YOU wouldn’t have hesitated over the photograph if the contents of it had immediately satisfied your long-held perception at a glance.
You had paused, took a long look, squinted, blinked and rubbed your eyes to ensure your vision was not impaired but once you looked at the photograph again, it was still the same.
As a last resort, you put it through the computer enhancer and it came out the same as you first saw it.
There was nothing wrong with the photograph except perhaps the lighting may not have been exactly balanced. This was deduced from the end product where the people in the photograph appeared rather dark skinned – an observation that went against a perception that you had held since you were in primary school.
The subject of the photograph was an event confined to the Chinese or people of Asian origin. It was the New Year celebrations in Lae. The photograph showed a Chinese lion heralding the New Year in front of a shop at Voco Point.
The caption pointed to Chinese lion dancers and that’s where all your trouble began.
It read “Chinese lion dancers making their traditional annual rounds in and around Lae amid the staccato of firecrackers and a haze of gunpowder …”
It was all fine but the Chinese lion dancers in the picture where black, hence the explanation above about the squinting, blinking and rubbing of the eyes.
Your memory, which dates back to 1963, always had Chinese people under the lion “skin” or whatever, so this was one photograph that shattered that long held perception that the lion dancers and their drums and percussions playing convoy would always be made up of Chinese and others of Asian origin.
It was a culture of sorts that was built in your mind since the very first time a convoy of Asians converged on your favourite trade store in your neighbourhood and treated you and the local residents to an age-old Chinese ritual of welcoming the New Year. It had stayed with you since.
Every time you saw the lion in action, both here and overseas, it reminded you of your early days in Lae where the excitement of the New Year’s day was as clear in your mind as if it was only yesterday.
You imagined those times when the kids would scramble and rummage through the thick carpet of red paper shreddings in front of the shops, seeking duds – the crackers that did not explode.
You’d run after the Chinese convoy as they made their way through the shops in your part of the neighbourhood but at the end of the day, you’d be hardly surprised when you get back home and realise that you’d followed the convoy from Papuan Compound to Elcom Compound, Eriku, top town and Chinatown where the lion called it a day; in fact half way around Lae city.
Safely back home, the kids got together and counted the day’s takings of dud firecrackers and proceeded to have a New Year’s celebrations consisting exclusively of firecrackers, of their own.
Long sticks would be employed with a burning amber attached at the end to light up the short fused crackers and those with fuses too short to light, were unwrapped and the powder poured onto a big rock and a smaller, flat piece placed on top of the powder.
Then you would find a heavier rock which you dropped onto the prepared “home-made” cracker. The bang that followed depended on how much powder was under the flat piece of rock. But the more the powder, the louder the bang and the desired result was achieved.
Of course, there were slight accidents – the hero kids would wrap the short fuses around matchsticks and grate the unlit matchstick against the flint and in one swift forward motion would render the cracker airborne. A bang meant the operation succeeded, silence meant the match too was a dud and the operation would begin all over again.
Accidents happened when the hero kid failed to get the cracker off in time – meaning he was too slow. The end result was that he’d suddenly have two fingers of his hand feeling like they’d not there, and a deafening high pitched silence in the ear closest to the bang. Soon, it would not be the ear he would be focused on but the pain in the fingers that suddenly feels as if it had swollen to 10 times its normal size.
For the stone cracker crackpots, sometimes they’d be too close for comfort and get pelted by flying pieces of rocks in vulnerable places.
It was many years later that we fully realised the dangers of these activities, when the Government banned the sales of firecrackers in the shops.
The “tradition” of having your own New Year celebrations died when the later generations failed to partake of the trend that we had started.
Such fond memories were evoked by the picture but the thought that persisted was of the perception bubble that just burst.
Would I see black Papua New Guineans or trained performers continuing the tradition of the Chinese lion dancers in place of the real McCoy? It seems a bit strange, doesn’t it?
You could almost feel that the thought of off-putting. As much as you try to convince yourself that yes, these could very well be Chinese descendants but with dark complexes because they had evolved to be almost all-black Papua New Guineans, you still can’t come to terms with it.
I don’t know about you, but I really would like to hold onto those memories I grew up with. I would not linger very long if black Papua New Guineans were holding the lion skin but I would certainly stay around if real Chinese were performing because that’s the New Year celebrations I would identify with. Not only that, but the Chinese and the lion would propel me into another time and another place, where all my childhood memories of these exciting times would come bubbling back out.
You would like that, wouldn’t you?
On that note, we are reminded of the Wise Counsellor words: “What would happen if God remembered us only as often as we remembered him …?”

 

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