Lunar New Year: A Diverse Festival That Contains Multitudes

The holiday marks the first day of the lunar calendar. The dates vary from year to year, but it tends to fall between January 21 and February 20 of the boring old Gregorian calendar. In 2023, January 22 will see lion dances, marching bands, and dance troupes roar into life; families will gather in restaurants and around dinner tables alike; red envelopes will find kids excited—or unenthused, depending on how much they find inside. The holiday’s most widely-known elements are staples in the Chinese version of the holiday. But Lunar New Year contains multitudes. Varying culturally specific versions are celebrated across East Asia, most notably in Vietnam, parts of Japan, and Korea. And of course, it’s celebrated by diasporic Asian communities around the world.

Big cities usually put on festivities, shopping malls and public squares get plastered with corporate renditions of the year’s zodiac animal, and travel routes get much, much busier. In Korea, as Lunar New Year approaches, a frenzy descends in the form of Gwi-seong-jeon-jaeng (귀성전쟁), which roughly translates to “homecoming war.” This mass-travel phenomenon sees millions of Koreans living or working in the country’s metropolitan centers travel en masse back to their hometowns to see their families. In 2019, an estimated 43 million travelers clogged the country’s arteries during the week of Seollal.

Travel rushes make homebound travel for the holiday hard, but living an ocean’s distance away from family makes it harder. Family inaccessible, one of the only tangible markers of Lunar New Year for me has been food. Koreans usually eat Tteokguk (떡국), or rice cake soup, to ring in the new year. It’s a warm, cozy dish made from fish or bone broth, with thinly sliced rice cakes, julienned eggs, beef, and garnished with sesame seeds and seaweed flakes. My mom says you gain one year of age after you eat it. Look, it doesn’t make sense to me, either. One, how is food supposed to magically age you, and two, it’s the start of the year, so even if you’re judging it by that standard you’re not a year older yet. My mom is awful at math but her Tteokguk more than makes up for it.

And so, on those January or February mornings, while Chinatown wound up for its celebrations and families reunited around us, my mom and I would sit at the table eating our soup. And some years, my dad would be there, if he wasn’t away in Korea for work.

Or maybe my inability to cozy up to Lunar New Year is thanks in part to the city I live in. Vancouver, BC has a massive community of Chinese ancestry, as do many big cities along the west coast and around the world. This is to say that so much of the imagery and messaging around Lunar New Year is rooted in a culture that isn’t my own. Sure, significant Korean communities exist here, but I’ve never lived in those neighborhoods, and only dealt with them superficially during my childhood churchgoing years.

While it’s not a problem to call it Chinese New Year when you’re talking about the cultural practices of Chinese people in China and the diaspora, it’s not representative of the holiday’s cultural diversity. And I’ve known about that diversity my whole life. Still, I felt spoken over, perhaps spoken for, by the overwhelmingly broad brush that Lunar New Year is drawn with in the West.

Until recently, I’d just accepted that the holiday—hot soup or otherwise—would always feel lukewarm. I didn’t particularly think about it. I wasn’t sad about it, either—it wasn’t like I was spending Christmas alone, or like my highly anticipated birthday plans were falling through.

And then, at a workshop last May, I met a group of 1st to 2nd generation Koreans who changed things for me. Over the span of an afternoon, we practiced somatics: movement and breathing exercises designed to foster mindfulness about our minds and bodies, rooted in a collective experience of what it meant to be Korean settlers on Indigenous land. I swear, it was a quasi-spiritual experience to be there with these people, my kin, many of whom had contentious relationships to Koreanness, as I did. I felt held, acknowledged, understood. It felt like a homecoming.

English was still our lingua franca. But as we spoke, we dotted our sentences with bits of Korean, like sesame seeds floating in rice cake soup. The names of foods, hometowns, and old singers our parents listened to in the car—these little gems constellated our conversations. In meeting these people, whom I’m now fortunate enough to call my friends, I learned that I wasn’t alone in my experiences of feeling distanced from parts of my own culture. In talking with these people, I saw my longing for culture take shape.

Everyone knows about holiday isolation. That awful feeling of being alone while everyone else seems swept up in joy. But now it’s clear to me how culturally specific holidays can cause an equally specific kind of isolation—one that felt to me less acute than spending Christmas Eve alone, and more spread out, numb, dull. A kind of pain connected to the larger structures of being a racial and ethnic minority, of trouble finding your people, of life away from your homeland. But over the last year, the bits of my culture that I’d felt divorced from have started to feel approachable.

It’s almost the new year. I think we might plan something, my friends and I. Maybe we’ll go through a little travel rush of our own, as we stage our own miniature homecoming war. We’re all looking for a bit of home, anyway, whether you celebrate Lunar New Year or not, aren’t we?

We’ve yet to make solid plans, though. Maybe we’ll spend the day around a table and talk about what we’ve been missing all these years, like we did in May. Maybe we’ll make Tteokguk together. But it doesn’t even matter if we meet for Lunar New Year this year, because this kinship we’re building feels more soul-warming than a bowl of soup could ever be.