Happy Chinese New Year

For me, Chinese New Year often means foods, foods and... foods. Yes, I can only think of foods when I think about Chinese New Year. Some of you may ask, why only foods? Isn't New Year a time for gathering and family time also? Well, it should have been, but that's not the case with my family. My family was a pretty large family with seven kids and large extended families, but yet somehow most of the heads of the families chose to do things by themselves on Chinese New Year.

My mom always tried to celebrate Chinese New Year by holding a small smorgasbord in our small home, but most of my twelve uncles and aunts seemed to have forgotten that we existed. Year by year, only three families gathered in our tiny home, squeezing ourselves in small rooms while avoiding stacks of items for sale. Yes, our home was small and filled with stacks of salable goods. My mom utilized our home as both home and warehouse. The only think come to my mind when Chinese New Year nearing was the good foods that we could have. My parents rarely prepared good foods on our dining table because we were not very rich to begin with, but they somehow always went out of their way to prepare the best foods they could provide for the New Year.

Since I lived in the house, I could care less for the stacks of goods since I was quite used to them. But that may not be the case with my extended families, my aunts and uncles and their kids. They must have been living more decent lifestyles that most of them seemed to hate coming to our small and not-so-clean place. I don't know if they really hated our homes, it could also have been because they were too busy with their routines, who knows? Throughout the years when I lived in the house, only two other families came to our homes, one of them because they lived next door and the other one used to live under our roof.

But the absence of others did not seem to bother the young me, because the more relatives showed up, the higher the chance for verbal fights and arguments to break out. At times, my cousins and my siblings often fought over foods even to the point that we had to roll on the "not-so-squeaky clean" floor. In my selfish mind, I was happy because I could eat more foods without having to fight over them with more competitors. But never did we realize that we would have had enough foods to eat without having to fight over them, because the amount of foods prepared was based on the anticipation that my other extended family members could show up. And yes, we always ended up having too much left over foods which we had to finish up for the following two weeks or so.

Yes, I had a bittersweet childhood memory about Chinese New Year, maybe just like most of us. I often envied some other people who had fond memory of their Chinese New Year as a time of gathering and family reunion, a time of laughter and joy. But for me, it was about foods, foods, and foods because that was all that I ever knew of.

When I moved to the States, I started to forget about some of my old bittersweet memory. I did not even celebrate my first Chinese New Year in the States because I was too busy working, but I began to expose myself to Chinese New Year celebration again as I met new friends when I joined the Indonesian Evangelical Church in San Jose, California. From there, I noticed that most people celebrated Chinese New Year truly as a joyful event, a time to celebrate and enjoy with friends and families. It's almost like the feast of Thanksgiving in Western hemisphere, without the hams, turkeys, mashed potatoes, or gravies.

From that time on, I began to see Chinese New Year from a different lens. I began to celebrate the New Year with glad tidings, with new and old friends I met in the Bay Area. I had never participated in a large smorgasbord party for Chinese New Year during my years in the Bay Area, but it does not mean that we did not have a great New Year celebration at all. True, sometimes we did not even have to go out to eat but the presence of laughter and smiles, and warm feelings extended by friends were more than enough to warm the coldest corner of my heart. Yes, I miss those days when people smiled and expressed their feelings with joy as they welcomed the New Year, and I hope this New Year will be the same, at the very least.

Happy Chinese New Year!