Happy Chinese New Year!

Gung Hay Fat Choy! 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese zodiac, and February 3 marks the first day of Chinese New Year.

Like many other cultures, the traditions linked with Chinese New Year are filled with family, food, and festivities. Chinese New Year is also known as the spring festival in Chinese culture. While the saying ‘Gung Hay Fat Choy’ is equivalent to wishing one a Happy New Year, the literal translation is congratulations prosperity. The phrase connotes the welcoming of luck and good fortune. Coupled with greetings of good health and improvement (for students in school or growth in business), every phrase in one’s greeting bears positive wishes.

This fifteen day celebration is taken very seriously in Chinese culture, and in places such as Hong Kong and China, the corporate world recognizes Chinese New Year as having greater importance than Christmas. For example, the last time I went to Hong Kong during Chinese New Year, one of the restaurants that I love, which is typically open every day of the year including Christmas, took a week long day shutdown. I barely stayed in town past their closure and nearly missed my beloved steamed milk dessert. Fortunately, my schedule gave me one day to enjoy it upon their opening.

Back to Chinese New Year food traditions – the celebration begins on New Year’s eve. Families will get together for a large feast which includes all types of dishes from chicken to duck and more. The food will be abundant because the celebration ends the previous year and welcomes in the new year. Additionally, the household is cleaned prior to the entering of the New Year to sweep away bad luck.

On New Year’s Day, the elders and thus, the most respected in the family, are visited. On this day, families also get together and traditionally enjoy a vegetarian meal. Meat is not served because that would require an animal to be killed for the meal, and nobody wants to talk about death of course. Also, the vegetarian meal is a sign of longevity. There is a primary vegetarian dish that mixes anywhere from 8 to 12 or more ingredients that is cooked together. This dish frequently includes Chinese shiitake mushrooms, dried tofu sheets or reeds, gingko, golden needles, black fungus, white fungus, lotus, and other dried and fresh vegetables. A red colored bean curd based sauce blends the flavors together well.

On the day after New Year’s, it’s another big feast, this time with meat served. It’s important to have fish on this day because the word for fish sounds similar to extra or more. One desires to have leftovers and extra in their life – a symbol of wealth that there is more than one needs.

Popular dishes for these meals include lettuce with black mushrooms and black sea moss, fat choy, which is similar sounding to ‘prosperity’ as mentioned earlier. When served with dried oysters, which sounds like ‘good events,’ one is preparing for the future year and in the hopes of many good events to come. Lettuce sounds like ‘growing prosperity’ (or as friend Kayan calls it, ‘sprout wealth’) and who wouldn’t want that? Noodles, because of their length, symbolize longevity. The list of foods and their related meaning goes on and on.

Expect to find most good Chinese restaurants in areas with high populations of Chinese people packed over the next few weeks. The same is true for Chinese grocery stores as families prepare these feasts at home. Enjoy the feasting – if you don’t get ‘fat choy’ this year, with all the eating, you might still get fat in the English sense of the word :p