Happy Lunar New Year 2024!

Before my family moved from South Korea to Canada, every year, we’d go on a trip outside the city where my grandparents lived to celebrate Seol-nal, the Korean New Year. I’d eagerly anticipate seeing my relatives and spending time with them over this multiple-day event. It was a time for us, city boys and girls, to go on scavenger hunts in the farmland, stay up all night telling scary stories we’d collected over the past months, and show off which rare Pokémon we’d caught under the dim light. In the morning, there was Jesa, a ritual to honour our ancestors with a table full of different foods. We waited patiently for it to finish, scanning the table and deciding which food to grab first when allowed. After the ceremony, the adults would bring us a big meal with galbi short ribs, various jeons, and five different kinds of homemade kimchi that my family made in October under my grandmother’s strict command (another special family event). But the highlight was the tteokguk (rice cake soup), as it’s an official way of marking ourselves a year older. Twenty years later, as an immigrant in Canada, I still make myself a bowl of tteokguk every Seol-nal, with a bit of fear of turning a whole year older, but mostly cherishing the memories of family rituals we had back in Korea.

Being born and raised mostly in North America meant that Lunar New Year celebrations were usually limited to phone calls with my family in South Korea and Taiwan. The few instances I found myself lucky enough to be visiting during this special time was a different story. Whether I was celebrating the Korean New Year or the Chinese New Year, I knew one thing was certain: as the child of the family, I would be showered with extra attention from my grandparents and indulging in hearty, home-cooked meals surrounded by the warmth and liveliness of family. I was perhaps too young to truly understand, let alone appreciate, all of the Lunar New Year traditions (I’m still learning about its customs to this day), but feel fortunate to have had glimpses of two different versions of celebrations. Now, Lunar New Year remains an opportunity to reconnect with relatives (though our phone calls have been replaced with video chats) and an excuse for me to stop by my local Korean market for some special tteok (rice cake).

As a first generation Chinese-born Canadian, my family had an unspoken rule about assimilating into our community and not rocking the boat. This meant that growing up we spoke English at home—there wasn’t a huge focus on passing on any traditional beliefs or superstitions in general. (I didn’t even hear about the whole thing about not washing your hair until I was in my late twenties.) Chinese New Year felt like a bonus holiday that was special because not everybody celebrated it. It was a time of year that our extended family got together for meals. Snapshots from my childhood memories would be plastic-covered dining furniture with at least one uncle bringing over a bucket of KFC, sticky rice, and my grandma always trying to feed me something. Where we fell short with words, plates were filled with love in the form of cut fruit. Nowadays, we still get together for a good meal for the New Year but it remains more about family time than the actual dishes we eat.

Lunar New Year is always an event in my family. A meal of 13 dishes filled with symbolic meaning for prosperity and longevity were expertly cooked by my grandmother. Living in a duplex with my uncle and his family living next door to ours, we would have all eight burners on two stoves cooking and steaming all at once. Many times, my grandmother would fall asleep at the kitchen table in between cooking dishes. To her, this was her Super Bowl. While the adults cooked, us kids were cleaning the house top down, and we had to be sure to get a haircut before the New Year, because cutting hair right after the New Year meant that you were also cutting your good luck and fortune. Once the meal was done, my father would bring out the New Year cake. Which is this rice flour / rock sugar dish that is finished with sesame seeds and is only made once a year (while supplies last). There was no exchange of red envelopes on New Year’s Eve, but because of the sheer quantity of food, we would all gather on New Year’s Day. No cooking aside from reheating of leftovers was allowed, and on New Year’s Day we would say well-wishes to our elders in exchange for red envelopes. As a Canadian-born Chinese, Lunar New Year allows me to bask in the culture of my ancestors. It represents a connection to those who I’ve lost, and brings my family together.