On Chinese New Year, bird's nest soup and this is good for you.
Chinese New Year
Chinese care a lot about their fortune and luck at the start of Chinese New Year. Worshipping activities like incense burning, roasted pig offering and praying, are intense during the festive days. Then their faith withers as time passes by — much like hitting the gym in the first week of January. The Gods only get their limited-time attention once a year.
This year, 2024, is the year of Dragon (龍）in Chinese zodiac. The first day of the year fell on 10th Feb, 2024 in Chinese lunar calendar. The Chinese New Year festival and the Mid-Autumn festival are the two Chinese festivals that I still "care about", which means I would still have to make myself present with parents.
Similar to what you may see on the internet, Chinese New Year is symbolically red everywhere and everything. I have fond memories of Chinese New Year from childhood, when my mother was still keen on decorating my childhood home — the one I spent most of my childhood time in. We have moved a couple of times before I went for boarding school. Since then, I only stayed with parents on weekly basis, then monthly basis and now yearly basis. Even though my parents are comfortable in each of our homes, for me, it was just this particular home, where memories seemed to be filtered with extra sharpness and where I sometimes dreamt about. Back to the decorations. My mom would buy tangerine plants and staple red packets on it. Just like this.
She would also put up Fai Chun (揮春) — Chinese calligraphic words with lucky phrases on red papers, in the doorways and windows to create a festive mood. She would prepare traditional snacks — fried and sugary treats wrapped in gold or red glossy papers. She doesn't do the plant thing any more now. She said tangerine plants take energy to maintain and do not look as good the next year. Besides, as parents age, they become conscious about their health and no longer want snacks. Fai Chun survived time and change, still remaining a festive decor at home.
There would be multiple visits to relatives' and then there would be courtesy revisits. These visits are often Q & A sessions, where we make each other uncomfortable. As a child, no one asks about your salary, work, relationship status, baby status or financial status. The only question that kids faced was your school performance, which I nailed. Thus, the naive me always had a great time at Chinese New Year, while some cousins were being grilled. Now, years later, the status quo is reversed. I am the one on the rack being grilled. Apparently, when you are older, having a family and a stable job are the gold standards of success in the Chinese culture (perhaps in any culture). Some cousins got married early, lived close to their parents and were planning to have babies. On the contrary, the golden kid back in the days — me, have no plan in marriage, not to mention babies, and "irrationally" pursue a PhD.
Relatives said: get married, have kids and find a stable job. do the minimal (in Chinese -躺平, similar to quiet quitting) and wait for retirement. this is good for you.
A bulletproof vest would not help me this Chinese New Year. I am ready for the bombardment of questions. In the Chinese culture, people say that the higher a woman's education level is , the less desirable she becomes. The rationale behind: a common Chinese man wouldn't want a highly educated woman, because he does not want to feel inferior to her; an elite Chinese man wouldn't want a highly educated woman either, because he does not want to feel threatened. So basically in the Chinese culture, a woman can be great and smart but she can never be greater and smarter than her husband. Oh, I ramble too far. Back to Chinese New Year.
During Covid years, family gatherings were cancelled and I guess, relatives come to realise that they don’t need to see each other so as to pry on each other's private matters and that gossips can be exchanged via WeChat — a popular Chinese messaging and social media app. So in recent years, the mood of Chinese New Year has become less festive. No more big tangerine plants but still a small bonsai to ensure a symbolic luckiness; no sugary fried snacks but fruits; no big money red packets but symbolic lucky $8 electronic red packets. One not-so-bad change, at least for me, is that relatives shift their focus to posting videos or snapping electronic red packets given out by other people on WeChat — a kind of luck competition game. So everyone is kind of looking at their shiny screens, smirking and talking to each other without eye contact, pretty much like a cult gathering. All my preparation for the grilling is wasted. Aw…
Bird’s nest soup
The bowl of bird’s nest soup glows in the morning sunshine. My mother got up early to make it for me. Something choke in my throat — a mix of guilt, love and the resistance of swallowing down this bowl of bird’s nest soup. My mother said: drink it. this is good for you.
Like many first-generation college kids, I have many differences in value from my parents due to my education, social circles and work. I have been "westernised" in many ways, or as my mother likes to put it "you forget your root", which I respectfully disagree, but I do understand the nuances in her (strong) statement.
Ironically, on the one hand, my parents send me to get western education, which they admire and think it's better than the Chinese way. They love to know what I learnt and what the new ideologies are trending in the world now. On the other hand, they kind of assume that I would still be very Chinese in the way that I should know the delicate tricks in maintaining harmony in a collective society, i.e., you cannot tell your uncle Jack that he is an ass (pardon my language), even though he is, but it's ok to bitch him with other uncles and aunties behind his back.
My parents are typical middle class Chinese. They love imported goods and always consider them higher quality and superior in performance, but at the same time, they guard traditional Chinese values and believe in experiences passed down from thousands of years of Chinese history. So it seems that the globalisation has kept them up with the world's materialism but not the value system. My mother often tries to make me eat bird's nest soup. I often resist. Edible bird’s nest is a Chinese delicacy, made from solidified saliva by specific bird species. It actually looks not as disgusting as it sounds. Google it. It’s a highly regarded food among Chinese and it’s believed to be particularly good for ladies’ skin and immune system. I told my mother edible bird's nest is a scam. You can get the same amount of protein from other food with a fraction of edible bird's nest prices. I don't want to eat bird's nest soup. Just give me milk and eggs for the protein. My mom said I am silly and don't know good stuff. Who wants milk and eggs if one can eat bird's nest soup?
We engaged in a fierce debate on the nutritional values of edible bird's nest and whether its value justifies its price, citing references to sources that we each believe in: journal papers vs. TV shows and celebrities. As always, the debate took a detour to why I ALWAYS discriminated China's thousands of years culture. My mother brought up a strong evidence that a historic figure named Yang Guifei — a well-known figure promoted by TV shows, who is one of the wives of an emperor and who has out of this world beauty, loves to eat bird's nest to keep her beauty and health. Well, what I see is a poor woman, whose sole purpose is to please the ruler in an extremely patriarchal time. The debate took another detour to a rather personal argument that I don't appreciate what she thinks is good for me. Don't ask me why it gets personal. I was really trying to discuss bird's nest soup. My dad knew how to survive so he refused to take a side.
I actually don’t hate the taste of bird’s nest soup. It is basically tasteless. The soup looks fine and has a soft texture. I hate the idea of bird’s nest soup. The way I see bird’s nest soup is that it represents a feudalism ideology that’s unscientific and superstitious. It conveys the ideas that something being passed down from generation to generation must be good — a biased evolutionism, that whatever the dominant group agrees must be true — herd behaviour, and that whatever authorities promote, we must follow — obedience. The bowl of bird’s nest soup becomes a value battle ground, steaming a bowl of philosophical difference between my mother and me.
So, along with some family gossips that I forgot the moment I heard them, I’ve heard “this is good for you” a lot. As if something sets out to be good for you, you need to do it. This is a passive aggressive attack. Your refusal is a defilement of the other party's love and care, a sign of ungratefulness. I start to wonder what is good for me really? Do I need the other person to tell me what is good for me? Maybe I do. Or maybe I have already known what is good for me — nope, not the bird's nest soup.
