On Lunar New Year

when homesickness feels the most poignant & starting my own new year's tradition in America.

📚 Every Tiny Thought is where I share book reviews on diverse stories from around the world (occasionally before the publication date), tiny joyous things, and finding home in America. If you’re new here, welcome!

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Since I moved to the U.S. in 2012 for education, celebrating Lunar New Year in the U.S. has always been bittersweet for me. It’s the time of the year when all families come together to celebrate the New Year. Yet, since I left home more than 10 years ago, Lunar New Year has also been the time when homesickness feels the most poignant and helpless for me.

Growing up, my Lunar New Year celebration was usually a multi-day, and sometimes a week-long event. Leading up to the New Year, adults would clean the house from the inside out, gift each other fruits and goodies, and plan the menu for the big feast. On New Year’s eve, my parents and my uncles would take turns hosting the dinner every year which usually consisted of 10-15 family members. Then we’d watch TV, snack, and count down to the New Year together. When it is midnight, we’d go outside and the adults would light firecrackers to celebrate the first day of the New Year. My grandmother, the most hardcore of us all, would play mahjong all night long with her friends until the crack of dawn and then go to the temple to burn incense to pray for the whole family. The following week would be visiting more distanced family members in the countryside, paying respect to our ancestors, and enjoying feasts after feasts. We’d gather again as a whole family on the 15th Day of the Lunar New Year to celebrate 元宵节， the Lantern Festival, to conclude the celebration.

Photo by Yuwei Shaw on Unsplash

During college, I never went back to China for the New Year’s celebration because the time coincides with the beginning of the spring semester. Although there were always Chinese students I knew at the time who were bold enough to skip one or two weeks of classes to spend their Lunar New Year in China. I always envied them, but I cared too much about the consequence of missing attendance at the time. Thus, my celebration had watered down to a dinner at the only not-so-Americanized Chinese restaurant in my small college town with other Chinese students, followed by a quick video chat with my family back home that had gathered together without me. The “holiday spirit” would then be quickly washed over by the upcoming dues and the busy class schedule.

Four years of college and two years of graduate school later, when I thought I could finally go home for a proper Lunar New Year’s dinner with my hard-earned vacation days, 2020 came around and the world shut down. Fast forward to today, I still had not been able to spend the Lunar New Year with my family in China, more than a decade since I first left. What I didn’t know was that the 2012 Lunar New Year would be the last one that I spent with my paternal grandparents. My grandmother passed away in 2019 and my grandfather in 2022 after a stroke. One of the most painful and poignant truths about living far away from where you grow up is that you never know when would be the last time that you would see someone.

a photo my mom sent me right before the 2017 Lunar New Year letting me know that they just finished decorating and were ready for the celebration.

Over the last decade living in the US, I moved around every couple of years, for school and for work. Even though I always had a home to go back to at the end of the day, I felt transient. In 2021 in Review, I wrote about feeling at home in America for the first time, after moving to California to be with my partner. Maybe it’s because I was finally settling down in one place after moving every couple of years, or the San Francisco Bay Area feels more like home to me than all the other places I have lived in the U.S.

Last year around this time, we walked around Oakland Chinatown where 年货 (goodies for the new year) were being sold, purchased ingredients for the new year’s eve dinner, and decorated our apartment for the festivity. It wasn’t quite like what we had growing up, but it felt familiar, nice, and warm. After many years of being the only or one of the very few Asians in most spaces, simply being around people who look like me and who share my cultural traditions made me feel lighter and almost liberated. I was no longer Asian. I was just me.

the grocery market and the fish market in Oakland Chinatown during the Lunar New Year - the busiest time of the year.

This past week, my partner and I decided to visit Oakland Chinatown again, to make it a tradition. We strolled around the markets, looking at mouth-watering goods and buying ingredients for the hotpot dinner we were having later that evening. Conversations in Cantonese were flying around me among the cashiers, the butchers, and the customers. Some I understood, but most I didn’t. For as long as I’ve been in the U.S., I never thought about what it means to truly belong. But this chaotic, festive energy and the shared holiday spirit with strangers around me certainly feel like I belong here, at least for this moment.

Fruits and rice cakes for new year's prosperity. They are so ordinarily laid out on the side of the streets, yet such a rare scene in my memory from the last decade.

A few hours later, we walked home carrying groceries bags full of fruits that signal good fortune and prosperity, rice cakes that represent yearly advancements (年糕), and festival decorations for the apartment that are so over the top. It was the time to be over the top. I was tired from the walk but content and grateful. Even though I still couldn’t celebrate the new year with my family this year, I found another place that indulged me in my cultural celebrations and traditions. It can never replace home, but it gets pretty darn close.

Tiny Joyous Things

I am taking time off from work this week to spend some time in the Sierra Nevada mountains before I start a new job in two weeks. Writers talk about having writing retreats to focus, recenter, and write. I see this little getaway as my own “writing retreat “ with no itinerary planned but an intention to read and write. It was nice to get away and even nicer to see snow again after living in Michigan for two years.

New York Times Cooking released a video of two Asian food writers, Genevieve Ko and Sue Li, talking about making Lunar New Year sesame treats. The video is as delightful to watch as the treats they’re making.

Thank you, always, for being here. I will be back soon with another book review. Tell me in the comments, what are some of the tiny joys you’ve experienced this week?

— Yuezhong