Eating Brings Fortune

By Liv Gohan

Chinese New Year is a period of rest, rejoice, and reunion. It emphasizes that the people should take their days off from work and studies to come home to family and friends to celebrate the New Year together. One of the most significant factors that make Chinese New Year special is the food that sometimes is only served a couple times a year, such as Yee Sang, Bird Nest, Tang Yuan, and more. Did you know that the food we eat also have specific meanings behind them? 

I spent about 60% of my Chinese New Year holiday eating, and it was definitely worth it. My family and I visited a lot of restaurants, and some of the food we ate was typical for every Chinese New Year reunion dinner.

Chinese New Year Eve is arguably even more important than the first day of the New Year, because Eve is when all our family members get together and have dinner to welcome the New Year. Every year, my family switches up when to celebrate Chinese New Year; sometimes they choose my hometown Medan, sometimes we go to Singapore, and this year, they decided to come to Penang.

On Chinese New Year Eve, my family and I had our reunion dinner (团圆饭 ) at Maple Palace, a Chinese restaurant with lazy Susan style meals. They served delicious boiled peanuts as an appetizer, and we had chrysanthemum tea for drinks. 

Before we started dinner, we did the yee sang (发财双鱼雪梨捞生) which had salmon, whitebait fish, and pear. Yee Sang is a Chinese New Year tradition where we toss a crunchy salad with ingredients like fish, carrots, red cabbage, and other crunchy vegetables while shouting good wishes and blessings. Elijah Peh (12) explains that “the higher the salad is tossed, the more luck will come to you”. Overall, Yee Sang represents wealth, abundance, and fortune. 

We also had shark fin soup (黃焖八珍鱼翅羹), chicken with ginger scallion sauce which represents unity and good luck (脆姜红葱自切粟米黄皮槽鸡), steamed fish which represents abundance (双椒墨鱼丸蒸笋壳), abalone and oysters also representing good luck and fortune (发财澳洲2头鲍鱼片海参蚝士青菜), and clay pot rice (北方腊味砂煲饭). For dessert, we had sweet Snow Fungus (海底椰莲子八宝茶) and New Year cake, which symbolizes prosperity (椰丝年糕).

A lot of the food we ate were puns and sounded similar to good wishes and blessings (for example fish in Chinese sounds similar to the word for abundance). We eat the food because they symbolize good things like prosperity, wealth, and fortune, and the act of eating these foods represent us wishing for these good blessings to come to us in the new year. So, eat a lot of good food during Chinese New Year, and good blessings will come upon you and your family. Happy Year of the Snake!