Being Chinese | The great Lunar New Year divide and how I bridged it
After sitting through the Spring Festival Gala with mainland Chinese friends, I had to introduce them to a delightful ritual from Singapore
If the world assumes Chinese to be a monolith, then Lunar New Year brings a curious paradox. This is the festive season that ostensibly brings all Chinese people together, yet I have found it is also when our cultural deviations are most sharply magnified.
In Singapore, the celebration has always been joyous and largely predictable. Then I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and suddenly, thanks to my mainland Chinese friends, the festival took on new meaning and my festive experience began to feel more like an anthropological study.
I had to keep a straight face when I explained that durians are not in season during Lunar New Year and that Singaporean Chinese give and receive mandarin oranges because in Cantonese, the word for the citrus fruit sounds like that for “gold”.
To my surprise, even my classmate from Guangzhou, the capital of the ancestral Cantonese heartland, hadn’t heard of the practice, putting paid to my assumption that ours was a Southeast Asian continuation of a good old Cantonese tradition.
