KUANTAN, Jan 23 (Sin Chew Daily) — It is going to be a different Chinese New Year this year as people are putting up Chinese couplets such as "spending the new year alone", "I want to live" to decline visitors at their doors.

Unlike the traditional practice of visiting one another during Chinese New Year, many start to tell friends and relatives to visit one another in cyberspace and not returning to their hometowns to celebrate the Chinese New Year due to travel ban and lockdown measures imposed by the government to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

The local Chinese are still decorating their homes with red couplets – poetic lines written in calligraphy and Chinese New Year decorations but many of such decorations deliver the message of declining visitors in a subtle manner.

Zhang, a businessman in Kuantan, put up a pair of couplets which read: Friends and relatives, please don't come, I am spending the new year by myself and I do not want angpow and hampers.

Zhang said visitors are not welcomed this year due to the Covid-10 outbreak. 

"I run a restaurant and I have many friends and business associates. Each year, we visit one another during the Chinese New Year. This year, due to the severity of the pandemic and I am very afraid of the coronavirus, we should not visit one another this year."

In jest, Zhang said it would not be nice to decline friends who are already at his doorstep.

Friends who read the pair of couplets at his door would get the subtle hint of turning down visitors.

Zhang said he mooted the idea of delivering the message via the couplets and sought a friend to write in calligraphy for him.

Zhou Yong Jia is another person who put up the creative Chinese couplets of declining visitors.

The pair of couplets that she pasted at her door read: "Spring is not here when COVID-19 is around, no mutual visits for friends and relatives as I wish to live well.

"My wish for this year is to live well," she said.