English verses for a trendy Spring Festival

English language couplets have become a new and stylish way for young Chinese people to celebrate Spring Festival.

On China's biggest online shopping platform, Taobao, there are dozens of shops selling decorative couplets printed in English. A typical one reads, "Eat well, sleep well, have fun day by day" and "study good, work good, make money more and more".

Yu Runrun, who owns a Beijing shop, expects to sell about 600 sets of English couplets during the holiday season.

"I began to sell English couplets four years ago when I saw a friend from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region hanging couplets hand-lettered in the Mongolian language during Spring Festival," says Yu.

A set of English couplets in his shop costs 25 yuan ($4; 3.20 euros; ￡2.80), almost double the price of Chinese couplets.

"Most of our buyers are young people who want to look cool and are willing to pay extra for fashionable things," Yu says, adding that some send the couplets to foreign friends as gifts.

"Foreigners living in China also buy the English couplets to celebrate the festival, but my English is not good enough to talk with them," says the 33-year-old Beijinger.

Spring Festival couplets - two complementary poetic lines adhering to certain rules - are among the most common and important customs for celebrating Chinese New Year. They are often used to decorate doors and walls to express hope and happiness for the coming year.

Mo Hao, who teaches English at Guangdong University of Foreign Study's South China Business College, bought two sets of such couplets from Taobao, one for himself and the other for his colleague, Benjamin Wolken, who is from the United States. "They are very special and actually quite good-looking, which will certainly stand out," Mo says.

Wolken says, "I would consider buying the couplets for myself, or even make my own set in English, so I can talk more with the people around me to learn Chinese culture and language."

He adds, "I like being a part of the Chinese community, so I enjoy being a part of the traditions."

The key to selling English couplets is that they should consist of very simple words, so that people can easily understand the meaning, says Yu, the shopkeeper.

"Grammar is not important and 'Chinglish' is also acceptable. If the sentence is grammatically incorrect, people will like it even more, just like the well-known and popular Chinglish proverb 'Good good study, day day up'," he says.

After all, Spring Festival should be a happy reunion, he adds.

zoushuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 02/16/2018 page14)