Lunar New Year has always been the most important holiday in my family. Growing up in China, I would travel to the northern coastal province of Shandong to celebrate with my dad’s side of the family. It was a time for me to reunite with relatives I only get to see a few times every year.
When I moved to the United States at the age of 12, one of the largest adjustments I faced was accepting the fact that Lunar New Year didn’t hold as much significance as it did back home. While some parts of my county had larger Asian populations, I could count the number of students in my grade who celebrated Lunar New Year on one hand.
In Shandong, I spent most of the days leading up to Lunar New Year with my cousins — we would go outside and run errands while the parents were busy preparing the meal. Like many families, we ate traditional foods with rich, symbolic meaning during our New Year’s Eve dinner. Fish, for example, symbolizes prosperity and abundance. Dumplings, a common celebratory dish in northern China, represent wealth because they resemble the shape of a gold Chinese currency. After dinner, we would watch Lunar New Year programs like the “Spring Festival Gala” and kill time waiting for midnight by playing majiang, also known as mahjong.
To my dismay, I was greeted with none of that in Irvington, New York — a suburban town about 25 miles north of NYU. Unlike in Shandong, Lunar New Year was regarded as a foreign holiday to most. There were no children buzzing with excitement awaiting their red envelopes, no communal decorations and certainly not much Chinese food. Despite the lack of festivity in my new home, I found solace in being able to celebrate the holiday with my immediate family. The door to my house was decorated with traditional banners and posters expressing wishes and luck for the coming year, and I helped my mom make dumplings for our New Year’s and New Year’s Eve dinners.
I have always been accompanied by my immediate family for past celebrations — but this is my first year, like many other East and Southeast Asian students, celebrating New Year’s alone.
This year, Lunar New Year falls on Wednesday, Jan. 29. The holiday is not federally recognized, nor is it one that NYU recognizes in its academic schedule. That does not, however, stop students from finding their own ways of celebrating the holiday. Lunar New Year is a time for new beginnings, wishes for good luck and reuniting with family. While many students might be far away from home when the clock strikes midnight, celebrating the new year at college offers a unique opportunity to form connections that span oceans, and perhaps even to create new traditions.
After I began attending NYU last fall, my family moved back to China — so this year more than most, I will look to celebrate in new ways with the people around me. Although I will undoubtedly be swamped with coursework on Lunar New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, I will still make time to go on a dumpling crawl in Chinatown and enjoy some hotpot. While this isn’t a food of northern Chinese origin nor traditionally tied to the holiday, socializing with friends over hotpot — thinly sliced meat, vegetables and other ingredients cooked in a boiling-hot soup broth — will be my new way of celebrating in a time and place without my family. I hope to walk around Chinatown to see the lanterns and the dragon dance, or even check out the Lunar New Year events held by NYU clubs for students like me. While this year will be different from those past, a new environment won’t stop me from enjoying my favorite holiday.
Contact Sherry Chen at [email protected].
