New dancing leader for Chinese New Year parade
There’s a mini-brouhaha unfolding about who gets the coveted honour of leading the dancing group in the Chinese New Year parade in Chinatown.
In recent years, the Hon Hsing Athletic Club, which was started on Pender Street in 1939, has been at the helm. This weekend, it will be a team from the Teo Chew Society of Vancouver, an organization that was established in 1987 on Hastings Street.
There is definitely plenty of gossip circulating. One is the diplomatic version of events that says different teams will take turns. Others tell of a heated meeting, a secret ballot and the influence of backers.
The parade is a well-known Vancouver fixture, drawing thousands of well-wishers. This year, it will be held on Sunday in celebration of the Year of the Dog that starts Friday, according to the lunar calendar.
Participants from across the region, including high schoolers, university students, tech and finance executives, as well as veterans and retirees, have been adding extra practice hours and prepping vintage costumes for their lion and dragon dances, martial arts performances and marching routines. It’s a Vancouver occasion replete with Scottish Highland dancers and Sikh motorcycle riders.
And way in the background, there are unspoken rules, traditions and changes to keep up with the times, as is to be expected with an event that goes back 45 years.
Which is why Jun Ing, chief coordinator of the parade, is only too happy to clear up the drama and explain some of the intricacies.
Firstly, he emphasizes, it’s the VIPs who lead the parade, “the Premier, the Lt.-Gov.,” followed by veterans and a marching band.
After that, he concedes, “everyone wants to be the first dragon or lion (dancing) group.”
This year, it came down to Teo Chew offering a dragon with 13 dancers, as compared to Hon Hsing’s one dragon with only nine dancers, says Ing, adding size matters, but “we don’t measure the length of the costumes, we count the number of dancers.”
He chuckles at all the chatter.
There used to be more dragon and lion dancers for the Chinatown parade, but with malls and community centres also hiring them at the same time, the numbers have been diminishing.
These dancers are supposed to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck to merchants, a ritual that involves stopping off at each storefront to nip at a dangling head of lucky lettuce and receive an envelope filled with cash. In Chinatown, the parade route includes hundreds of stores, and not many teams are up for the time-consuming task these days, says Ing.
“To entice people, and keep the peace, we created two separate random draws (to determine placement), one for groups willing to go to the stores and one for the others.”
The draw for the groups willing to go to the stores generally involves fewer participants, meaning that, for teams really gunning for a front spot, their chances are higher with this option. Nevertheless, it remains that traditions of ranking by animal and then size of animal still trump.
“It goes dragons, unicorns and then lions,” says Ing, explaining that this order has been the case for the Vancouver parade going back some decades. “We don’t want to break that.”
Dragons seem to be prime because the costumes are more expensive and rare. In fact, Danny Quon, head instructor at Hon Hsing, says it was only in 2014 that “somebody gave us a dragon costume.”
Michael Tan, a tech executive who has participated in the parade for nearly 20 years, says the rumours are amusing because, in reality, there is more co-operation that competition.