Lunar New Year marks the first new moon of the lunisolar calendar. Celebrated by numerous communities across the world, the holiday has come to mean many things beyond its calendrical significance.
Last year, my celebration of Lunar New Year was negligible. Boiling frozen dumplings at 8 o’clock in the morning, I video-call my extended family and my phone bridges the spatial and temporal divide between us. My mother turns the camera away from herself to show me the dinner that she and my grandmother had been preparing since morning. I am given a tour across the table: steamed fish adorned with chives and peppercorns, congee that had been simmering all afternoon, lard-filled rice pudding brimming with jujubes. I wish each of my family members, from my mother to my cousins to my grandmother, a healthy and prosperous year and express my wish to return home.
Raised in southwest China, I grew up calling the new year Chun Jie (春节), meaning Spring Festival. Every year, the streets, usually teeming with the call of vendors, fall into a hushed reverie as families retreat home for the reunion dinners of the New Years Eve, or Chu Xi (除夕), dinner. If one needed a trim of hair or itched for a pack of cigarettes, they would have to wait until after the holidays.
The quietude of the streets gives the illusion that the country has come to a stop. Yet, the ten-day government sanctioned holiday and the period surrounding it is far from static. Chun Yun (春运), the name for the national travel rush during the Spring Festival holidays, has been recorded as the largest annual human migration in the world. The clash of filial values against last century’s rapid economic reforms gives rise to tumultuous journeys of departure and return. Transportation prices spike as hundreds of millions of people vie for tickets to return home for Chu Xi dinner.
Looking up “Spring Festival Dinner” on Google yields a curated mosaic of family bliss—elaborately prepared dishes adorn circular tables, presided over by a benevolent elder surrounded by smiling faces. To unfreeze this image would be to ripple the illusion of photographic perfection with a tinge of uncomfortable truth. For one, as most restaurants close their doors, members of the family, usually women, continue their kitchen labors under the pressures of maintaining tradition.
Other tensions linger in the air at the dinner table. For many migrant workers, the holiday is the only time of year when one can reunite with their families. Confronted with the pressures of reconnection with children raised by grandparents, the guilt of absence, and impending goodbyes, the “family” in family dinner feels more a passing than a constant. On the other hand, as returning children find themselves enveloped by the familial fold, the atmosphere grows taut with anticipation, each interaction laden with the weight of expectations. The digits in one’s salary, one’s relationship status, the entirety of one’s life plan—all are subject to familial scrutiny at the dinner table.
Nevertheless, all of this is precedented by the condition that one does return—that there is a place one desires to return and a means to return there. For queer Chinese individuals, particularly those navigating life abroad for work or study, the decision to forgo the traditional trip home is not uncommon. Others, who desire to return, are often unable to, due to financial or personal circumstances. As the cultural fervor of the holiday season amplifies, a palpable sense of absence pervades, prompting the emergence of alternative Spring Festival celebrations. Group chats such as “Not Going Home for Spring Festival” (春节不回家) begin appearing on social media, and the internet becomes an avenue for those charting their own paths, forging different forms of companionship against a backdrop of familial traditions.
As with any other nationally sanctioned holiday, the Spring Festival break positions a group of people, vastly different in circumstance and geography, under the same span of public time. The traditions that it carries, inundated in a history that transcends the establishment of the nation itself, casts a spell where the felt space between people widens and winnows. In a moment of transition—from one city to the other, from the public to the domestic, from one form of labor to another—individuals find themselves propelled forward and backwards by currents bigger than themselves, never quite coming to a full stop.
