What I Will Not Be Making for Chinese New Year This Year

Sorry Instagram

This year, Chinese New Year falls on a Tuesday. Monday night, if we’re being precise. Traditionally, it begins the night before.

When I was growing up in San Francisco, the signs were unmistakable. My mother would stop cleaning. She’d tell us not to wash our hair. And in the refrigerator there would be a giant round disc taking up a shelf on its own. Brown. Homogeneous.

Let me say this clearly: it’s nonsense that all Chinese families make dumplings for New Year. My mother was Cantonese. That meant no dumplings. If you wanted dumplings, you went out for them. Or you ordered them from the dim sum cart.

My Cantonese mom took the Lunar New Year seriously

What she made was that institutional-brown rice cake. Rice flour, water, brown sugar, steamed in a cake pan for an indeterminate length of time. It cooled overnight in the fridge. Then she sliced it and pan-fried it.

Gemini more or less gets things right…

We ate it. Mostly without complaint. It was sweet. It was chewy. It wasn’t much to look at.

Over the years, I’ve watched Lunar New Year become a genre online. Fifteen lucky dishes. Twenty auspicious recipes. Mostly Chinese at first, now expanded to foods across Asia.

Some resemble what we ate in our Cantonese-German-Irish family. The spring rolls from our annual restaurant banquet out are usually accurate. Yes on the fish. And the tangyuan show up too—technically for the Lantern Festival, fifteen days later—but I understand why. Break one open and the black sesame filling spills out. That photographs better than a brown sticky slab.

I click on all of it. Who wouldn’t? Pot stickers drizzled with chili sauce. A whole fish buried under a bed of perfectly uniform scallions and ginger slivers. Why is the steamed fish rose pink? Is everyone else cheating?

I made these, but not for New Years

When my daughter, now ten, was little, I fantasized about giving her the perfect Lunar New Year dinner. The imaginary menu usually looked like whatever I had just scrolled past. Dumplings my mother never made—she would have scoffed. A whole fish with bones my daughter is afraid to eat. Deep-fried tofu, cooked until golden. And the sticky rice cake.

In this fantasy, my daughter would know all the names in Chinese and pronounce them with perfect tones. All the homophones. All the lucky associations. Our dust-free mantel would overflow with mandarins, gold decorations, and red envelopes.

Then comes the guilt. Because the gap between fantasy and reality looks like this: it’s Monday night at nine. A frozen Canadian rice cake that costs too much and takes hours to thaw. A daughter announcing her tummy is “judgy.” The whole fish is forty dollars. We just paid for a furnace motor, a car repair, and an emergency root canal. Food prices have gone up. My work does not pause for a Chinese holiday—there are papers to grade, Zoom meetings, an endless stream of recommendation letters.

My daughter doesn’t like fish with bones. “No need to spend forty bucks on a whole fish.”

My husband has opinions about carbs and grease. “Is there a reason you can’t bake the spring rolls?”

My daughter adds, “Be careful with the fillings. My tummy is judgy. But you can make the sesame rice dumplings. Those are yummy. And noodles without toppings.”

Crystal skin tangyuan—not traditional and more photogenic than delicious

“And don’t forget the Taiwanese pineapple cakes,” my husband says. “Those are good.”

They aren’t especially New Year’s food, at least for families like mine, with relatives on the Mainland.

“So what?” he says. “They’re tasty. I miss them from our time in Taiwan.”

And that’s how I learned my Lunar New Year tradition is whatever fits into a Monday night—and doesn’t give anyone a tummy ache.