While everyone was watching the Super Bowl (or at least Super Bowl ads) I watched a short Chinese New Year film produced by 苹果中国 - Apple China - patiently making my way through the subtitles. (My Mandarin listening comprehension is alas still pretty lousy.) It tells a sweet and sweetly predictable story about a little girl growing up in the mountains, warned against the niánshòu 年兽 (a wild beast) by her parents. She ignores them, of course, and becomes besties with the creature, even as her father keeps warning that it eats little children. She's unmoved when he explains (above) that he tried to make her believe those stories to protect her. 让你把故事当真，是为了保护你！
A few years pass, and one year the girl decides to take the beast with her to the village new year's festivities - fine until the fireworks send it running away in terror. (Many new year's traditions are about frightening off scary monsters with light and sound and even the color red.) She runs after it to assure it there's no danger but her parents drag her home. She sneaks out the window into the mountain as the mother starts to wonder if they've been wrong: are the fireworks really there to scare away monsters and not, in fact, to light up the places in the mountains we want to go? 真的是为了赶走那些怪物吗？还是为了照亮山那边，那些我们想去的地方。 What are you really trying to protect her from, she asks her husband. I'm afraid of her growing up, he says, that this house won't hold her. 我怕孩子长大了，这个家留不住她。 I'm afraid that one day we won't be by her side. The more fearless she gets, he says, the more afraid I become. 我怕总有一天，我们会不在她身边。他越是天不怕地不怕，我就越怕。
But something's opened up. Next thing we see the family together going into the mountains to find the nián, and with the closing credits we're treated to the inevitable Chinese New Year scene of a family eating together around a table in their home - including not only the nian but both of the actresses who played the daughter, as a little girl and older! What's this all about? Nián 年 shares a character with the word year (or new year), and every new year's story is a version of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof: change is less frightening than we think - and in any case can't be stopped. But this is an advertisement for Apple (the Apple logo appears at the end as a cute monster face), though there's no electronic device in sight in this rustic village. Or is about Apple, the American company? Fear not!
