eve of the year of the pig
Tonight is Chinese New Year’s eve! It is the most important holiday to me because of the traditional foods, the symbolism, the superstitions, and the ties to family. I’ve been thinking of Kris a lot lately. Normally, you set out plates for your ancestors at your celebration table, but I realized that traditionally, children go home to their parents’ house for the new year. Kris wouldn’t come to my table, but to Mom and Dad’s – so I will let them set a place for her at dinner. Instead, I will celebrate with traditional foods and remember Kris in my own ways.
I spent all afternoon and some of the evening preparing for dinner tonight.
tofu is luck
On our front door, I hung the Chinese character for luck upside down. Much of the Chinese cultural traditions is based on word play. Because Chinese is a tonal language, homonyms connect certain actions or items to other actions or items. For example, you never give a watch as a gift because “give a watch” (song tsong) sounds the same as the phrase “to pay your last respects”. In this case, many Chinese households hang the character for luck upside down because the word for “upside down” (dao) sounds like the word for “arrive”.
luck arrives
For dinner we had hot pot, dumplings, and stir-fried beef with spinach. The hot pot soup is similar to shabu shabu (Japanese fondue). In a large electric wok, we heat broth and water to boiling. We put napa cabbage, bamboo shoots, tofu, water chesnuts, Chinese black mushrooms, bean thread (cellophane) noodles, pork meatballs, fishballs, spinach, and snow peas in the pot. On the side is sliced raw chicken, beef, and shrimp. Each person fills their bowl with a variety of sauces, oils, seasonings, and chopped vegetables. Then they begin cooking the raw meats in the hot broth and ladel their cooked meats along with other goodies from the soup into their bowls. It is good luck to eat one of each ingredient from the soup. Everything symbolizes something for the coming year. Most of the things we eat symbolize wealth, if I’m not mistaken. That’s mostly from my parents…
the spread
a toast to the year of the pig
