While Taiwan and others in Asia ring in the lunar Year of the Rabbit this week, Vietnamese are purring about the coming Year of the Cat.
Exactly why and when Vietnam dumped the rabbit and adopted the cat for its version of the 12 signs of the horoscope taken from China is up for debate and may have been partly the result of a complex translation error.
These days, though, the idea of hopping back to the rabbit would be highly disagreeable to most Vietnamese.
Photo: Reuters
Besides the cat, the other 11 signs are the ox, tiger, dragon, snake, rat, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Each is believed to bring its own peculiar and unique characteristics to the cycle.
“It’s appropriate that the Vietnamese swapped the cat into the calendar in place of the rabbit. Rabbits are a kind of rodent and the rat is also a rodent. The animals should be different,” pet enthusiast Nguyen Bao Sinh said.
The cat helps offset the dog, its natural enemy, said Sinh, who runs a pet hotel in Hanoi that charges 500,000 dong (US$25.65) a night per animal for a stay.
“This expresses a balance of yin and yang in the cosmos that is more complete, that better unifies the contradictions, and so it is richer and better to have the cat,” he added.
In China, the rabbit is thought to be one of the happiest signs, with people born in that year renowned for their kindness, reliability and loyalty, though with an air of mystery. In Vietnam, rabbits are considered food.
Cats also appear on the occasional menu as “little tigers,” although the practice of eating them is technically banned.
To most, though, they are clean, sociable and smart companions, and their year brings high hopes for harmony.
“The image of the cat is cultured and the nature of a cat is gentle, sociable and close to people,” said Hoang Ngoc Bao, a veterinarian and cat enthusiast.
“I want that gentleness, that sociability that is special to cats to make our society better so that we can live for the community and more humanely,” he said.
At an outdoor pet market not far away, Hanoi resident Cao Thu Ha was buying a new cat for the New Year, saying that cats are like children in bringing happiness to a family.
Fashion boutique owner Khuc Hoai Thuong has had about 20 cats over the years and is also a believer.
“When people have a love of pets, their demeanor is softened a bit,” said Thuong, who brought a two-month-old kitten to Sinh’s hotel shop to buy a new red satin outfit and to get groomed.
Pet shows have celebrated the coming year, with a feline show in Hanoi last week crowning a portly Siamese “Miss Cat.”
“I hope that in the New Year all people and all animals are healthy and have good luck and success,” said the cat’s owner, Nguyen Minh Ngoc. “I also hope that in the New Year there are more cat shows like this so that all the cats can show off their lovability.”
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS