Another year has passed. Hurray! We survived the last one!

If you live in Taiwan, “New Year’s" lasts for a month or even longer. The real new year starts closer to or in February for Chinese people. But people have started New Year’s celebrations on the western calendar in the recent decades. It’s called 跨年 (kua nian) which means crossing over the year. In Taipei, the government and the entertainment industry collaborate to put on a show right outside Taipei 101 that starts a couple of hours before the fireworks and continues afterwards. I’ve been living in Taiwan for 8 years. In this time, the attempts to make the fireworks surrounding the same building even more spectacular than the previous year, no matter what country the specialists are from each time, have looked pretty much the same to me. The shows, as I’ve seen on TV most years, consist of singing for the most part. It’s more like a concert featuring many different popular local singers.

When I ask my students what they do on New Year’s Eve, those who have a plan normally do one of the forms of watching Taipei 101 explode in fireworks. Whether it is with friends or alone, right at the scene or from a bridge, it seems that the new western year should start with the fireworks. So you can only imagine the crowds on that day. It has been an annual challenge to the Taipei Metro Company to successfully transport people home afterwards. They even have designated workers who entertain the mass while they’re stuck waiting to reach the entrance of the metro and, who knows when, to get on a train. This is the main reason why I’ve never done a public New Year’s Eve event. Never at Taipei 101, never at Stephansplatz in Vienna, never on The Strip in Vegas, never at the River Main in Frankfurt.

New year’s resolutions is not a thing here. Taiwanese people have something similar, but in a form of a wish. 新年新希望 is a new wish for the new year. People hope and wish for things to get better, but don’t make promises to themselves and take it into their own hands. As someone who makes resolutions for the sheer fun of it, whether a promise or a wish, I think the result is the same in the end.