits. Yet, Philippine durian does not seem to have caught the attention of the Chinese. Instead, it’s our mangoes that are cherished.
My take on all this is that the fruit craze is indeed bringing prosperity—to the Chinese fruit dealers. If we are to learn from the Chinese, it shouldn’t be about colors and shapes of fruits for luck, but about national policies on agricultural development and exports.
mtan@inquirer.com.ph