The changing face of New Year
Family, friends, festivities and food are all high on the agenda as celebrations begin for the Chinese Lunar New Year, writes Amy Nelmes Bissett.
The work has already begun in the kitchen of popular Vietnamese restaurant Saigon Noon in Hamilton. This Saturday, owner and chef Erik Au Duong will have about 200 mouths to feed. And, dauntingly, each will be well-versed in Vietnamese cuisine as they all hail from Vietnam.
‘‘There’s a growing Vietnamese community in this city now,’’ says Au Duong. ‘‘But cooking for those from your own country can be a little daunting sometimes. There will be those from the north and south of Vietnam and the dishes are very different.’’
The party will be one of many around New Zealand to mark the Chinese Lunar New Year, an ever-growing event in the Kiwi calendar that marks the start of a new year in countries that observe the Chinese lunar calendar.
Fish, noodles, family and Chinese TV are New Year traditions in the home of Vivian Wong, owner of Christchurch restaurant Madam Kwong.
Wong, who moved to New Zealand from China 28 years ago, says fish is a very important dish at New Year because of the way the Chinese word for fish sounds, and also because it symbolises surplus and wealth.
‘‘The word for fish, yu, in Chinese is similar to another word, which [means] something left over from the old year. For example, you work the whole year so you have money saved up for the following year,’’ she says. ‘‘Chinese people like to personify prosperity and luck.’’
The fish will likely be steamed with soya sauce and served with a variety of meats, such as pork, duck and chicken.
After dinner, the family will round off their New Year’s Eve celebrations by watching Chinese television programme, New Year’s Gala.
On Saturday, the first day of the year, the traditional dish in Wong’s family is noodles with chicken soup.
‘‘Because the noodles are really long, it signifies longevity. In my tradition, [when] we celebrate weddings, New Year, birthdays, you eat noodles.’’
It’s thought that over a billion people from all over Asia will attend parties to celebrate the New Year, much like Au Duong’s and Wong’s, filled with family and friends, festivities and of course plenty of food.
Au Duong admits he likes to keep the food he serves traditional. He will be serving braised pork belly and eggs, a dish that’s still served in almost every home in the Ho Chi Minh City region over the new year.
‘‘You use coconut water to make the caramel and cook the pork belly slowly so it’s very tender and the colour is a little brownish,’’ he explains. ‘‘But at home that would be the finale to cooking a dish a day from the 23rd of the lunar calendar.’’
Before leaving Vietnam 18 years ago, Au Duong would celebrate with his family with a traditional meal, sailing through course after course, finishing with bitter melon soup, which was less about stimulating the tastebuds and more about warding off the previous year’s negativity.
He explains: ‘‘It’s almost sweet and bitter, and that would be the last thing we would have, in the hope that the bad things and hardship of the year before would now come to an end and don’t follow you into the next year.’’
Chinese Lunar New Year is, admittedly, as much about fun and frivolity as it is about superstition and tradition. And Au Duong feels it’s important to pass these ideas down to the next generation, now teaching his 7-year-old son, Lukas.
‘‘The first day of the New Year you would traditionally spend with your grandparents, to wish them good luck and good health, and the next with your friends, maybe at a picture house, and the third with a teacher for guidance,’’ Au Duong says. ‘‘But the younger generation don’t seem to follow that routine as much now.’’
Executive Chef Ray Xue, from Huami at Auckland’s SkyCity, also confesses that the celebration of Chinese New Year has evolved since he was a child, with the traditional cooking at home now being replaced by eating out at restaurants.
‘‘When I was in China in the 70s, all the family would come together and Mum would do all the cooking but now most Chinese will go out,’’ the Shanghai native says. ‘‘I feel like home cooking is the best but the times are changing as younger families don’t want to cook.’’
And, while that’s a benefit to Xue who will feed 180 with a special menu over the Chinese New Year this weekend, he does admit, ‘‘it’s kind of sad that we’ve lost this tradition. We’re all so busy now’’.