Reflections | From food to grieving: how Chinese traditions and customs are tweaked to suit the times and why we eat Ferrero Rocher at Lunar New Year
- Lunar New Year is a time of tradition, but not all the customs date back as far as you may think or are as strict as they once were
- From the three-year grieving period for widows to pineapple buns and butter cookies, we look at how traditions are adapted to suit the times
I celebrated Lunar New Year, which ended earlier this week, with my family for the first time in almost 20 years. I use the word “celebrated” loosely, because apart from having the immediate family together for dinner on Lunar New Year’s Eve, we hardly did anything else.
We were never keen on the festivities, even pre-Covid. The exploitative prices of flights during the period meant that our reunion dinners were scheduled long before the actual day. My parents and brother also never bothered visiting any of our many relatives.
One relative did visit us this year, but my mother wasn’t too happy about it because this aunt was recently widowed. In her supposedly traditional world view, individuals who are recently bereaved shouldn’t present themselves and their “aura of death” at festive occasions, in case they spread their “bad luck” to others.
My mother’s displeasure had more to do with her antipathy towards this relative than any putative adherence to traditional custom. If it was someone she liked, she’d have no such qualms and the tradition would most certainly be “waived”.
Similar negotiations around traditions that are inconvenient in one way or another have occurred in the past and present. Take personal bereavement for example. At different periods in China’s past, the three-year mourning period for one’s dead parents was prescribed at varying levels of strictness. At its most stringent, people whose parents had recently died couldn’t leave their houses, work or study, or entertain themselves for the next three years.
Today, this tradition is obsolete because modern life does not allow such a lengthy period of unproductivity. In fact, a Chinese person today would be hard-pressed to tell you what an appropriate, let alone formal, period of grieving ought to be. From a mental health perspective, any period of more than a few months would be an issue of concern.