Blog

One of the most important aspects of the Lunar New Year is spending the holiday with your family. In China, you get two weeks to a month off, sometimes more — the longest vacation of the year — and everyone goes home (to their parents or their ancestral home) to celebrate, even if it means traveling for hours (or days) by plane or train.

Once everyone is gathered at home, New Year’s Eve culminates in a big dinner, called wei lu, or “surrounding the stove.” I asked some of my friends and relatives what their dinners were like when they were growing up and what they’re like now.

Joyce grew up in Los Angeles and recalls the main dishes featured at their big dinner:

There’s always a chicken that hasn’t been marinated, some veggies, a special soup (with seaweed and some other stuff), a fish, and rice. My family usually fries a fish and leaves it in the fridge until it molds (supposedly good luck?). We had rice cakes for dessert.

Lillian, who grew up in Morris County, NJ, says:

We always had dinner at my maternal grandmother’s house. She lived with my mother’s oldest brother (although he was younger than her) and his family. The meal was traditional in many ways — the medicinal tonic soup with goji berries and sometimes a second soup of chicken with white fungus or winter melon. The same bowl was used (we were so many) and the food was put out on a large table and various tables set up for eating — (card tables later used for a long night of mah jong).

Our New Year’s dinner was ALWAYS with my mother’s Cantonese family in a tiny Brooklyn apartment. As their wealth increased, the meal became more elaborate. Flank was replaced by filet mignon. The vegetarian dish was always eaten by everyone despite its science-experiment appearance. It was wrinkled dried bits of reconstituted tofu, carrot, lotus root, gingko, black moss, dried oysters (Buddhist loophole?), and many other whatnots. Unidentifiable herbal ingredients added for health, later considered flavorings, were always used in a tonic soup. The meal always included a whole chicken (with head and feet), fish (whole with head and tail), and of course, the Buddhist vegetarian dish.

These days, many families go out to a restaurant for a banquet-style dinner or else they go another easy route: hot pot. Lillian, like my cousin Eric, usually takes part in such gatherings now:

About 15 of us (including my sisters’ families, and my brother) hover over two plug-in skillets that simmer broth as we cook our own ingredients in our own little baskets. It’s an easy dinner to throw together — raw sliced meat and fish, trimmed greens, some fish balls, tofu, noodles.

Tomorrow: my New Year’s Eve wei lu.