I went to my parents home for the New Year and discovered that my mom have thrown out their sofas. Now, my uncle and aunt came for the New year, all of us had to stand in the living room. My mom said this way we can lose some weight.
Inside China, Lunar (Chinese) New Year is mostly called Spring Festival, because it is around the time spring is returning to northern hemisphere. You might still feel cold, but the sun is working really hard to warm everything up. The trees and shrubs know it very well.
It is the very beginning, right before the hard work to get the crops into the fields. People are resting, seeing each other, having some fun.
In the past, the preparation and activities started one month before. Nowadays, it depends - as we mentioned in our last newsletter, some family outsources the New Year eve dinner to restaurants, saving time for more fun. Traditionally, on New Year day, you visit relatives and eat leftover from the sumptuous New Year eve dinner and precooked food (which were prepared in the weeks leading up to New Year eve and left to be frozen outside your home) till 15th of Jan of Lunar calendar. There are also lion dances, local theatre performances, fireworks.
In the old days, children were the happiest because you get to have new clothes, candies, good food to eat, and if you made mistakes, the adults would not shout at you or beat you up. And if you were lucky, you got the red envelopes, aka Yasuiqian, the cash that “slow you down from growing up”. Why? Because being adult is sad, I guess. Normally the money was of small quantity. But since we never had pocket money, it was a very big deal.
That was a long time ago. Now, as I understand, everything is inflated, so is Yasuiqian.
I remember counting the days to Spring festival since the fall, and the joy of getting candies from the kindergarten on the last day before Spring festival. Each candy was so sweet.
Now, with social media, I can see how people do the spring festival their own way. For example, this tweet amused me:
I went to my parents home for the New Year and discovered that my mom have thrown out their sofas. Now, my uncle and aunt came for the New year, all of us had to stand in the living room. My mom said this way we can lose some weight.
Is the mother just being subtly passive aggressive because she does not like these guests??
A Chinese in Canada posted his dinner photo, he said this is standard in Tianjin where he is from:
The dishes are (clock wise from upper left corner): fried peanuts, red-cooked pork belly, pork meat balls, thousand year old eggs (considered the most disgusting food by some TV shows in the west), cold cut of cooked meat and sausages, fish, shrimps, stir fried lotus roots (must be bought in Chinese super market).
Hot pot is food that you cook when you eat: in the pot in the center there is prepared base broth. There can be two chambers, one for spicy food, one for non-spicy food. Plates of food ready to be dumped into the soup are arranged around the pot. The three small bowls in front of the pot are chopped garlic, cilantro and chilly pepper, to enhance the flavour of the food. At the end, you can throw in noodles in the broth and have a warm bowl of noodle soup.
The fruit and snack tray is also quite standard, recently pistachios have replaced peanuts, because of globalization:
The owner of the photo said she designed the steamed bum herself. Well done.
The dishes are (clock wise from Winnie the Pooh): eggplants, vegetable, slow cooked pork with skin on, pork meat balls, eggplants again, shrimps. In the middle are fish and stick rice with beans (a dessert dish).
The main attraction is a signature Cantonese dish: roasted suckling pig.
Twelve dishes with dumplings. It is a lot: The owner of the photo said they finished all.
It seems that the drinks in the photo with red yellow blue colours on the boxes are popular drinks for the New Year dinner, according to a Chinese American reporter.
It is made in Hainan province.
Fish is very popular in the New Year dinner because it sounds the same as “redundancy”. Redundancy is good, it means you have more than you need. So everyone should eat fish for a good year.
Dumplings are also a very popular new year dish, often in the north region where people are famous for their skills and taste of dumplings. It is important that the whole family make dumplings together. When you close the skin of each dumpling, you are squeezing the mouth of “small people”, so they can’t bad mouth you in the coming year. “Small people” are your enemies.
Look at this dumpling, I am mouth watering already.
This is posted by LAI PIN-YU of Taiwan, who is a member of parliament.
On the left, the character is “Tiger”, on the right, the four character says: “cute-tiger-presents-good luck”.
It is important to say things for good luck all day long.
Not every Chinese celebrate the New Year. Yours truly, normally don’t celebrate because it is just a normal day with work. Some times, I make dumplings, but it is just too much work when it is done all by myself, LOL.
On Twitter, a Chinese woman tweeted her not celebrating:
This is my six years overseas all by myself. I have no sense of belonging and no sense of ritual. For a person like me, today is just like any other day.
Later she posted a picture of herself going to skateboard.
The CCTV new year eve gala got very few comments, because, alas, criticisms are not welcome on Weibo.
On Twitter, most people say the gala is just boring as hell, as usual. But a few of the performance got some good comments. I am posting the links so you can click and see the performance for yourself.
This is considered the best part of the gala.
This is from Beijing TV, some people love it.
Two years ago, the CCP started forbidding public schools teach Mongolian language and it created a backlash among the ethnic group in Inner Mongolia.
This year they are allowed to sing in the language on CCTV. You can see the performance by clicking.
Of course they released this because they think it will convince us that the Uyghurs are okay, I guess.
Did you know that there was a football match on Feb 1st (the New Year day) between the men’s Chinese national team and the Vietnamese national team?
I did not know. I didn’t even know what the match is for. Turned out it is for qualification to the World Cup.
But, it made many Chinese talking, complaining that the men’s football team is way way worse than the New year Gala. Why? because the national team lost 1:3.
Someone posted a very sharp comment:
(rough translation) Suppose there is no international matches in football, the image of Chinese football team would be: we have achieved in the past few decades what the western country achieved in the last few hundreds of years. In the numbers of clubs, number of audience, amount of investment, the scale of the market, we are the first class among the world. What is more, the football system that is already of Chinese characteristics has created new football theories, new strategies of positioning the players. Anyone without prejudice can never deny such achievement.
If you replace the “football system” with “political system”, this is exactly the same propaganda trotted out for years.
On Twitter the woman in chains that was forced to give birth to 8 children (from our last newsletter) is still the main topic. I will provide a follow-up in another newsletter.
Meanwhile, enjoy the year of tiger. It already starts well.