More Chinese New Year!

I’m giving myself one more day off for Chinese New Year. Instead of a weibo post today, let me tell you all about how my family celebrates Chinese New Year!

Some context, everywhere in China has different customs. And within those regions, every family is going to have different customs. My family is not at all representative! This is not really useful information at all for knowing how China works! It’s literally just a data sample of one! Honestly, because I’ve literally never been to anyone else’s place for Chinese New Years, for all I know, my family is the only one who does things this way. But if there are any readers who also celebrate Chinese New Year, I would love to hear about your family’s traditions!

For my family, preparation for Chinese New Year starts almost a month and a half before the actual day, because a vital step is a deep, thorough cleaning of your entire house. And by thorough, I mean thorough. We remove all the window curtains and wash them. We take off all the couch cushion covers and wash them. My grandma will dust every groove of her carved wooden chairs. We wipe down every nook and cranny on our hands and knees. Fortunately, I have apparently displayed enough utter incompetence at cleaning that I have been blessed enough to never be involved in this. I just have to stay in my room and not make any new messes.

While we clean is when we put up all the Chinese New Years decorations too, window stickers, hanging lanterns, and, of course, the most important part, anti-slip carpet from our door to the entrance of our yard.

It’s also pretty important to get out and shop before all the other New Years shoppers sweep the shelves clean. The most important items is new clothing for everyone in the family. This is a tradition left over from back in the day, when the only time you ever got new clothes was for Chinese New Year. Since that’s not the case anymore, my family tries to make it special by buying everyone clothes in a set, like matching Christmas PJs. We went several years with sets of funny New Years t-shirts, before my mom found out about the Singapore tradition of wearing qipao for New Years and decided she loves it. So for the past several years, the whole family has gotten matching qipaos—that is, different designs but same colour schemes. So far, we’ve done red, green, and white.

You also gotta buy snack platters. The standard set is hard candy + assortment of nuts/sunflower seeds + a plate of oranges and apples. Due to my endless craving for ferroro roches, they’ve become a staple lately too. That, and of course, you have to stop by the bank to make withdrawals so you have cash to put in red pockets. My grandma will have a whole desk piled up with red pockets way in advance of Chinese New Years, some labelled for people she definitely knows is coming, some generic. The labelling is different because the amount in the red pockets are different.

Personally, I’m super jealous of how Guangzhou does red pockets, where everyone hands them out to everyone—you can give it to your coworkers, you can give it to your friends, you can give it to your extended family. But each red pocket is very small, anywhere from 2 to 20 RMB. If you get a red pocket that’s 100 RMB, that means you’re super important to that person.

For my hometown, we do things the completely opposite way, where I think the smallest red pocket I’ve ever seen was still 2000 RMB. And you regularly had people showing up with 5K, 10K put in a red pocket. That is a stupid amount of money for a place where average income is only 15K-20K per year, but it more or less works out fine, because they show up to my place, give me two 2500 RMB red pockets for both of my kids. And I’ll say thanks and hand them right back a 5K red pocket for their kid. And a lot of money has changed hands, but no one’s really lost anything.

And to make this work out, a very important job my grandma does each year is guess how much money each family who comes by is going to bring, so she can prepare a red pocket that’s just the right size to give back.

Starting the day before Chinese New Years, as soon as I wake up from my afternoon siesta, the celebrations are in full swing. The whole family gets together to make dumplings. I’ve tried suggesting before that we copy what other provinces do, and maybe try New Years noodles or New Years rice cakes instead, but that got vetoed by my family. Apparently, it just doesn’t feel like New Years without dumplings.

It is fun to spend an afternoon gossiping around the kitchen while we all work though. I’ve been declared too incompetent to even make an attempt at dough kneading or rolling. I’m definitely not allowed to make an attempt to make the stuffing. So along with all the other little kids in the family, I get assigned to the “folding dumplings” station. Typically, we make pork and cabbage dumplings and beef and celery dumplings. There’s been a couple of years where we’ve tried something different, like vegetarian dumplings while I was pregnant and all meat made me throw up, or fish dumplings.

It’s not just stuffing in the dumplings, though. There’s also various little surprises. The luckiest one you can get is money! It means in the next year, you’ll have lots of money. My grandma has a little drawer full of coins that are only used for the purpose of putting into dumplings. They’ve never been in circulation and she disinfects them every year so they’re clean to eat. And while they’re lucky, the problem is, chewing down on metal is…an awful sensation. It honestly makes me so anxious, that I split my dumpling up to look inside before eating it. Everyone in my family thinks this is totally cheating.

For one year, my grandma experimented with paper bills instead, where you fold the paper bill up into a tiny square and wrap it in shrink wrap and put it into a dumpling. This was even worse, because I’ll end up chewing on it for a long time thinking it’s just a tough part of the dumpling I’m not getting through.

In addition to money, there’s also peanuts (meaning you’ll have lots of kids), jujube (meaning you’ll have lots of kids), chestnuts (meaning you’ll have lots of kids), or candy (meaning your next year will be sweet).

It’s sort of like a Chinese New Years gacha, if you think about it, where money is the SSR card. My luckiest record so far is 7 coins in one sitting.

By the way, if money in your food isn’t bad enough, coming up on a piece of hard candy in a pork and cabbage flavoured dumpling is actively godawful in my mouth. That’s definitely the one-star trash card nobody wants.

Dumplings are the star of the show, but there’s other food at Chinese New Years too. But that changes every year based on what people feel like making. The staple we have every year is pork jelly—yes, jelly made out of pork skin, with pork bits inside. I swear it’s a lot tastier than it sounds! Honestly, despite the big spread, almost all of it goes to waste, because everyone is saving their appetite to eat as many dumplings as possible, to get more rolls at that gacha.

Back in the day, after eating dinner, we’d swap red pockets just within our family, and then all sit down to watch the Spring Festival Gala, which runs from about 8PM to midnight. And then, we’d go to bed. Or, well, it’s more like we’d take a power nap, because at 4AM, my grandma is up again, ready to receive guests.

Since my grandma’s getting up there in age, and since Spring Festival Galas have become increasingly low quality, at some point in the past couple of years, my family’s decided that proper sleep is more important than watching the show, so nowadays, we just go to bed at 9PM after dinner. (I still totally stay up to watch the show though. I can chug coffee. It’s okay.)

Proper Chinese New Year day is like Chinese trick or treating. Anyone who’s feeling active, usually the men of the family, would go out into the village and trudge through the snow door to door, delivering red pockets, sending greetings. Anyone who’s fearful of the cold stays at home and receives guests from other families. I live in a small village, so everyone knows everyone, so basically the whole village will come over at one point or another in an endless stream. People come in, have a small performative politeness fight over the red pockets, exchange a couple of greetings, grab a handful of nuts or candy, and move on. Once anyone in the family gets a red pocket, we all hand it to my aunt, who’s sitting at a table, opening these red pockets up and writing down how much money is in them (yes, right in front of the guests).

I never get to keep the red pockets, except maybe the ones I get from my parents. Even the ones I get from my grandma and grandpa, I give over to my parents and they find a way to give it back. So really, as a kiddo, what I mainly got out of Chinese New Year was just the endless supply of candy.

The visitors would cease round about 10AM. As a kid, this confused the shit out of me. I just don’t see why we all have to get up that early. Why can’t we just start Chinese New Years at 8AM and have it go on to noon? Wouldn’t that be much more comfortable? And my grandma was like, “But if you don’t get up until 8AM, everyone will gossip about how you’re lazy.”

After all the visitors are gone, we go up to the Buddhist temple in the hills and make some offerings and prayers there. Apparently, we’re not the only family who has a schedule like this, because the temple is always insanely packed. There’s no line or anything either. You just have to violently elbow people in the ribs until you can force your way through to the front, where you can quickly prostrate yourself, hope you don’t get trampled to death, and do the quickest prayer for fortune and health you possibly can before someone else elbows you in the face to get to the front.

This was something we only really when I was a little kid. As far as I remember, every since middle school, my family has decided “fuck that”, and gotten a tiny buddha statue to set up in our house and decided praying from home is just as good.

And after that, we have lunch. and my dad will set off to the graveyard to make New Years offerings to our ancestors.

Back in the day, you got to go to your individual family graves and burn offerings to them right in front of their grave. But with all the dry undergrowth and wood around in the mountains, almost every year, someone would screw up and start a forest fire and everyone would have to spend the rest of the day fighting a fire. So at some point, people apparently decided enough was enough, and built a big giant oven at the entrance of the graveyard, and now we all collectively burn offerings there.

My dad is all like, “Well, there’s no point then, is there? What’s the point of burning everything in one big collective oven? How would they know which ghost it’s for?” So now, he doesn’t even try to be sincere anymore.

A lot of other families make a tradition of standing by the oven and speaking out loud, telling their passed loved ones about what happened in this past year. My dad is just like, “Welp. Here ya go.” *Heaves up a giant bundle of paper gold/houses/cars/iPhones/servants/Covid vaccines* *Dumps it all into the oven*

And then he leaves, and the whole thing takes like 40 seconds.

At this point, Chinese New Year proper is more or less wrapped up. The tradition in my hometown is that married women visit their original families on the third day after the New Year, so that’s when we visit my maternal grandparents for a whole day and eat with them.

About three days after New Years is when work starts back up too, so then it just returns to life as normal.

But my grandma’s work still isn’t done! After Chinese New Years, she has to go over the book with my aunt, and compare how much money we put in our red pockets versus how much money we got in red pockets, and calculate out who we’ve accidentally shorted. Like perhaps my grandma predicted her second youngest sister would come by with 8K in red pockets, but she actually brought 10K, so we shorted her 2000 RMB. So my grandma would list out all the families that we’ve shorted, and make a point to visit them throughout the week to make it even. When I was little, my parents would be back at work at this point, so I would be forced to come along with my grandma because there are no adults in the house. And I always dreaded and hated this part, because while the politeness fights on Chinese New Years itself is very short and brief since everyone is in a hurry, it can become a very elaborate and painstaking ordeal afterwards. I have seen my grandma spend four and a half hours arguing with someone over money that I knew they were going to take. It’s literally the most boring thing in the world for a 6 year old.

And of course, we gotta make sure we’re home at the right points too, for people who are visiting us because they’ve accidentally shorted us. And that’s another long, drawn-out politeness fight, but at least I can go to my room and read my book and ignore it.

The 15th day after Chinese New Years is when we take all the decorations down. And at this point, if there are still any candy left around, they disappear into a little tin sewing box in my grandma’s room and get handed out slowly over time as rewards for eating all my vegetables.

Both my kids are way too small now to have any idea what’s going on, but I’m really looking forward to the day they’ll really get to participate in all of this. It’s fun to imagine sitting around a kitchen island making dumplings with them, and the way their faces might light up when they find a coin in their dumplings.

Maybe, one day, I’ll be trusted enough to be taught the dark magic that is dumpling skin making.

Or I’ll just buy store bought skins. That seems easier.