2010 is a special year for the city of Shanghai as 2008 for Beijing. A world-wide event the World Expo will be held in the city. And differ from Beijing Olympic Games, Shanghai World Expo 2010 will last 6 months, from May 1 to late October. And the government estimates that over 70 million visitors will attend this event. It is a giant party for travel industry.

So, welcome to China, welcome to Shanghai.

Here is the public holiday schedule for 2010. For detail explanation of each holiday, check out our older post of public holiday of 2008 & 2009.

2010 public holiday China

source: Flickr – zTransmissions

source: Flickr – laurenceshan

source: Flickr – jenniferphoon

source: Flickr – laurenceshan

Last year, Min Guo, who grew up in Guangdong, noted that while she had heard dumplings (饺子, jiaozi) mentioned as Chinese New Year food on TV all her life, in fact she had never eaten jiaozi for Chinese New Year and indeed had never had a jiaozi until she went to middle school!  So she polled six of her friends from six different provinces.  Well, it turns out its not just us Cantonese who don’t eat jiaozi for Chinese New Year.

After you read this, help us continue the survey by sharing what you ate for Chinese New Year eve dinner!

In case you can’t see the Slideshare, this list shows the different foods eaten across different provinces:

1.  Urumqi – Xinjiang

• Roast Lamb
• Chinese Alcohol
• Jiaozi

2.  Harbin – Heilongjiang

• Chicken Stew Mushroom
• Pork Stew Green Bean Noodle
• Friend Pork with Sweet & Sour Sauce

3.  Xinxiang – Henan

• Sausage
• Soup with Chicken & Corn
• Bun with Red Bean Paste

4.  Yichang – Hubei

• Sausage
• Fish
• Rice Cake

5.  Nanchang – Jiangxi

• Red Carp
• Homemade Rice Wine
• Sticky Rice

6.  Guangzhou – Guangdong

• Boiled Chicken
• Soup
• Sweet Dumpling

If you are Chinese, please help us complete the survey!  What city and province are you from?   What did you eat for your Chinese New Year eve dinner this year? (drop it in comments below)

Can you tell how many red lantern in this super lantern?

Another challenge of counting how many lantern are hanging on the tree!

年年有余（鱼）: Have fish （saving）evey year!

Hope to give you a sense of what the people like in China in a temple fair.

I don’t have an idea about of what’s the yellow stuff? Xu, can you tell us?

Temple fair is a traditional CNY event with long history. Today, it is a market fair that people can see Chinese New year decoration, buy stuff, eat local snacks and also see traditional folk performance. It is also an opportunity to feel the happiness of Chinese New Year from the crowds. Meg went to a temple fair in Beijing this Chinese New Year, check out her Baiyunguan Temple Fair trip.

Yew Chung is a foundation that now has campuses in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Qingdao and Hong Kong. The Yew Chung Silicon Valley campus is about 7 or 8 years old and has had its ups and downs in recent years. But I was so proud of what the school and the YCIS-SV Parents Organization accomplished this year with this Chinese New Year gala. One parent from China told me it “gave them a good feeling of completeness” to celebrate Chinese New Year. He had been missing this before he had kids, and the school helped bring Chinese New Year to him here in Silicon Valley

Lion dance team from a local Kung Fu group

Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Martial Arts performance

YCIS-SV Pre-Kindergarten-1 Welcoming the New Year with Great Health

Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Gong Xi!

My 6-year old son is one of the 2 boys making the announcement at the microphone. He is wearing the Chinese outfit that fellow blogger Min and I purchased when I was in Beijing this January. He was a bit shy and silly in his announcement!

Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Fan Dance

YALP has all kinds of electives that the kids can take. The program is from 3 pm to 6 pm so working parents can pick up their kids after work. The girls have lots of fun electives like this Fan Dance class!

YCIS-SV First Grade class performing “The Mice Family”

These are my older son’s former classmates. We miss them!

YALP Talent Show – Chinese YoYo

Another elective is called Chinese YoYo. I don’t get it because I didn’t really see anything that looked like an Western YoYo. And the Google But it was a very elegant dance by the girls in YALP.

Here is my wife and younger son at the gala. We both had to work hard to keep him entertained! He enjoyed all the dancing and music, but started getting restless!

YCIS-SV Parents Organization (YCIS-PO) volunteers

So these were the 6-9 people who gave up 3 months of their life to organize this event! There was an incredible attention to detail and it was a great event. This is a huge turnaround from 2-3 years ago when there was a massive problem with teaching staff turnover and low morale. These parents are some of the ones who made the turnaround happen!

Live Auction begins

The Auctioneer is a parent, Enoch Choi, who did a great job coaxing money out of the parents pockets for hand crafted products and other awards. People can get out of hand in these kinds of auction situations, which can help theg school raise more money. People like to win and to be recognized for their generosity. On the other hand, I think Chinese people in general also have a value of being frugal, or even cheap! So I was interested to see how this would play out at the auction. We ended up leaving early because my toddler had to get to sleep! But not before willing a gift basket of toys and books, and 3DVD set of Doraemon!

What we won – a 3 DVD set of Doraemon

Right now, we plan to send our #2 son to YCIS as well for pre-school and maybe Kindergarten as well. So we will have many more of these galas to drop some more cash in the school’s bank account! But I think bilingual education here in Silicon Valley is a worthy cause, and I’m thankful for all these parent volunteers who have continued to move this forward!

UPDATE:   some additional photos of the event here.

Now it’s time for Beijing — and the entire People’s Republic and all Chinese everywhere — to break fives.

That’s right.

Well, nearly. Po Wu (破五) is what Beijing is going through — and any Chinese city at that. Tradition goes that on the fifth day of the new year in the lunar calendar, you break things. You let the fireworks have the mic, so to speak, and you eat dumplings (which you had about four days ago for the big festival on the first — at midnight).

In terms of just how or what is behind Po Wu, yours truly would like to know as much as you’d like to know (to be totally honest with you). Your now confused-but-still-cheerful blogger has only been in China for Chinese New Years since 2002 for good, so there’s a lot of tradition that slips behind view (and remains invisible to David Feng eyes — at least for now).

However, as you can see (or hear, if you’re around in the capital — read: war zone), fireworks and dumplings aren’t too far away. The price of fireworks, by the way, has dropped by around 20%. However, rather strong winds (to the tune of Beaufort Level 5) are threatening the capital, so the Fire Department is ready.

In the West, Chinese New Year is quiet. But I got to vicariously enjoy about 0:50 seconds of the constant shelling in Shanghai via YouTube via Marc van der Chijs. Then I saw both Kaiser Kuo‘s facebook status and David Feng‘s twitter to STOP THE SHELLING ALREADY. That was enough for me. So for Chinese New Year, West = peace, East = simulated war zone.

Then, you have to factor in North vs. South. One of my colleagues is from Tianjin, and another from Sichuan. For most northerners, Chinese New Year = dumplings. My colleague from Tianjin happily ate the dumplings that his wife made. And my other colleague, who grew up in Beijing but is originally from Sichuan, also ushered in the New Year with dumplings.

But for Guangdong and Hong Kong people, dumplings are less central to the tradition. For the last dinner of the old year, we ate chicken–which represents a celebration of the past year’s prosperity. Chicken = prosperity. For the first dinner of the new year, our nanny from Hong Kong prepared a set of “lucky” food. For example, fish, or yue in Cantonese, represents sufficient wealth or plenty. If you eat fish, you are likely to have enough wealth and savings for the year. We also ate vegetables, su cai, a mix of vermicelli, tofu, and green vegetables. This represents frugality–starting the year right by not using up your wealth up front. Finally, we ate some pork (ideally BBQ pork), which also represented some other aspect of prosperity. So for some Southerners, Chinese New Year = “lucky” food.

My son, after reading a book about nian gao, was inspired to make a Southern style of nian gao that my nanny then fried up. I forgot to take pictures of it, but it looked sort of like this:

(By the way, most Chinese would agree that the Yangtze (Changjiang) River is the dividing line between North and South. But for my Guangdong mother-in-law, the Fujianese are decided North! And for someone from Heilongjiang, even Beijing people are decidedly South even though the word North is in the name of the city!)

Many Westerners think of China as a single, unified culture, but in reality there are many rich differences between people from different backgrounds–North vs. South, mainland vs. Hong Kong vs. Taiwan, East vs. West.

I also enjoyed a great episode of Sexy Beijing where our heroine Su Fei travels to Hong Kong for the holidays, and considers Beijing vs. Hong Kong. Notice that most Hong Kong people would rather speak English rather than Mandarin to Su Fei.

Anyone else observe the differences between regions of China in celebrating Chinese New Year?

Photos: courtesy of avlxyz, sheilaz413

David Feng, by the way, is staying put in Beijing. Updates will pour in throughout the week as usual. But as it’s the time to get in a festive mood, so — Happy Spring Festival!