Gong hey fat choy!
It’s incumbent on me to say that seeing as we’re in the swing of the Lunar New Year period (festivities technically kicked off on Monday with New Year’s Eve and will last until Valentine’s Day). This is the one time of the year when Chinese (although LNY is celebrated across East and South-East Asia) culture is front and centre in the UK, resplendent in red and gold and suddenly even the lollipop lady is wishing you happy new year in Cantonese. Oh look, Chinatown is on BBC News! Quick, get the TV-record feature on, there’s actual Chinese people on the telly! Blue Peter might have a lion dance!
As a child, I’d bring in a box full of my mum’s fried peanut puff cookies to school, trotting out the line that we eat them because they symbolise abundant wealth. Even better if they came accompanied with bright red packets.
But some of the messy, unpretty intricacies of this festival can be lost in translation. How to explain, for example, that we eat dried black moss, or ‘fat choy’, because it sounds similar to ‘fortune’ in Cantonese? (In a bowl it literally looks like a tangle of black hair. Appetising!) Why the poached chicken has to be served with the head on the side because you need to have a ‘head’ and a ‘tail’ to begin the new year? Yum — cockerel’s head! Why must our hair be dirty and vacuum cleaners be avoided on 1 February? Why are there so many ‘weird’ gelatinous textures going on in the eight plus dishes that are weighing down my mother’s not-so-lazy Susan.
Because the rampant commodification of the holiday pays lip service to the dominant market of the luxury sector, a limited-edition Year of the Tiger-embossed pochette doesn’t really connect with what is at the heart of LNY.
How to explain that we eat dried, black moss, or ‘fat choy’, because it sounds similar to ‘fortune’ in Cantonese?
My parents, for the first time in my life, are not in London to tell me off when they clock the Pantene smell in my hair on New Year’s Day. They bit the bullet late last year, the endured 21 days mandatory hotel quarantine to go back to Hong Kong and be reunited with friends, family and a proper dim sum trolley.
In their absence, I’ve become pedantically protective over the rituals of this auspicious period, so much so I’m literally dropping the word ‘auspicious’ into normal conversation. Can we wrap dumplings, and make sure there are five different types of wrapping because an odd number is better than even? I want to go back to my parent’s house in Finchley and burn incense and paper ingots at our family altar until the smell is embedded in my skin. I’m going to urge my daughter Nico to put her red packets in her pillow case because somehow sleeping in close proximity to envelopes stuffed with tenners will magically stop her from getting tickly coughs and runny noses for the year.
By the way, I do love that LNY is universally embraced. Please go out to Chinatown and Trafalgar Square this Sunday and wave a paper dragon with its springy pearl tongue! Do try to support the wealth and breadth of Chinese restaurants that will be hoping for a business boon after the turbulent ride faced by the hospitality sector over the past two years. Meanwhile I’ll be at home desperately trying to recreate a lost taste of a familial LNY involving bean-curd sheets, dried scallops and minute-long nonsensical WhatsApp voice messages from my parents seeped in farcical superstition. ‘Don’t over soak the scallops! You’ll lose all the flavour! Do you want a roof over your head next year or what?’
