Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

This piece was published in the Sunday Times on 29 January 2006.

Sunday Times 29 Jan 2006
Spending CNY in NYC
by Colin Goh

We Chinese believe the number 8 is lucky, which has made me somewhat confused about how I should feel about this being the 8th straight year in a row the Wife and I have not celebrated Chinese New Year with our families.

Maybe it’s lucky in the sense that we can dodge sending ang paos. But on the other hand, not having access to all the kueh-kueh and satanically sedap bacon bak kua is really depressing.

It’s not as if we haven’t gone back to Singapore. Last year, thanks to our film project, the split between Singapore and New York was about 50-50. It’s just that Chinese New Year invariably falls during the American university Spring semester, and the Wife, being an assistant professor, has to be back at her day job.

And it seems, we’re not alone. As the Straits Times reported last week, more and more Singaporean families are celebrating “CNY” (as it’s increasingly being abbreviated – not to be confused with CSI: NY) earlier, to accommodate relatives who have to toil overseas. Certainly, in my family, for a couple of the previous years, we’ve had to substitute a sushi buffet for the traditional yusheng lo hei.

But if you’re going to be spending CNY away, then NY is possibly the best place in the world to be. Not just because you feel slightly less lonely being surrounded by so many other Chinese strivers who’re probably as homesick as you, but – as I came to realise just last week – the sheer variety of lunar new year celebrations here is bewildering.

I don’t just mean the variance between the traditions of the different ethnic Chinese groups. (The Hunan couple who run our neighbourhood Chinese takeout, for instance, reacted to our pineapple tarts with furrowed brows, even as our own wrinkled noses regarded their spicy lamb pot.)

But the spring is greeted here by so many other national groups, as I discovered when some Korean friends invited us to celebrate Seol-Nal with them, and sample their “duk gook” – rice cakes bobbing in a beef-bone marrow-rich broth. Apparently, you have to eat them before you can turn a year older. Well, the cholesterol probably took a year off my life instead, but what a way to go.

And then there’s the Vietnamese, who greet Tet Nguyen Dan with bahn chung, a kind of bak chang made with pork belly and beans stuffed in banana leaves that is simmered in a foil package for 12 hours or more, then drained before serving. Meanwhile, the Tibetans celebrate Losar by giving out dough balls containing ingredients that comment on the recipient’s character (e.g. if your ball includes chilli, it means your friends think you’re talkative).

I was also surprised (and somewhat ashamed) to learn for the first time about the CNY customs of fellow Asean neighbours. I never knew the Indonesian Chinese New Year was called Imlek, for example, or that Chinese Filipino families call their niangao ‘tikoy’, a name that derives from the Hokkien name ‘tee kuay’.

I don’t know if any of the exoticism really helped my homesickness, but what it did do was emphasise to me how cultural differences are all just a sliver away from each other.

We now live in a world that is being brought rapidly together by global forces and technology, and as a result, we instinctively look to entrench our cultural uniqueness, or seek to define things in black and white. We talk about ‘traditional Chinese/Asian/American/Western/Martian/whatever values’, when really, it’s all a nonsensical contrivance to keep things simplistic and people stupid. As we cross the globe, especially in border nations, we see how culture is murky. My Kazakh friends, for instance, are both Russian AND Chinese in many respects.

We’re more like each other than some of us want to believe, and we should be emphasizing that rather than fanning deep-seated, irrational fears of ‘the other’. I recognize how realpolitik may mandate certain temporarily policies, but ultimately, there must be an overarching effort to diminish ethnic differences. Otherwise, we only defer time bombs rather than diffuse them.

On that note, here’s wishing all of you, especially those who’ve been kind enough to email me your wishes, a hearty gongxi facai/kiong hee huat tzai/gung hey fatt choy/cung hỉ phát tài/Sehe Bokmanee Bateuseyo/Losar sang!

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