FEATURE: The Real Meaning of Chinese New Year

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Welcome to the 4704th Lunar New Year observed by the Chinese and many other Asians. It’s the year of the dog, one of the 12 animal zodiac signs in the Chinese horoscope that predicts the person one becomes based on the “12 earthly branches” and the 5 elements – wood, earth, metal, fire and water. Food for thought and some serious snooping just to tame that curiosity cat, eh?

It is certainly humbling to declare that despite its long and intricate history, this is only the 30th Chinese New Year I celebrate this year. Well, that is if you don’t count the time I was battling the amniotic waters of my mother’s womb to make the 1976 celebration but alas, still missed the finish line by more than a month. That made a Dragon out of me though, for which I consider myself truly blessed.

Umm… 30 may sound a tad bit too many in human years but hey, look at the big picture, folks. For almost 5000 years, people have been celebrating the Spring Festival, another name by which the Lunar New Year is known as (more so in Chinese-speaking cultures than the Banana Republic where its people are Chinese by birth but have a Western outlook).

In as many ways as the festival is known in different parts of the world, so is the Lunar New Year celebrated differently. Although all of them last exactly 15 days, the significance of each day blurs across geographical, cultural and generational borders. Likewise, legends, folklores and superstitions handed down the generations are caught in the tide of time whose ebb and flow erode the storytelling as new versions spring forth but the essence of these ancient tales is never once lost. They have triumphed to found the Chinese community’s unique identity as one of the oldest cultural civilizations in the world.

With the many tales and their numerous versions, so what, then, constitutes the real meaning of the Chinese New Year?

Growing up, Chinese New Year was the one thing I looked forward to the whole year. To a certain extent, I still do. For obvious reasons – the new clothes, the holidays, the never-ending and mostly great food, drinks, cakes and snacks, AND above and beyond – the ‘ang pows’! It’s no wonder that even on New Year’s Day itself, I was already wondering just how far ahead was the next one…

Many of my fondest memories of the Chinese New Year are not of the holiday itself but of the preparation for the big day. Even a boring, dirty, tiresome whole-day-wasted task like Spring Cleaning holds some cherished memories. I don’t know if ‘spring cleaning’ is an original word in the English dictionary or borrowed from the Chinese initiative of ‘cleaning for the Spring Festival celebrations’. We believe that discarding old things and clearing the dust signify a change in fortune – done with the bad, hail the good. Don’t ask what happens if the year has been a good one, and if spring cleaning might inadvertently turn up … worse fortunes? I don’t have the answer because when I asked the same question in an attempt to talk my mom out of spring cleaning, the only answer that I got was to keep the day free and say no more.

Spring cleaning was a family affair. Even my grandmother, at more than 80 years of age and then well into her 90s, chipped in. That, in itself, has a charming quality to it because it’s not very often that the whole family gets to come together and… do something. And then there are those precious moments of reminiscence – digging up old photos of the little imps that we were (and the devils that we’ve grown into… hehe) and paraphernalia that we simply refused to throw away for one sentimental reason or another. These ubiquitous moments of nostalgic sighs and hollering laughter are worth the dirt and sweat of cleaning. Besides, it’s really not asking too much to clean the house just once in a year, is it?

When I was very little, my mom would join her colleagues on a ‘baking day out’ closer to the Chinese New Year, every year. Mom was a smart student, learning great cookie recipes from her wonderful colleagues, improvising and improving each year so that now, she makes the best ‘kuih bangkit’ and butter cookies (not the Kjeldsens type) in the world!

Although she makes far less new year cookies these day because her arms and legs (us!) are only home on the few days before New Year’s Day, we used to help her with all the baking when we were still in school over a few days in the month before the festival. Because we did not have an oven, we depended on ‘tao sar bia’ (traditional Chinese green bean biscuit) factories to bake the cookies.

Mom would mix the dough at home and when all’s ready, mother and daughters would take the 15-minute walk to the nearest factory. At the factory, we would quickly get down to business, sometimes with new year songs playing in the background, adding to the festive mood!

It’s usually not till evening that we could call it a day but at the sight of the delicious cookies and oh, how heavenly they smelled, fatigue was completely forgotten as everyone scrambled for a piece of the freshly baked goodies. Mom would usually let us have our way provided we knew when to stop. After all, those cookies were meant for the new year and that’s only when we should feast….

Cookies aside, the real delicacies are sumptuous, important dishes (translated – we never get to eat these at other times of the year, at least at a single spread) which are offered to the ancestors as a connection to our past, inviting our ‘whole’ family to usher in the new year, as a way of saying thanks to the deceased for watching over the living members and providing the good luck which they have enjoyed in the past year and hopefully in the new one too.

It would be quite impossible to list the entire menu here as the food display usually takes up 2 sizeable tables but here are some more significant ones – braised sea cucumbers with pork and shitake mushrooms, braised eggs with pork, “tau kua” (hard beancurd), black fungus and sometime with ‘fa cai’ (a hair-like vegetable that we kids used to confuse with seaweed), white fungus/long cabbage/fish ball soup.

Traditional cakes include the hand-beaten egg cake, ‘huat kueh’ (a must for the Chinese New Year as a symbol of prosperity for the year ahead), yam cake (steamed yams will do just fine too as all this dish represents is abundance in the family line), and my grandma’s specialty and a cake unique to the Hokkiens – a springy rice cake that is best eaten with the braised meat dishes above.

A whole fish, either steamed or fried, is offered for abundance, usually wealth, as the pronunciation of fish in Chinese - ‘yu’ - means leftover and is part of the Chinese adage, ‘nian nian you yu’, which means there’s leftover of the things that matter (money, health, luck) every year. The chicken, usually offered as a whole (including the innards) albeit chopped up, is simmered in fragrant sesame oil, ginger and button mushroom. Boy, just writing about these makes my mouth water!

New year shopping for the family would include procuring these food stuff, especially the dried ones like the sea cucumbers, mushrooms, fungi, etc. The atmosphere was thick with festivity as people throng the stores. It was as delightful learning about the different dried seafoods as watching the women exchanging recipes.

Shopping for new year clothes was definitely one of the highlights every year. Probably not for mom, who very often was dismayed at our fastidious taste in clothes. We would spend the whole day mall hopping and would sometimes end up buying none, rendering a second day of endless shopping necessary. Sometimes, mom would disagree with our choices because we should wear red (for good luck!) but other colours seemed somewhat more fashionable... What can I say, but girls just wanna be pretty, especially on New Year’s Day!

Another feature of Chinese New Year in Melaka is the small but bustling bazaar at Kee Ann Road, off the once-upon-a-time hangout of Jalan Bunga Raya where shops and malls lined the narrow one-way street. Modernization has gradually but surely re-directed the shopping traffic to hipper malls like Mahkota Parade, Jaya Jusco and Tesco, leaving only the most nostalgic of merchants holding onto their stores along this shopping belt of bygone days. Yet, these small traditional businesses are the saving grace of Melaka, reeling the historic city from the vacuum of modernization.

Kee Ann Road comes alive every night for a month, up to New Year’s Eve, for as long as I can remember. We would take casual evening strolls to eventually end up amongst the crowd, savouring samples of cookies and candies of myriad flavours and colours. Undoubtedly one of my most cherished memories was that one year, when I was still real little (below 10, I believe), the whole family went out together (dad would usually prefer to beat the crowd) the evening before New Year’s Eve and ended up having duck noodles at one of the hawkers along Kee Ann. I love that occasion for 2 main reasons – one, because that’s the first time I had duck noodles (my family is more into chickens, and I don’t mean it in a bad way) and two, because we hardly ate out, especially not with my father who prefers the more hygienic home-cooked meals. We had a blast that night.

Come New Year’s Eve, it is an annual ritual of waking up early when it’s still dark to help with kitchen chores that would eventually give us that sumptuous meal mentioned further up. When Grandma was still around (she passed away in 2003), the first smells of her terrific cooking was the alarm clock. Even if our eyelids were still heavy with sleep, it was quite impossible to drift back to sleep with that wonderful smell stealing its way into our nostrils. Mom would come a-calling anyway, for an early trip to the market to grab the freshest prawns, veges and poultry (the porky dishes had been cooked the previous day to hasten the cooking process on the actual day).

At around 10 a.m., most of the dishes are ready. The tables would also have been laid out in front of the ancestral altar and the red canvas ribbon is up framing the doorway, another of many Chinese New Year decorations that herald vibrancy and good cheer in the new year. This is a day when most of the family will gather and offer their prayers to the ancestors. In a way, it’s thanksgiving, and also to pray for a smooth-sailing, healthy and prosperous year ahead. It is also reunion day; regardless of distance and time constraints, the family will be whole again when all members, young and old, gather for a meal.

Unlike many families who have reunion dinners, we usually have reunion lunch. And no steamboat to boot. Not that I crave it because I’ve always been partial to steamboat meals. Besides, all these great food that have been heartily prepared over 2 days certainly beat the everyday-steamboat!

In the evening, we would give the house a good wash in preparation of another offering at night, this time to usher in the new year with the blessings of the Gods. Fruits and various designated sweets are prepared. The ceremony begins at around 11 pm, with the whole family offering prayers for a good year.

After the clock strikes 12, ‘ang pows’ are handed out by mom, who at the same time blesses us with good fortune in our studies and now, careers, as well as life in general. These are called ‘ya sui qian’, which promise good life and longevity. Traditionally, children would go to bed with these ‘ang pows’ from their parents tucked under their pillows. It is also believed that the later the children stay up (‘shou ye’), the longer their parents live. Although these are just folklore, it is indeed a rare opportunity for children to stay up way past their usual bedtime to just watch tv, chat or have a game of cards.

In the years of growing up, most of these annual rituals remain albeit with marked variations. The holidays during my adolescent years became a show time – a time to catch all the music award shows that all the tv channels seem to have waited a whole year to show them all at the same time. As obsessed as I am with pop music, no one could pluck me out of my seats when these went on air. And then I left home for Singapore for an excruciating 3 years of undergraduate education. Show time traded for study time as the psychotic lecturers and tutors had to have mid-term tests scheduled right after the New Year celebrations. Only when I began working that the holidays were a complete bliss again, but with an expiry date that came far too soon.

Time spent with family and friends in completely relaxed, bonding-conducive climate is over with a blink of the eye. Although I’ve never taken a real liking to relative-visiting, not especially since the ‘ang pows’ diminish with our growing ability to ‘make money’ and the steady rise of nosey questions (come on, I don’t have to spell these out. You must have heard them a hundred times), I recognize the significance of this practice.

It’s the real meaning of the Chinese New Year – a celebration of family ties and friendship.

Medicine for the curiosity cat:
Wikipedia's Chinese New Year
Meaning of the 15 Days of Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year Taboos
Chinese Zodiac Signs