When a holiday is a ‘noliday’ for some

As a recovering workaholic who used to view holidays as the professionals’ equivalent of a club soda, I’ve had second thoughts about the importance of downtime. But, since working in China, I’ve had further reason to revisit the notion of time off and what it means.

To this end, as the National Day holiday approaches, I have a question:

Dear Reader, when is a holiday not a holiday? Answer: when you’re required to work for the next seven consecutive days to make up for it.

I’ve asked around, and it seems that I am far from the only one who finds the notion of working extra time to make up for having had a holiday faintly absurd.

How can you possibly relax when all you can see is the looming make-up schedule that darkens the sky like a predatory eagle seeking out a slothful fish?

China’s government-mandated vacation schedule took effect in 2008, and it dictates that workers get three consecutive days off at Mid-Autumn Festival. The catch is that they (we) must make up two of those days by working at the weekend either end of the holiday.

This gift-that-eventuallytaketh-away arrangement is then repeated over the National Day holiday. When is a holiday not a holiday? When you have to sacrifice weekends to make up for it.

Aside from me, critics are legion. “Even while I’m enjoying my week off, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I have to make up four of those days during my weekends,” Huang Linmei, a

30, high school teacher in Zhejiang province

then 25-year-old a legal secretary in Beijing, told The New York Times in 2010.

“I’d like to yell at the person who came up with this schedule.”

Perhaps I can help with that, albeit belatedly. The man generally “credited” with pushing the changes to the nation’s holiday structures is a professor at Tsinghua Univeristy named Cai Jiming. Professor Cai claims that his aims were to afford Chinese workers time off, and ease the pressure on both the country’s transportation systems and tourist sites. He may, instead, have simply heaped more pressure upon himself.

What, though, shall we call a holiday if the traditional definition has been skewered like a restless kebab? Perhaps a “noliday”, or a “naycation”?

In Chinese, one possibility is “tiaoxiu”, which literally means “moving around the days off ”. Comments on weibo quoted on theworldofchinese.com illustrate how people feel about the concept.

“Moving around the days is like not getting days off at all. Just call it tiaoxiu (instead of holiday). Giving the people days off via lying about National Holiday, have you no shame?” wrote one netizen, while another commented: “When I was in school, every time the school gave days off, I counted them. Then I found that we ended up with half a day extra of school.”

There we have it. Not only make-up work and school days, but extra added on for good measure.

Well, that’s it, I’m exhausted just thinking about the holiday. Rant over and column finished. And I’m taking tomorrow off to make up for it.

“It’s not fair. All students should be treated equally. Having said that, I think high school students should not be allowed to take their cellphones to the class.

Contact the writer at simon@chinadaily.com.cn