meaning good fortune.
On a snowy night in January, 1992 I was sitting at my computer keyboard
when suddenly, the screen froze and a loud beep heralded this ethereal
portent:
New MAIL on NOAH from MX%"yude@xxx..." :
"Happy New Year!"
I saved and exited my file and opened the
message. I examined the header. It was from a Chinese student in Engineering,
a friend and the president of the local Chinese Scholars' and Students'
Association. I scrolled down to read the message and was greeted by a squat
Chinese lantern emblazoned with the character fu, meaning good fortune.
All at
once I remembered what time of year it was, and for a moment it was as if I
could hear firecrackers over the roar of the storm. I remembered the New Year
I had spent in Beijing the year before, while I was teaching in the English
Department of what was then the Beijing Teachers' College. I was transported
back to the open-air festival in Beihai Park--watching jugglers and acrobats,
sampling exotic delicacies prepared in front of me by street vendors, and
between the firecrackers, listening to the excited laughter of children, their
pinwheels crackling on the frosty air, spinning prayers of pure joy at the
sombre, grey heavens. I looked at the header again: the transmission had been
a broadcast message, and I saw that I was the only "foreigner"
listed among that particular batch of "old hundred surnames." I felt
a certain solidarity with this imagined community of receivers, a
"...remarkable confidence of community in anonymity" (Anderson,
1990). I had the curious feeling that, though most of us did not know each
other save through the thoughtful well-wishing of a mutual friend, we had all
celebrated the arrival of Spring Festival together.
In Chinese society,
perhaps the most significant means by which an individual is defined is
through his or her social relationships, the network of family and friends
which reinforces a sense of personal and collective identity. Historically
however, despite the fact that Chinese culture is so deeply rooted in its
concern for the maintenance and cultivation of social ties, extended periods
of separation from home have been a common experience for many Chinese.
Contemporary university students are no exception, and so it is little wonder
that growing numbers of Chinese scholars make use of the Internet. Whether
they subscribe to newsgroups and Chinese language on-line magazines, or to
explore the "Ten-Thousand Dimensional Web of Heaven and Net on
Earth" (the World Wide Web) in search of a classical Chinese novel,
Chinese language shareware or even a greeting card design to send to a former
classmate now thousands of miles away, the electronic medium of the Internet
has been integrated into many aspects of Chinese student life. As Ruedenberg,
Danet and Rosenbaum-Tamari (1995) note, "the Net" as metaphor aptly
describes the personal and social aspects which are so important to much of
our global information exchange, and acknowledges that this exchange takes
place between people who in turn form "...communities that are
based not on contiguity but on connectivity" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
in press).
This study focuses on computer-generated Chinese New Year
cards, or chun jie ka 2
. In a larger sense it is also an exploration of Chinese
calendar customs and traditional ritual recreated through the electronic
medium. For the purposes of this discussion, recreation--that is,
re-creation--involves the interrelation of: 1) individuals, 2) levels
of interaction with the Internet, and 3) use of traditional Chinese symbolic
motifs in juxtaposition with contemporary borrowings from other cultures. This
tripartite integration forms the discursive structure of this article.
Concerning individuals, while anyone can be both a sender and a
receiver of electronic greetings, the celebration experienced by a user who
downloads a fitting design and re-authors it for transmission to many others--
as my friend did with the lantern--may be qualitatively different from that of
an original, anonymous "Internet artist" who creates a design and
posts it for future consumption and reproduction. In the first instance, the
sender of the re-authored greeting may then become the recipient of many other
similar greetings or "thank you notes" as a consequence of that
initial, customised transmission. By contrast, while the anonymous artist may
also receive a number of "New Year cards," these could potentially
include several copies of his or her own design, discovered and re-
authored unknowingly by friends and acquaintances worldwide.
Recreation
is also related to different levels of interaction between types of users and
the Internet as a resource system. As with many types of performance, there
are some things that people can do on the Internet simply with resources at
hand--such as logging on to check e-mail--and some things that require special
equipment, in this case shareware or freeware, which must be located and put
into place before further play becomes possible. As I will explain in a later
section, while it is possible to send and re-transmit previously received
greetings as simple text files, being able to design or even locate
novel, unique images on the Chinese Net may require a more adventurous tack.
It may be necessary to browse a number of public ftp 3
sites and subdirectories in order to find a compatible and complete
program which will display Chinese-language newsgroups, gopher and WWW sites
in Chinese characters on-line. Thus equipped, the user can then look for items
of interest, and be able to read the directions for how to obtain them in
Chinese, instead of one of the commonly used encoding formats which at first
glance may look, as one bewildered Chinese user once remarked: "Like a
language only God can understand."
Finally, recreation also
considers the dialectic between traditional Chinese and contemporary, borrowed
motifs which comprise the symbolic discourse of these electronic cards. Not
surprisingly, just as Chinese New Year, as an early- to mid-Winter festival,
overlaps with such celebrations as Christmas and Jewish Chanukah, so too
Christmas trees, Santas, menorahs and other images may be incorporated into
Chinese New Year greetings on the Internet. By comparison, Mid-Autumn
Festival, or zhongqiu jie
which is
commemorated on lunar August fifteenth, is a Chinese festival which appears to
lack a counterpart in the western calendar. During Mid-Autumn festival, people
eat mooncakes--which symbolise both the full moon which occurs around that
time and togetherness--and recall absent loved ones. If they themselves are
away from home, then Mid-Autumn festival offers a collectively sanctioned time
for the expression of homesickness.
Further attesting to the Internet's
ongoing diversification of potentialities for communication, a Chinese student
in Edinburgh recently forwarded these designs to me, which had been sent to
him by a classmate who would soon leave for the United States. The pictures
have a simple, bittersweet quality about them. Preferred motifs include
moonlight and quiet scenes with limitless heavens, and inscriptions such as a
translated poem by Tang (607-906 AD) poet Li Bai and phrases like
"Though we are at the farthest reaches of the world, yet we are
close" "Tianya gong zhi shi" 
complete the mood.
Of course, one can still play with homesickness, as this four-character good wish ("Happy Mid-Autumn Festival") testifies. The text-within-a-text, intended for the original recipient, remains a secret.
In the following sections, I discuss the recreation of
Chinese New Year celebrations first from a social, playful perspective,
presenting selected images from various "cards" from the viewpoint
of individual senders and receivers, focusing on the insights of one such
Chinese student in particular, whom I interviewed in the summer of 1994. I
believe that he is representative of most users who recreate celebrations by
re-authoring existing greetings. Recently, I was able to interview a
"virtual artist" on-line who, though he stated that he is not the
original artist of any of the currently popular designs, he did share a
considerable amount of information as to how still-image and animated cards
could be put together. Secondly, I describe some of the skills needed to
navigate the Chinese Net. Finally, I examine the interplay between traditional
Chinese motifs and borrowed images, and make some suggestions for future
research.
Senders and Receivers: Recreation Through Re-authoring
Before I discuss the images themselves, I want to talk a bit about the
celebration of Chinese New Year in China. While I must confine my descriptions
to Spring Festival celebrations in Mainland China, and more specifically to
Beijing, it should be recognised that New Year is celebrated around the same
time by Chinese people all over the world, and that primarily it involves
family, friends and food . Although the climate plays a part in
determining the nature of celebrations--in Beijing, while there are a few
open-air fairs, most people celebrate indoors, whereas in Guangzhou (Canton) I
understand that the fine weather encourages flower shows and outdoor
performances--there is considerable correspondence among the various symbols
used in the holiday.
Chinese New Year is a moveable feast in the lunar
calendar which falls any time between Burns' Night (January 25th) and
Valentine's Day. Wishing friends and loved ones prosperity in the New
Year is an important aspect of Chinese tradition. The custom of sending
Chinese New Year greetings from overseas overlaps with the Christmas season in
many western cultures, and in the case of these computerized greeting cards,
Christmas motifs are freely borrowed. Since many Western Christmas cards also
incorporate wishes for a happy New Year and since both days are subsumed into
a "yuletide season" which marks the end of one year and the
beginning of the next, it it not hard to imagine that Chinese students
studying abroad see fit to draw on Western holiday imagery in the composition
of these greetings.
The main feature in Chinese symbolic expression is
a layering or clustering of meaning-laden images and
texts. Consider the metaphor of someone traditionally decked out in new
holiday finery. Whether you picture someone from a northern or southern clime,
you can probably see several articles of brand-new clothing layered one on top
of another, along with new shoes, and perhaps other small articles or
decorations as well. The aesthetic operating here is one of newness and the
potential for prosperity, as if every thread has been woven with the hopes of
the New Year. Now imagine an entire street, village, town or city turned out
that way: paper cut-outs in shop windows, banners adorning house mantels and
public buidings, everywhere a blaze of colour to sweep the old year and its
old demons away. Even words and actions are layered at this time. One Chinese
student from Taiwan told me that in her family, if a bottle or some other
fragile thing was broken during Spring Festival preparations, the person
would say: "Sui ping, sui ping," 
("Break the bottle, may a peaceful, happy year
follow!") to undo any bad luck which might otherwise accompany the
breakage.
Another demonstration of this layering of meaning is provided
by the following example of a typical festive banner such as might adorn a
door or foyer during Chinese New Year:
The four characters in the center read from top to bottom: gongxi facai
"Wish you prosperity.
" In the original banner they were golden, their metallic surface
was reflected as black in the scanning process. Red is perhaps the most
auspicious colour in Chinese culture, signifying happiness and good luck. Gold
is reminiscent of riches. The pronunciations of many of the images shown are
homophonic with the aspirations they represent. For example, the word for
bat is very similar in sound to fortune . Reading some of
the other symbols around the border, we can see that this is a wish for
congugal bliss, prosperity and longevity:
congugal happiness:
prosperity, good fortune:
longevity:
In the examples and analysis
which follow, I hope to demonstrate how this layering can be achieved to some
extent on a computer screen by combining still-images in sequence or even
endowing them with the appearance of motion.
Before I look at some of
the more artistic and technical aspects of these texts, I want to discuss
their significance as a social custom which provides Chinese students with a
way of staying in touch, observing their most important festival and playing
with expressions of tradition. In general, I have found that while a greeting
may be made up of a collage of Western holiday motifs, there is at least
one traditionally Chinese articulation of the underlying purpose of
Spring Festival, a wish from the sender for the receiver's continued and
increased good fortune in the coming year.
As a graduate student in
Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, I spoke to many Chinese
students informally about the sending of electronic New Year greetings. Most,
however, declined to be formally interviewed about their participation in this
discourse. When I asked who might be willing to discuss this topic in detail,
I was directed to Wang Zhongning, a graduate student in chemistry who was in
his early thirties. I was told that, when not pondering the finer points of
thermodynamics, Wang could be found "cruising the Chinese Net." Wang
was very happy to talk to me, but he asserted from the outset that he was not
an artist. He saw himself not as an expert in this regard, but rather as a
kind of expert user because he knew about more than the simple re-
authoring of greetings that he had already received. He knew also how to find
the public domain software which enabled him to successfully traverse the
ether and pick up interesting souvenirs, like clever New Year card designs,
along the way.
Wang said he personally found Christmas quite
intriguing, the lights, music and motifs seemed to bring something cheerful to
the forbidding onset of a Newfoundland winter. He also said that more and more
young Mainland Chinese, both in China and abroad, celebrate Christmas as well
as Chinese New Year. They do so unofficially, and it seems to me that these
borrowed cultural landscapes are frequently mapped out in innovative ways.
Young people often have an awareness of the surfaces of the significant texts,
but no perception of either their potential depth, or where or if they can be
combined. In an interesting recombination of the Nativity with the modern,
commercial manifestation of Saint Nicholas, one of my students at the
Teachers' College in Beijing requested the following clarification:
"Tell me the Christmas story, Miss Seana, and please explain the part
about where the little old man in red clothes brings the Jesus-baby."
This student had been exposed to aspects of both the secular and religious
traditions associated with Christmas through texts studied in previous
classes, and he conflated the two narratives into a single pattern. And, like
Chinese New Year in the west, Christmas has not made it into the Chinese
calendar. One of the professors in the English Department at the Teachers'
College had to put up a good fight to get Christmas Day as a mid-week holiday
for the foreign teachers. "Just remember what it was like when you were
at Oxford," he reminded the Head of the English Department, "alone,
without your family, having to work on Spring Festival!" We got the day
off, but like Bob Cratchit, had to be there "all the earlier the next
morning."
A description of some of these texts follows, focusing
initially on an animated card which Wang received from a friend-who had first
downloaded it from an anonymous site- and then sent to me. I received
Wang's holiday greeting belatedly, as I had been away. True to his
convictions that seasonal good wishes should not be sent late, he e-mailed it
on December 23rd. I followed the directions, first extracting the file and
then using the "TYPE" command to display the contents. I shared
Wang's delighted reaction to what unfolded on the screen. When he
initially discovered how to display the card, Wang said : "I find
it's amazing!" A brief description and a few examples follow.
Although I have had to freeze the animated scenes, converting them into still-
images so that they could be presented in-text,4 I hope
that my descriptions convey at least a sense of the pleasure evoked by the
contents of this rather unusual "card":
First, a little train
chugged along on a circular track beneath a Christmas tree
surrounded by
gifts:
This was followed immediately by the words, "Merry Christmas and Happy
New Year" surrounded by a reverse-colour frame comprised of capital
letter "E"s which scrolled brightly up the screen. Next came a
Christmas card with a depiction of Santa Claus saying "Ho-ho-ho." A
menorah with blazing candles, symbolic of the Jewish Festival of Lights,
proclaimed "Happy Chanukah:"
After this, a display of "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" in
large lettering claimed the entire surface, and temporarily reset the dark-
light monitor controls. This gave the screen a sharply contrasting background.
The screen faded to black and a decorated tree with twinkling lights
proclaimed "Peace on Earth." A plain text display read: "A
Traditional Chinese New Year brought to you courtesy of the vt-100 Escape
Sequences. Have some fantastic holidays!"
Then, a brick fireplace
with a winking tree on the left appeared. Above the mantle ran the following
lexical joke which dislocates a common phrase from idiomatic English, shifting
the power of the word-play to the students for whom English often holds little
humour in everyday situations: "A very, very important thing to remember
on Christmas Eve is: If you leave a fire in the fireplace...":
A crackling log fire suddenly appeared, emphasizing the punchline.
Next, a simple line drawing of a tree similar to that used in the previous
"train scene" took centre-screen. Then, a box wrapped with
"Merry Christmas" paper shared the spotlight with an empty champagne
glass. A moment later, an unseen hand held a bottle over the glass, and it
began to fill with champagne, tiny bubbles and all:
This was followed by a toast:
The bottle disappeared, and a Jack-in-the-Box sprang- somewhat slowly-
from the papered box and bobbed up and down:
The first verse of "Jingle Bells" took up the upper right screen,
each beat punctuated by the system alert, which is usually activated when bad
commands are given or when text exceeds the margin. On most terminals, it
takes the form of a rather tinny-sounding bell. Not exactly silvery in tone,
the melody was somewhat flatter than the libation which preceded it.
Next, a goose migrated across a lightly snowing night sky. Something from its
beak dropped and it squawked, or rather dinged its solitary way
across the horizon. The object was a seed, and a pine tree gradually grew from
it. The tree grew bigger and bigger, was mysteriously decorated and
"Happy Holidays" slid out from behind the trunk. Intimations of folk
authorship! The right-hand corner was signed by Ji-cheng (L)iu and Xiufen
Li:
Then, a group of letters edged closer and closer, finally scrambling for
positions which spelled out the ubiquitous Yuletide greeting. Finally, plain
text read: "I wish you all a good New Year," followed by large
Chinese characters which gave traditional5
gonghe
xinxi, 
"Congratulations on
your (re)New(ed) Good Fortune! " (with an implicit wish that it may
continue...)
..and more contemporary6
xinnian ruyi, 
"May the New Year be All You Could Wish For!
"
expression to these sentiments. Then, the system prompt appeared, returning
the me to the present, and putting at least a momentary end to the
festivities, at least until the next time the file was run.
Several things struck me as significant about this experience, which I brought
up with Wang during our interview. To begin with, I recognized the first two
vignettes in this particular construction, the directions to "extract and
type," and the train scene. I was sent that piece of animation on its own
by another student in the Folklore Department shortly after I arrived as an MA
student in 1991. This student, who had joined the MA program a few years
before I arrived, had been giving me a quick VAX tutorial, and sent me the
file "for fun." He told me he had received it from a classmate. I
opened it up and puzzled over the strange codes. "Don't use
'EDIT,' " I was advised, "use 'TYPE.' "
Like a child with a real train on Christmas Day, I ran it incessantly. My
long-suffering tutor finally reached over and turned off the bells.
I sent the train-only file to a Chinese graduate student in Food Sciences,
whose wife and infant son had recently arrived in Newfoundland. "Why you
clutter up my account with machine code?" was all the acknowledgment I
received for my splendid gift. I explained how to run the file. Two days later
the reply came back. "Thank you for the lovely train. I and my wife and
the baby like it very much." Wang told me how he was similarly unable to
read the animated Christmas card when he first received it, and how its secret
wonders elude a friend of his to this day:
It's pity, one of my friends, until now he don't know how to
read it. Maybe he has another kind of computer system, so he can't read
it. Maybe, let me think, after March, he STILL send me an e-mail, saying:
"What's that? What's that stuff? I don't know that!"
<laughs> It's quite funny. 7
Wang's anecdote illustrates a point raised by Smith in an article about
official and unofficial uses of computers in the workplace, that there are
different types of users who possess varying degrees of computer literacy
(1991, 258). In a critique of Anderson's "Law of Self-
Correction" as a means of accounting for stability and variation in
texts, Degh and Vasonyi note that transmission can be temporarily disrupted or
cease altogether when a tradition bearer is unwilling or unable to serve as a
transmission conduit (1975, 212-13, 219).
Another striking feature of Wang's Christmas card is the preponderance of
Western motifs over traditional Chinese ones. A collection of pictorial
greetings which I compiled from e-mail sent by Chinese students during the
period from just before Christmas Eve 1991 to Chinese New Year 1992 shows
almost the reverse trend. Where Wang's card contains at least sixteen
distinct scenes, and only the closing one can be considered
"traditionally" Chinese, the earlier collection presents twelve
scenes, all of which consist of Chinese calligraphy or motifs, such as
lanterns, with the exception of the first (a snow scene)8:
the eighth (a flower), and the last two which are portraits of "the
Simpsons" followed by the text "Happy Chinese New Year" in
English.
As a comparison, I want to discuss some images found in another, later
transmission. A smaller collage of seasonal ASCII art, sent to a Chinese-
Canadian friend of mine by another ethnic Chinese student for Chinese New Year
1994, consists entirely of Chinese texts, and contains motifs such as the
"good fortune"(fu, )lantern shown below:
It should also be noted that, in this particular card, many of the Chinese
greetings are in full-form, "complex," characters, rather than the
simplified system which was adopted in Mainland China after Liberation in
1949.9 Some of the characters are also presented in a
cursive style, such as those commonly seen on Chinese New Year banners and in
decorative calligraphy. The full-form system is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and
by many overseas Chinese communities. In the case of this particular
transmission, a Hong Kong-born Chinese student sent New Year wishes to her
Canadian-born Chinese friend, and so full-form characters have been used. The
receiver is not literate in Chinese, but she can recognize the traditional
characters used in holiday greetings if they are presented in full-form
script. It is likely that she learned these from her mother, who emigrated to
Canada as a young bride, before literacy reform took hold in southern China.
Compare the following examples, which are taken from the 1994 card described
above and, where noted, from cards sent in 1991-92 by Mainland Chinese
students:
1) A cursive rendition of fu (fortune, ), which is the same character as the one appearing in the
lantern above.
2) The same "good fortune lantern," but sent to me in 1992, as I
described earlier. Note the sender's additions, which include his
name.
3)chunjie kuaile, 
"Happy Spring Festival/Happy New Year " in full-form
characters, from the 1994 greeting.
chun jie kuai le
4) chunjie hao, 
"(Have a) Good Spring Festival/New Year " spelled out on
small lanterns in simplified form from the 1991-92 collection, followed by
nianian kuaile 
"Happy
New Year, " also in simplified form from the same collection. The
contrast between simplified and full-form characters can be seen by a closer
examination of the above greeting, and then comparison with the next two.
Simplified characters are frequently composed of notably fewer strokes than
their full-form counterparts. Differences in the number of strokes in the
characters for jie 
(meaning
festival ) and le 
(component of happy ) can be clearly seen.10
chun jie hao
nian nian kuai le
Also, the more contemporary greeting xinnian ruyi which ends Wang's animated card is used in the 1994
collage as well.
This illustrates two important features of this discourse: 1) the
dialectic between traditional and contemporary texts and motifs is quite fluid
within the parameters of the respective (simplified or full-form) writing
systems , and, 2) while most users are not creative experts, they do
appropriate texts and rework them in creative ways . This is accomplished
by extracting the still image from e-mail, which appears in
"readable" ASCII code, and personalizing it. Wang stated:
Actually, every year, by the computer by the e-mail, you can
get computer art. And for me, I think I am not a computer expert, so I just
use other people's card. So I just extract it to be a file, and edit.
And maybe I put the name, my friend's name, like "Seana" and I
put my name on the bottom. And then I put some letters, special letters, like
"1993 December 24," you know, something like that. And I send this
to my friend. I think it's usual way, people just use that.
Although Internet copyright and intellectual property rights are
subjects for debate right now, Wang doesn't see a problem with this kind
of re-writing. He suggested that people post their creations on the public
sites precisely because they want them to be used and circulated. By
Wang's reckoning, if people are clever enough to write a program for an
animated card, they aren't so stupid as to leave it open for anonymous
appropriation, if they are concerned about copyright.
Two other motifs in Wang's card compelled me to question him further. When I
asked Wang whether he knew that the menorah was a symbol of Jewish Chanukah,
he said he thought that all of the pictures represented Christmas. Alluding to
the Simpsons in the earlier seasonal collection, as well as to a message he
sent to me in April of this year which extolled the tenets of
"Bart's blackboard wisdom" and ended with the same family
portrait, I asked him whether most Chinese students knew who the Simpsons
were. Again, he laughed and said no. Well, for that matter, why was Christmas
chosen, if most of the senders and receivers did not really comprehend the
images? His answer reflected a common feature of many invented traditions,
that there are often combinations of fixed and free elements, especially in
reworked calendar customs. In this case, the Christmas season provides a fixed
holiday period into which the Chinese holiday, and its accompanying North
American modifications in terms of foodways and festivities, can be freely
substituted:
For me, I didn't read the card very carefully, because I just say:
"Oh good! It's quite funny and looks like lots of stuff on it! And
lots of signal of the holiday." Holiday, big festival, and give me, made
me feel the atmosphere of the Christmas, I just think about that, oh good. But
IF YOU ASK ME WHAT'S ON IT, I DON'T KNOW! Yeah, I really don't
know. I think most of Chinese people here is just like me. They don't
care about what the card said, the card give lots of interesting things, and
make me feel: "Oh that's Christmas, that's New Year's
Day."
It has been suggested that the textually-attuned human mind does not attend to
images with as much concentration, they become a kind of visual
"background music" (McCorduck 255). While Wang's statements of
his experiences with the animated greeting card support this assertion, he is
doing more than selectively attending to the entertaining surface structures
manifesting someone else's genius. Although his chosen texts are not in
themselves parodies or counter-hegemonic statements, by claiming and
marginally re-authoring a composite text of fleeting images, Wang is enacting
an aspect of his everyday experience, but with a difference. In his own
recreation, he maintains ultimate control over the barrage of images. He can
play the same predictable pieces over and over for his own enjoyment. And,
unlike his daily encounters with the often confusing subtexts which inscribe
themselves upon the Western cultural landscape in which he now lives, he can
shut the whole thing off.
As I noted earlier, one of the ways that layering of symbolic significance is
accomplished in computerised New Year greetings is by either combining several
still-images in sequence in a transmission, or by using system resources to
simulate animation. In actual fact, animated ASCII art greetings are optical
illusions of sorts. Just as the human eye can look at a still object under
certain conditions and perceive movement, so too the images in an animated
card are not scrolling forward like multiple cells in a cartoon. The pictures
remain in a finite, still series, and instead the cursor moves over them,
controlled by a series of system commands. Before I discuss other issues, such
as the interweaving and reworking of traditional and borrowed imagery in these
cards, I want to briefly look at artistic recreation from the point of view of
a technical expert.
It is perhaps not surprising that many Chinese generally think of these
greetings as fun as opposed to art. Certainly the detail
that can be achieved with ASCII characters cannot be considered calligraphy as
such. Yet, most of the Chinese designs I have seen do subscribe to the
traditional aesthetic of a balance between open and filled space. This is
particularly well demonstrated in the Mid Autumn Festival images shown
earlier.
Being a good Chinese "ASCII artist" seems contingent on two related
factors: 1) an ability to select and place the most appropriate ASCII
characters to best fill in and define the larger design and 2) a knowledge of
how to manipulate existing system resources to display the finished product to
best advantage. The first aspect of the artist's task, since it often involves
making a series of individual decisions--unless the artist chooses to create a
greeting by "animating" a series of pre-existing, recycled motifs
that have been recombined into a single file--is considered much more
difficult than the second. According to Chen Jun-Rong, a postgraduate student
now at York University who worked as a multimedia technical consultant in
Taiwan, once you have a collection of discrete designs, putting them together
effectively is easy. He said that most DOS machines are equipped with ANSI
tools. These were developed by the American National Standards Institute and
derive their name from this organization. ANSI.SYS and its variations can be
installed within a CONFIG.SYS file, and then ANSI sequences, such as ESC
(Escape Sequence code) commands can be used to control the console display.
ESC commands can even incorporate motion and sound into the display output.
Chen stated that most animated files found on bulletin boards make use of
ANSI sequences or, as in the case of Wang's animated greeting, their VAX/VMS
equivalents. In an electronic correspondence on 24 August 1995, which he later
permitted me to quote and which appears below in its original wording, he
said:
Since the escape sequences code(ESC) are designed to control the console
(monitor, keyboard, speaker etc.), all the cursor moving, screen
colour could be handled by ESC. At the time of displaying a
still-picture on screen, we may send out ESC to move the cursor instead
of pressing the keyboard. The animated effect in fact is cursor-moving action.
When the object is not only a cursor but a block of characters, you will see
the text moving around the screen like a floating banner.
As a demonstration, he sent me a small animated piece which he put together.
It begins with a multi-coloured "HELLO" in block letters. Once the
salutation is fully drawn on the screen, smaller coloured letters edge
together to form my name, "Seana." Then, the screen clears, and a
cursive rendition of "fortune," almost identical to that displayed
earlier in this discussion, fills the screen. Finally, a colourful "Happy
New Year" appears to thread its way through and behind the larger
character, quickly moving from right to left.11 In the
next section, I provide descriptions of some of the skills which potential
users of the Chinese Net may need to acquire, as well as links to some useful
sites.
At this point, I want to discuss the recreation of celebrations and other
forms of playful, social communication in light of users' interactions with
the Chinese Net itself. The Chinese name for the World Wide Web attributes
"ten thousand dimensions" to it. While this is partially an example
of intercultural hyperbole, that number being a particularly auspicious one by
Chinese reckoning, it also takes into account the growing diversity of
Chinese-language resources that are available.
For example, Chinese
students can access newsgroups such as alt.chinese.text and
alt.chinese.text.big5 and read postings in Chinese on-line if they
have the necessary Chinese-language shareware on their terminals. Those
studying at participating universities can use IRC to talk to other Chinese
students. Any interested reader can subscribe to the weekly Chinese News
Digest magazine Hua xia wen zhai, and have new issues sent to a
personal e-mail address. In addition to news, this magazine frequently
contains short stories and poetry, and can be obtained from ifcss.org or its mirror site, cnd.org. Also, there are two anonymous Chinese
sites where users can browse through classical and popular fiction, poetry,
songs, film reviews and short essays. The largest of these is a gopher site at
McGill University and requires a
Chinese text viewer such as zw-DOS used in conjunction with a WWW text-
browser, like LYNX. The other site, though it does not offer the same breadth
of selection as the sunrise site, is located at Purdue, and can be explored with any
standard WWW browser. At this site, Chinese text appears on the browser screen
because the characters have been uploaded as GIF files. I have used the same
process in this article to display Chinese text.If you are new to the Chinese
Net, the
Department of East Asian Studies homepage at the University of Edinburgh is a good place to
start, as there are links to several other Chinese and related sites that
might be of interest.
When navigating the Chinese Net, it is necessary to understand that, in order
to participate in many levels of discourse, a computer terminal and a telnet
connection are not sufficient. For example, if you wanted to look at what
topics are presently being discussed on alt.chinese.text, you
could simply log into that newsgroup from your newsreader. Once you
got there, however, you would not be able to read anything, as all of the
Chinese text would be encoded into something called hZ (hanzi,
meaning Chinese character ) format. In this format, each character is
transformed into a two-character ASCII combination, and strings of text are
enclosed in single-line environments defined by tildes and curly brackets. To
read the posted messages and reply, you would require a program such as zw-
DOS, which interprets hZ/zw encoded text, and displays it in Chinese on the
screen. With this program, you could also input simplified Chinese on screen,
for example, if you wanted to post a reply to a newsgroup discussion. You
would see Chinese as you read and replied. Your posted message would appear in
Chinese to someone running the program, but for someone without zw-DOS your
message would appear as incomprehensible code. There are also shareware
programs which interpret GB (guo biao ) encoding, another simplified
Chinese format, and BIG5 encoding, which is the standard encoding system for
full-form characters.
These kinds of programs, including dictionaries and font files, can be
obtained from various directories on sites like cnd.org. However, spelling out precise
pathnames is difficult because these sites are large and all of the public
software is divided into subdirectories according to machine type (i.e., DOS,
Mac, Unix) and program function (i.e., viewers, conversion programs and so
on). Also, the font files are kept separately from the applications, and you
should first download the README or INFO file for the application you think
you might want in order to find out exactly what it does, what system
requirements it needs, and what the preferred font files are. These
information documents are usually small text files, and will often specify
precise pathnames. Lists of available software can also be obtained from the
newsgroups or downloaded from these sites.
In my experience as a Mac user, some of the Chinese shareware programs for Mac
are less convenient than DOS applications, probably because of the Mac's
different interface. While programs like zw-DOS will allow display of Chinese
text files and input, most Macintosh programs are display-and-print only, and
are designed for people who want to do things like print off a copy of a news
magazine. Other programs for the Macintosh are display-only, allowing Chinese
text to appear as a scrolling subtitle in a split-screen. These somewhat
limited applications are often quite robust, however. That is, if a Macintosh
Chinese viewer is interpreting an encoded file and encounters an example of
"bad code" which does not have a properly defined environment, these
smaller programs will often interpret around the corrupted text. I find that
larger, more sophisticated programs show a greater tendency to quit completely
when they run into this kind of problem.
My suggestion to Mac users is that they become as ambidexterous as possible,
and learn to use DOS programs as well, since many of them are more versatile.
The Macintosh system facilitates this--most newer Macs can read DOS disks
without any difficulty. As I do not have a telnet link from home, I often use
zw-DOS at the university in my fieldwork, to send electronic questionnaires,
for example. When the replies come back, I extract them onto a DOS disk, and
read and print them on my Mac at home. The area in which Macs appear to excel
with respect to Chinese shareware is in format conversion. It is possible to
convert between all of the major Chinese formats and PostScript with
conversion shareware. Once a file has been converted, it will display, or in
the case of a PostScript file, print, in another format. This is useful if
your preferred viewer does not handle all formats, or if you need to format
Chinese for printing from Unix.
The ability to find and use Chinese public domain software is important
because, while many things on the Chinese Net, such as ASCII art text files,
may not be encoded, many others are. Although you might be able to download
some greetings or actual scanned photographs or paintings of Chinese scenery
once you found a particular site, you might also easily overlook potentially
interesting or useful items. Having the ability to browse the Chinese-language
sites occasionally means that you can see if a Chinese message giving address
information or file descriptions had been posted by some delighted user who
happened to "get there first." While browsing can sometimes be a
rather lonely journey, it is important to be able to interpret the ethereal
word-of-mouth of other users. Information gleaned in this way can act as
signposts to guide you through at least a few of the "ten thousand
dimensions," and that in itself constitutes a kind of celebration.
In short, full exploitation of the expressive possibilities of Chinese Net culture requires greater than average computer skills.
Recreating Subtexts of Tradition, Aesthetics and Meaning, or gongxi
facai Revisited
As a third facet of the recreation of this particular ritual on the Internet,
I would like to reflect on the potential significance of this form of
seasonally marked discourse. In answer to the question, "What does this
all mean, why is this interaction between folklore and computers
important?" I want to examine several possible interpretations which I
hope will provide frames of reference for present understanding, and
directions for future study. As with folklore in general, these greetings are
an expression of the on-going negotiation of conservation and change in
tradition.
Firstly, it is possible that these cards, in their original creation, were
deliberately intended as multicultural objects. This could explain why in the
animated card for instance, there are several secular Christmas motifs, and a
menorah. Perhaps the artist who designed the card was intending to give
"air time" to a range of festival symbols which occur within the
temporal span of Chinese New Year. Broadly speaking, this time span could be
demarcated as stretching from the end of the year to "the beginning of
the end" of winter. Although this may have been the artist's
intention, we have no way of knowing, and other cross-cultural midwinter
festivals are not represented. It seems more likely that the cards are
reworked New Year's cards, with some Christmas decoration thrown in for
convenience and "good measure," because, as I noted earlier,
Christmas is a fixed holiday in the west, just as New Year is an acknowledged
seasonal holiday in China. Though the actual date of Chinese New Year is
determined by the lunar calendar every year, the observance is marked in many
Chinese-speaking countries by festive behaviour, including the preparation
and consumption of special foods and interruption of the work week.
Secondly, there could be an element of parody in the animated card, and in
some of the rather unorthodox Western motifs used in the still image cards,
such as the Simpsons. Though portrayed as a rather dysfunctional unit most of
the time, the Simpsons are a family, and Bart himself might be seen as a
somehow endearingly mischievious child rather than a troublemaker. In my
experience, to call children "naughty" in Chinese culture is not so
much a disparaging commentary on their behaviour as a recognition that they
are cute, lively and clever. While I think that parody might become a feature
of future computerized card transmissions among Chinese students, I am not
convinced that it is so at present. Wang's interview comments are quite
typical of other Chinese students I spoke to. For many of them, Christmas is,
as one student remarked: "That funny time when all the Westerners spend
lots of money, and are still pretty nice to each other." For the parody
explanation to work in this context, I believe that students would require a
greater sophistication with the connotations of this symbolic lexicon. I am
not certain that many of the senders and receivers of cards with Western
motifs recognize them as signifying "tidings of comfort and joy."
Rather, these essentially foreign designs are used to create pastiches of
curiosity and momentary delight, conveyed playfully by the same instrument
upon which most students must analyse their data, and struggle with their
English.
Thirdly, in "Cinderella Christmas: Kitsch, Consumerism and Youth in
Japan," Moeran and Skov discuss Japanese young people's' reworkings
of the Christmas celebration into an elaborately staged romantic fantasy not
as an example of bricolage --the making of subcultural systems of
meaning by dislocating signs within a particular discourse, often by
rearranging elements that the mainstream culture has discarded--12 but as a manifestation of consumerism. They assert that
Japanese youth construct Christmas out of "...phenomena that are clean,
well-ordered, and brand new.... Consumerism is based upon a desire to discard
the old and acquire the new, and this the concept of bricolage does
its best to deny" (110). Using the decoration of Christmas trees as an
example, the authors note that:
...it would seem as if there are no aesthetic rules at work in this kind
of decoration and that everything has been crammed in any old how, with as
many ornaments attached to the tree trunk and branches as possible. The
overall stylistic effect thus comes to seem like one of total disorder. And
yet this is in fact exactly the way in which Japanese bedeck riverside trees
during their Tanabata festival in midsummer. The point here is that the
decoration of Christmas trees reflects the way in which various styles are
first detached from their geographical, seasonal, and cultural ties, before
being reassembled according to different aesthetic criteria (112).
I think that this idea can also be applied to this study, to the extent that
Chinese students are not "making Christmas" out of old or cast-off
traditions or images that have somehow been rendered devoid of semantic power
within a Western cultural context. Rather, these students are constructing and
recycling holiday greetings in a new medium and in a new context, according to
their own traditional cultural aesthetics and everyday experiences of Western
culture. On the one hand, the electronic greetings celebrate the concept of
"festival" in a way that seems similar to many contemporary Chinese
paper cards as a many-layered wish for future prosperity and happiness
which often literally "pops out" at the receiver in a symbolically
rich banquet of red, gold, auspicious characters, fish,13
chubby little boys, ships in full sail, and perhaps even music and lights.
While this level of emphasis is largely impossible on a monochromatic VAX
screen, the underlying traditional message of Chinese New Year, a
wish for abundant good fortune- a sentiment, I suggest, which is far older
than our global, modern consumerism- is achieved through the
manipulation of the "texts within these texts," regardless of the
Chinese character system used or the syntactics of the actual message
conveyed. As I have said, many cards contain at least one message in Chinese
characters which is comprised of a single ASCII symbol of certain
"pecuniary" importance. For example, consider the following texts,
taken from the 1991-92 still image collection. The top line reads, from left
to right: xinchun ruyi, 
,
"Wish You a Happy New Year/Spring Festival. " The bottom
reads, in the same direction: Gongxi facai, "Wish you prosperity: "
An even more striking example is found in the 1994 collage.14The first four characters proclaim "Happy New
Year" in Chinese. Each of these characters fills nearly an entire screen,
and all four are completely comprised of dollar signs. The mixing of a large
number of Western motifs with traditional wishes for Chinese New Year might
also reflect a kind of microcosm of the students' daily lives in another
sense. Faced with having to develop at least a functional fluency, not only
with another language, but also, as Wang described, "adopting the foreign
habit" of a different cultural competence, students not infrequently find
it a struggle to maintain a firm grasp on their own personal articulation of
Chinese tradition. Many lament that they have forgotten how to write certain
Chinese characters, and that writing a letter home has become like writing an
English composition. Removed to the west, Chinese New Year is no longer a
recognized holiday when they can relax with family and friends. A single night
of celebration must often be stolen away from work or study. But, something
like the Chinese motifs in Wang's card, New Year steals quietly in after
the fat little man in red clothes and before the arrival of hearts, flowers,
and winged babies armed with bows and arrows. With the coming of Spring
Festival there follows Spring, and the promise of another year.
I suggest that appropriating, re-authoring and sending these cards is one way
that students choose to reinforce their social cohesion and complex multi-
cultural identity. This kind of interaction is important for scholars to
study, since as Wang said: "With the Internet, there is no
distance." Ethnicity and identity are being made both global and local by
the proliferation of electronic media (Morley and Robins 1995, 113). Not only
does this kind of communication allow people to renew and strengthen
friendships, but it also provides them with an interface for play, and through
play for the creation of new patterns for the performance of tradition. And,
as Bolter states, because the ethereal, electronic text encourages, and even
requires re-authoring in its consumption, entire traditions as
well as their constituent texts are being reworked (1992, 33).
This discussion of the layers of meaning attached to Chinese New Year, and
reinforced as the festival is recreated and celebrated on the electronic
network, demonstrates the power of the Internet as both tool and object for
cross-cultural ethnographic research. Like many of the designs used in the
"cards" themselves, the skills I have learned in the course of
investigating Chinese seasonal computer art have been recycled and transferred
to other contexts. For example, knowing how to find and use different Chinese
shareware programs, I can also study Chinese popular fiction audiences on a
potentially global scale, and can interview people on-line and by questionnaire
in their own language.
The Internet is an environment ideally
suited for the reflexive analysis of users' creative performances, especially
since scholars must to some extent become players as well. The evanescent
speech play of jokes and nicknames has been the subject of insightful study
(Dorst, 1990; Ruedenberg, Danet and Rosenbaum-Tamari, 1995; Bechar-Israeli,
1995, this issue). In my opinion, similar techniques could be applied to the
study of nicknaming and jokes on the Chinese Net, which appear in Chinese
language newsgroups such as alt.chinese.text . For researchers
conversant with the language and the characters from popular martial arts
fiction to which many of the nicknames and jokes refer, this is an area which
could yield rich ethnographic insight. Other possibilities would involve the
study of readers and producers of on-line digests and fanzines, and the use of
newsgroups and bulletin boards to reunite friends and former classmates around
the world. As we know, the Net is an inherently social space which places
people in communicative and performative contexts with others, and as such
must be more thoroughly explored by scholars who study human interaction.
1
An earlier draft of this paper was read by Peter Narvaez at the American Folklore Society Conference in Milwaukee, October 1994. I am grateful to Peter and Tommy McClellan (University of Edinburgh), as well as to Brenda Danet and the reviewers of earlier versions of this paper for their comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett for suggesting I submit this paper to Brenda Danet. I would also like to thank Dai Show-fen for her insights into traditional and contemporary Chinese seasonal greetings, and Graham Bevan for his assistance with conversion of the picture files into a compatible format so that they can be displayed is this article. This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 2 According to Yeh Ch'inglong, a Taiwanese
postgraduate student at Edinburgh who is studying AI and natural language
production, Taiwanese students often refer to these greetings as he nian
ka 
, "(New) Year Greeting
cards."
3 This is an abbreviated term meaning
"file transfer protocol" which is a method for the rapid transfer of
data (text files, certain kinds of software and so on) from public domain
sites.
4 The still-image and animated greetings are
available for viewing in other formats. The animated card can be experienced
as a short film by either: 1) viewing it through the
Web browser as an external application with QuickTime and Movie Player or 2)
downloading it and using QuickTime in conjunction with a suitable display
environment (such as Word 5.1 or higher). It can also be viewed as a moving text file extracted to a VAX terminal. Please
note that for the third option, the modem speed should be set at 2400 baud for
best results. The 1992 and 1994 still-image New Year greetings, as well as the Mid-Autumn Festival images can be downloaded and
viewed as ASCII text files, but should be displayed in a non-proportional
font, such as Courier 9.
5 This greeting is also
traditional in its spatial presentation, that is, it should be read from top
to bottom, right to left. It should be noted that the Chinese greetings
discussed in this article, while certainly traditional, are not religious.
6 This greeting should be read "western
style," from left to right.
7 Zhongning WANG.
Interview. 23 August 1994.
8 Note the sender's
"signature." This kind of personalisation is commonly used.
9 Simplified and full-form characters do not exist in a one-
to-one correspondence. Some full-form characters have been retained in the
simplified system, although many have been substantially modified.
10 The English translation in the greeting with three lanterns
is syntactically incorrect. Here, "happy " is actually
signified by hao (good). Chun means spring.
11 As DOS-compatible video equipment was unavailable
prior to the final preparation of this paper, interested users will have to
download the file HELLO.txt and view it on a DOS
machine with ANSI.SYS. To run the file, input "type hello.txt" at
the DOS prompt. Do not enclose the command in quotes.
12 See Hebdige, 103-4.
13 In
Chinese, the word for "fish" is homophonic with a word for
prosperity and riches, and is associated with a phrase meaning, "At
the end of the year, there's something left over."
14 The large characters described in this greeting exceeded
the parameters of the monitor I had to work with (a Mac CClassic) and so I was
unable to convert the images without cropping them considerably. However, as
mentioned earlier, this and other greetings can be downloaded and viewed as
separate text files. As this file contains no animation, it can be simply
scrolled through.See footnote4.
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