Silicon Valley

Sunday, Feb 10th 2008 2 Comments

Chinese New Year in Silicon Valley - North, South, East, West

By elliottng

I love learning about the differences between North and South among the Chinese. Then factor in the differences between East and West, and you have a two-by-two matrix! (sorry, ex-consultant humor)

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.

dumplings for chinese new year

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:

Nian Gao

(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.