Who’s taking over the unseen work of organising Chinese New Year?
For most of my life, festive gatherings seemed to happen automatically. What happens when those quietly maintaining family traditions stop?
Last Chinese New Year, the reunion dinner unfolded the way it always has: with an almost rehearsed ease that disguises how much work it takes to look effortless.
The dishes arrived in their expected order. Conversations circled familiar ground – work, health, travel plans. There was a comfort in that predictability, as if the evening was held together by habit more than intention.
At some point, plans for the next day, the first day of Lunar New Year, were mentioned. There was a short discussion about visits, timings, who might or might not be able to make it. Within two minutes, we resumed eating.
But I remember thinking, if my parents stopped organising all of this, would I know how to do it?
Not in the obvious sense of cooking or booking a restaurant, but in the deeper sense of holding the thing together. I wouldn’t know who needs to be invited first, or how invitations move through a family that no longer shares a single neighbourhood. I wouldn’t know the unspoken rules: who should never be seated together, who needs to be checked with early, who will never explicitly ask to be visited but will notice if they are not.
Nor would I know which traditions are fixed only because someone has always taken responsibility for them. For most of my life, Chinese New Year seemed to run itself. As a child, I only saw the finished product. You were moved from one house to another, one meal to the next.