COMMENTARY, Jan 25 — For kids, the most exciting part about Chinese New Year may well be receiving ang pows, making a game to see who can collect the most red packets. (For the married adults obliged to give these away, it’s probably less exciting!)
The one aspect of the festive season everyone can agree on is that Chinese New Year isn’t Chinese New Year without the reunion dinner. Held on the eve of a brand new lunar year, this meal is more than just an excuse to feast on delicacies or to toss yee sang for good fortune.
It’s a rare opportunity for everyone, each busy with their own lives, to come together and be a family.
Reunion dinner means preparations may start days or even weeks earlier, from baking cookies to scouring the wet markets for the freshest seafood. (Relationships matter; knowing the butcher and fishmonger at your local pasar well will avail you of choice cuts you’d be hard pressed to find at the supermarket.)
Why all the hard work? Why not just head out to a neighbourhood restaurant and have someone else do the cooking? For one thing, cooking the dishes together is part of the fun and helps bring everyone closer.
While arguing over how long the fish ought to be steamed (a perennial topic in my parents’ home), you could also catch up on the latest news — which cousin just got married, whose daughter just got a scholarship to further her studies — and each other’s lives.
When we debate about which celebrity astrologist has interpreted the Chinese Zodiac better this year and binge on kuih ros, shattering each honeycomb crisp into tiny shards as we munch, we are also tightening our familial bonds. Folks who gossip and snack together, stay together (or so the theory goes).
So what happens when we cease doing this?
More and more, we no longer cook reunion dinner at home and reserve a table outside — at a proper Chinese restaurant, at a corner-lot daichow, at some popular chain outlet nestled inside a shopping mall — so we save the trouble of planning ahead, of preparing more dishes than we can finish, of the actual exhausting task of cooking.
And then we can all return to our own worlds, as swiftly as the waiters rush over to serve dishes (all with prosperity-symbolic names, all the same as the other tables as there is only a set menu during this busy period, naturally). Is this a reunion dinner? Is this what it’s meant to be?
It’s easy to be cynical, to demand that we stick to our roots. Traditions must remain or they will fade away. The implicit fear here is that families will fade away too if our rituals disappear.
Why are we so afraid?
Certainly it can’t be a bad thing to relieve each other of cooking duties if it means skipping the stress and fuss that come with it? Perhaps the dishes won’t taste as good as compared to home-cooked classics, but isn’t it a good thing if there is more time for dad jokes and uproarious laughter that can be heard down the street?
Sometimes there is more tears than laughter. I have acquaintances who are estranged from their families. They have abusive parents, siblings who are self-destructive, toxic relatives who really don’t mean the best. To force them to attend a reunion dinner with that bunch would be cruel; they have been punished enough, surely?
This doesn’t mean they can’t or don’t experience the joys of a reunion dinner though. Some are invited to reunion dinners at the homes of good friends. Their friends’ parents are almost adoptive parents, closer to them than their own. They are part of the family.
Others make new traditions, gathering other friends — some similarly alienated from their kin, some forced to be separate by distance and personal finances — to have their own reunion dinner.
A potluck, maybe; or someone who’s gifted in all things culinary hosts; or dinner at a restaurant so everyone can spend more time in conversation and camaraderie — what works, works. They are part of the family.
I remember when I was studying in Munich many, many years ago. A student allowance meant I could barely make ends meet, much less buy a ticket to fly home to celebrate Chinese New Year.
That year I would just have to miss my mother’s lap mei fan, rich with fragrant waxed meats, and have dinner on my own, perhaps a cheesy Käsespätzle instead of unctuous strands of longevity noodles.
Or that was what could have happened if I chose to stick to a rigid definition of reunion dinner, of family. Instead my group of friends — among them Americans, Italians and Germans — and I went out to a Hong Kong restaurant along Blutenburgstraße and had Cantonese food.
We had not seen each other in ages, all of us busy with our semester exams, that it was a reunion of sorts. They were part of my family then and I was part of theirs.
See, the reunion dinner hasn’t lost its meaning; it has merely expanded its definition. If anything, the reunion dinner is more meaningful than ever in this times of discord and despair. If anything, the reunion dinner is more necessary than ever, and what’s necessary is that it be empathetic, non-judgemental and inclusive.
Last year, I had a surprise when I reached my parents’ home after braving the usual balik kampung jam on the North-South Highway. My hands full with bags of bakkwa and mandarin oranges, I called out to someone to open the door for me. My nephew, maybe, or my father. Instead a complete stranger opened the door.
“Hi, Uncle Kenny,” he said and then introduced himself. My eldest niece’s boyfriend whom I had not known existed before this. Now that’s something to get caught up on. We tossed yee sang together, hollering auspicious sayings, then tucked into steamed fish, longevity noodles and my mother’s splendid lap mei fan.
As it turned out, my niece’s boyfriend was a complete charmer and our family welcomed him with open arms. It’s the start of a new tradition, and — spoiler alert — he’ll be back for reunion lunch this year. (My niece joins his family for reunion dinner.) Families grow and we happily adjust: He’s a part of our family now, and my niece a part of his.
The reunion dinner isn’t dying out, no matter what the cynics may tell you. It is changing with the times, opening its arms wide to embrace more than what was traditional, so that we may all belong. So that we may all be family.
