Every year for a while now, I’ve hosted a Chinese New Year party. I make a ton of dumplings and a few other dishes and invite as many friends and their families as we can reasonably cram in the house. It’s usually in February, sometimes January (the 25th this year), usually subzero outside, and for the kids, I try to buy the traditional red envelopes, hong bao, which we stuff with dollar bills or — somewhat less traditional — chocolate coins. It’s always hot and loud and chaotic and fun, and when the last guest is gone, I am left with all the things you want to herald the start of a new year: love, fellowship, laughter, gratitude.
Also a nagging sense of fraud.
Chinese New Year was not a holiday my family celebrated, I don’t really know why. Salt Lake City in the ’70s and ’80s was not exactly a hub of Taiwanese culture, but we did have Taiwanese friends, and there was a Taiwanese Association that hosted picnics and hikes and other events. This was before such organizations had a political tang to them, real or perceived. The Taiwanese Association was a purely social club: eating, drinking, songs. If there were politics involved, they were oriented against mainland China; “cultural hegemony” was not yet a phrase. My mom, and to some extent my dad, both of whom came to the United States on the back of the Hart-Celler Act, did not and still don’t think that preserving their cultural identity is of major concern. (The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 amended laws that had previously banned immigration from Asia and severely restricted immigrants from southern and eastern Europe while giving preference to those from northern Europe.) The most monumental holiday event of the year in our house was Thanksgiving, when my mother struggled to produce a giant bronzed turkey from our tiny oven, along with sides that neither she nor my father liked: sweet potatoes, Pepperidge Farm stuffing.
It still puzzles me, why she chose to die on the hill of traditional Thanksgiving, when nobody enjoyed turkey, and the stress of cooking unfamiliar food made her cranky. Chinese New Year, by contrast, passed without notice. I think my sister and I did get red envelopes some years: crisp new bills in large denominations which were quickly taken back and deposited in a college account. But there was never any talk about eating fish for good luck or noodles for longevity, or lighting firecrackers to scare away ghosts or bad luck. We didn’t watch any lion dances or avoid cleaning the house on New Year’s Day.
For a good part of my teens and 20s, I resented my parents for not giving us a clearer sense of our cultural origins. They spoke a bit of Taiwanese to us — often if they were pissed and wanted to scold us in a language that others didn’t understand — but I didn’t learn Mandarin until after college, when I devoted a lot of intense personal energy to clawing back a little bit of what had been lost in translation. I was pretty bitter: Why couldn’t they have just spoken Mandarin to us when we were growing up? Then I wouldn’t be sitting in a portable classroom after work, practicing the four tones like a robot so I could achieve the linguistic proficiency of a 2-year-old: Zai nali? Kuai yidian! (Where is it? Hurry!) My poor parents got defensive, sometimes a little angry when I complained. “But you are already Chinese!” my mom once said in exasperation. In her view, being Chinese was something internal and inviolate, not something you needed to demonstrate to others through speaking the language or eating dumplings or doing a lion dance. Why would you need to prove something that was already true? (Maybe that’s why she was so determined to master the American Thanksgiving turkey. Perhaps she felt a bit on shaky ground when it came to things all-American: Thanksgiving, bake sales.)
Eventually, I went to live in Taiwan for a year, where I quickly discovered how impossible it was for me to retrieve whatever blood feeling I thought was waiting for me there. My long-lost relatives were actually kind of bitchy; I had nothing to say to my cousins; I dreaded having to spend time with my grandpa, who, despite being very jolly and an amazing first-hand repository of Sino-Japanese history, had such a thick accent I couldn’t understand anything he said. I hung out with the other ex-pats mainly — we spent Chinese New Year at McDonald’s, which was the only place open in Taipei during the holiday — and wrestled with guilt for preferring their company.
That feeling of being split and disconnected from their source is hardly new among first-generation Americans, but the prevalence of the sentiment doesn’t change how sad it made me feel. People tend to gloss over the fact that moving to a new country, a new culture — even under the best of circumstances, as my parents did — constitutes a huge break with your past, and the repercussions are long: You can’t take everything with you. Back in the U.S., I wrote a book about that feeling (a thriller set in Taipei, oddly enough), got married, moved on.
That was almost 20 years ago. I wish I could say that being slightly out of context doesn’t bother me anymore, and, for the most part, it doesn’t. Why should it? My children are safe, I have more than I could ask for. Given the desperation of immigrants around the world, in Syria, in Africa, at the U.S.-Mexican border, that Chinese-New-Year feeling of fraud seems like a hothouse concern, a bit of navel-gazing.
Still, it persists, and not exclusively as a private sorrow. Last spring, my son came home from school in tears because a classmate had told him that he wasn’t really Chinese because he didn’t speak Chinese. (Parental concern aside, this was sort of interesting to me, because when I was little, that kid would have said I wasn’t American because I was Chinese.) I told him that wasn’t true, but if he wanted, I could teach him some Chinese. He felt a little better, so I taught him the word for “cat.” He repeated it fervently, like an incantation. Then, true to form, he asked what we were having for dinner. I thought it might be a good night to make dumplings.
Francie Lin is an editor and writer who has a complicated relationship with domestic life. She lives in Florence.