‘Year of the Dog’ headliner: Did China discover America?

I asked a cousin the other day how they were celebrating tonight, the eve of the Lunar New Year.

She gave me this do-you-really-have-to-ask look and said, "We eat, what else?"

Eating is, of course, the most important part of the Chinese new year celebration. A full plate — or, since we are entering the Year of the Dog, a full food bowl — and, more importantly, a full stomach are the best indicators of one’s fortune for the year ahead.

In Chinese communities across the country and around the world, families gather together tonight to keep alive the tradition of wei-lo or "gathering around the hearth" and sharing a bountiful meal, with enough leftovers to ensure that there will be food on the table all of next year.

In China, rural peasants who sought work in cities have been returning home in droves, prompting what news reports characterize as "the biggest movement of humanity on earth," as many as 3.8 million train commuters a day.

Reuters news service quoted state media as saying migrant workers in southern China have resorted to "wearing adult diapers on packed trains heading home for the Lunar New Year because they have no access to a toilet," leading to a 50-percent increase in the sale of adult diapers in the southern city of Foshan.

The Lunar New Year is the biggest and most important holiday for the Chinese, now increasingly celebrated as well by a world enamored with all things Tsinoys. The big news as we enter the Year of the Dog is the proposition that Chinese explorer Zheng He discovered America long before Columbus did, part of the voyages the legendary Chinese admiral undertook from 1405 to 1433. This proposition is bolstered by an old map recently displayed in Beijing, as well as by the bestseller "1421: the Year China Discovered America" by British writer Gavin Menzies, who says Zheng He led a fleet of 300 ships and 30,000 men to the American continent in the early 15th century.

In the Philippines, where Chinese merchants did brisk trade with the locals long before Magellan came around, tikoy or sweet rice cakes in bright red boxes are selling better than the proverbial hotcakes. So are oranges, grapes, apples and kiat (small oranges), all red and round and almost double in price this past week, ensuring prosperity at least for the fruit vendors.

All Chinese restaurants are booked to capacity for dinner tonight, as more families opt to eat out rather than go through the hassle and rigors of cooking a multi-course feast at home.

And the new year’s eve meal can be nothing less than a feast. Meats and seafood, vegetables and sweets populate the family table. My mother used to tell us that in China, where harsh winters usually mean a scarcity of food, especially for poor rural peasants like most of the ancestors of today’s Tsinoys, families save up for months for a sumptuous meal. Fattened hens and pigs are slaughtered and cooked, and the stoves burn non-stop for days steaming rice cakes both savory and sweet.

Rice cakes, especially of the sticky variety to foster family unity or sticking together, are a feature of the new year’s eve table, as are noodles for long life, and, for those of us from Fujian, huat que, a sort of Chinese puto that contains yeast, to indicate an enlarging or rising (huat) of one’s fortune.

Other so-called "lucky food" seems to be a later — and decidedly commercial, these being promoted largely by restaurants — addition to the roster of new year’s practices, as is the belief of wearing polka dots to indicate money (leading some smart aleck to propose wearing rectangles for higher monetary value).

Geomancers and fortune tellers are doing brisk business with predictions for the Year of the Dog — which starts tomorrow and ends on Feb. 17, 2007 — as well as giving advice on how to counter negative indications and improve the odds for having a good year. To find out which of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals you were born under and how you will fare in the coming year, check out STARweek magazins’s feature on the Year of the Dog in tomorrow’s edition of The STAR.