New Year

It is the most important holiday in the lunar calendar, observed all over Asia and in places where overseas Chinese have settled, which is practically every country on earth. The Spring Festival marks the lunar new year, which this time falls on January 31 (for the second year, it has been declared an official holiday).

Much like Christmas and the Gregorian New Year, this is a time when family members come together from far and wide (train stations in China are jampacked at this time of year, when millions of rural folk who sought jobs in factories and urban centers rush to get home), gathering around the dinner table (in olden China families gathered around the hearth, hence the term oui oh, since it was the dead of winter) laden with caloric and cholesterolic delights. But who cares? It’s a time for rejoicing, for celebrating good fortune past, present and future, for setting things right and starting anew on what will hopefully be a good path. Debts are paid off, scores settled (hopefully peacefully so), houses cleaned. Children especially look forward to this time, when they get new clothes and bright red packs containing money, and extra sweets too.

Tradition is different from superstition, but sometimes the lines can be blurred. Because this is a time of beginning anew, the trick is to stack the odds in one’s favor, and I suppose one can never have too much luck, or too many symbols of luck. I am often asked “di ba swerte yan sa inyo,” or the converse “malas ba yan,” and I must confess sometimes, just to fuel the irrationality, I invent answers that have little or no basis in fact or logic, but they fly simply because I’m Tsinoy (the politically incorrect term is intsik, though in my experience it is more often than not used with a dose of affection, or perhaps cariño brutal).

In our family we go by tradition, some practices from the time of my grandmother (and these, obviously, were from the old village in China), some from my parents, some new adaptations. Some of them may very well have roots in superstition, in swerte or malas, but they live on as symbols of heritage, a connection with and respect for our ancestry. We don’t do the 12 or 13 round fruits, but we’ve started a new and rather fun thing involving dozens of kiat (small oranges which are plentiful and extremely sweet this time of year), the Chinese-themed salt and pepper shakers and the lazy susan on our dinner table.

And so, to one and all, from our family hearth to yours, xin nian kwai leh!

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The horse symbols on our cover and on this page are taken from the 2014 calendar of the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) based in Beijing. The calendar features six papercuts of horses, carrying on a tradition of papercutting (jianzhi) that started as early as the 6th century and which had been declared a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. Red is the most common color of papercuts, used as they are as décor on windows of houses, for weddings and for the New Year.