Chinese New Year parade in Vancouver. Photo: Kenny Louie (Flickr/Creative Commons).
I apologize for the lack of posts lately. Between my finishing my master’s thesis and planning two conferences, I haven’t had much time to sit down and write anything non-academic. Thankfully, lunar new year will force me to take a break.
Those of you who celebrate lunar new year: what old traditions are you keeping, and what new ones are you making? Southern California Public Radio wants to know. As I told LA Times reporter Anh Do a few weeks ago, it’s been a very long, exhausting holiday season for lunar new year celebrants in the West. Do people still have the energy and the money to keep going with the festivities?
Food culture
- Why everyone films at the same damn New York Chinese restaurant
- The mysterious Chinese-only menu
- A culturally-sensitive community supported agriculture (CSA) project in Los Angeles
- Did McDonald’s edit out the Asian dude from its Australia Day commercials?
On the margins
- From undocumented youth to university professor
- Do casinos prey on Asian Americans?
- Orphanage at the end of the universe
Eurotrip
- Are immigrants abandoning recession-hit Italy?
- Searching for the visible and invisible in London’s Chinatown
January 23, 2013 at 8:12 pm
Ah well, here in Singapore we are really into Chinese New Year. A tradition particular to the Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese community is lo-hei, where business associates get together to toss a vegetable and raw fish salad so that their business dealings will get better.
Lo Hei means mix-up, a pun on the importance of networking.
The salad’s assembled at table by a wait staff who names all the ingredients and their symbolic meaning. For example oil comes with a wish for xun xun li li = everything to be smooth and progress well), honey is tian tian mi mi = closeness and intimacy, lime is da ji da li = big gains and big profits. Finally there’s fish, nian nian you yu = surplus every year.
When the salad’s ready, the server says lo hei. Everyone stands up and tosses, the higher the better. And of course, quite a lot falls outside the platter, which is good because it means there’s plenty to go around.
If you’re a business person especially a sales person, you start to lo hei 15 days before New Year and continue till the 15th of the New Year when the celebrations officially close. With dinner and lunch thrown in you’re eating maybe 25 raw fish meals over the month.
The people who get the most out of it are the restaurants. It’s a relatively low cost meal that has a sticker price of $38, $48 to $108 per platter. And the servers usually get a little red hong-pao from the host of the table for every dish they assemble.