The traditional American holiday period has come and gone, but the biggest holiday in my culture is still approaching. Growing up as an ABC (American-Born Chinese), I am used to celebrating Lunar New Year without allocated days off from school and work. But being an academic often leads one to move away from home, and this has created a new set of challenges for celebrating cultural holidays.
As a third culture kid — individuals raised in a different country than the culture of their parents’ origin — the Lunar New Year celebrations of my mother’s home country were always far away. In fact, I have never experienced the 热闹 (liveliness) of China’s most important holiday in person. But immersed in the Chinese community of my hometown, my family always found a way to celebrate within our local community. Dressed in 新洋洋 (pronounced xin yang yang, Shanxi dialect for new clothing), we would gather with friends to make dumplings together while the TV blared with a recording of this year’s 春节晚会 — the annual televised Chinese New Year Gala. Gathered around the table, chatting as our hands became dirty from rolling out dumpling wrappers and packing them with fragrant garlic chive filling, my community members became a sort of chosen family when our biological families were so far away. My local Chinese community even put on our own local 春节晚会, which my mother and I both performed in year after year. And amid the festivities, we would schedule a call across time zones to exchange holiday wishes with our family back in China, yelling at the phone with an increasingly larger volume each year in accordance with my grandparents’ hearing. With these celebrations, our hearts felt full despite the distance from the rest of our family back in China.
Today, as a Baltimore transplant living on the other side of the country from my hometown, I can no longer rely on my mother for my Lunar New Year plans. Far away from my old community and even farther from China, it is now up to me to find a way to fill my heart for the holiday. Luckily, I am not alone in this experience. Many cultures celebrate Lunar New Year, and many students from those cultures have left their hometowns just like me to study at Hopkins. Even the lab equipment vendors who come by will bring Lunar New Year-themed freebies! Organizing with other students and lab mates, I have started finding ways to make my own Lunar New Year celebrations. At first, my ways of celebrating started as a small gesture of bringing oranges (symbolizing success) and white rabbit candies (symbolizing prosperity) into lab to share. As I have gotten better at building a new community, making dumplings at home with a small gathering of roommates or friends has slowly turned into larger gatherings of those who wish to come together to celebrate. Although the people are different, the red decorations and dumpling-oriented table gathering remains the same. And of course, I still schedule calls, now coordinating across three time zones, to yell holiday wishes louder than ever to my grandmother.
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