Chinese Calligraphy for Chinese New Year

Another aspect of Chinese New Year celebration is festive wishes expressed in Chinese calligraphy – the art of Chinese writing using the Chinese brush and ink. A good hairbrush may be made up of horse hair.

The greetings are usually written usually on red paper, sprinkled with gold dust in the background and are pasted on front door posts. The red banners are supposed to frighten off evil spirits and to usher in good luck. Some Chinese businessmen would pay thousands of dollars for a well worded calligraphy by an equally well known calligrapher.

It is also the practice to present a framed calligraphy with words of best wishes to a business associate who has just opened a business.

Frequent characters for Chinese New Year include
Fu ( Luck)
Chun (Spring)
Shou (Longevity)

Trust God for your fortune

There are two anchor tenants in the Pavilion and they are Parksons and Tang’s. I think Tang’s is part of the Singapore CK Tang group. When I entered the Tang’s, a pretty lady in red qipao presented me with a mandarin orange and a fortune cookie. Somehow, fortune cookies are not part of the Malaysian Chinese scene but it’s very much part of the culture of American Chinese, made even more famous, by the novel, Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and other novels with American Chinese settings.

Quite amused by the fortune cookie, I opened it up and lo and behold, the biscuit was in the shape of ancient Chinese money. Trust the Chinese. Everything during Chinese New Year has to have some association with wealth, and wealth and more wealth! As I crunched into the biscuit, out came the strip of “fortune.” It says “Your desires will come true.” Halleluyah ! Who wouldn’t like to hear that? I added “Amen” to it.