Chinese cuisine key to New Year Writer recalls feast at Shanghai home

The gigantic city of Shanghai bristles with skyscrapers, lights and people – 16 million or 20 million, no one knows for sure. Its summers are hot and sticky, and its winters are cold – frozen sidewalk puddles one day, bone-chilling 40-degree rain the next. In the middle of gloomy winter, though, a remarkable thing happens in Shanghai, and all over China: the Spring Festival, or New Year celebration.

Around the end of January the whole country of 1.3 billion people seems to migrate in every direction. Universities take winter break, and businesses close for days. Bus and airplane tickets are nearly impossible to get. Students, doctors and laborers cram into train cars, four or five together in seats like church pews; they sit in the aisles and stand near the doors for days to get home for the holidays. And the cooks everywhere pull out all their pots, woks and utensils for an extended schedule.

Chinese New Year occurs not on one night, as in Western countries, but begins on the night of the first new moon of the year and lasts two weeks, ending on the full moon. It’s a time of renewal, the same as for Westerners – in December the sun sank to its lowest point in the sky and now is climbing higher, and everyone has bright hopes for the spring sunshine. To celebrate their hope, friends and families gather to talk, laugh, remember the ancestors, and even say a few words of prayer to them and the Buddhist and Taoist deities of the home. And they eat, copiously.

When I was in Shanghai teaching on a U.S. Fulbright grant during the New Year that began in 2001, my wife, son and I made our own mini-migration to the home of one of my students for a New Year’s dinner. Her family lived on the southwestern side of the city, and our taxi drove for an hour along the raised highway, past apartment blocks and through narrow streets in the January twilight.

We mounted six unheated flights of stairs to the dimly lit, cozy apartment where she lived with her parents. Music was playing and incense was burning in the sitting room where we were graciously led. The overhead electric heater was turned on high especially for us, and the room was festooned with bright red hangings of gold and yellow characters – red symbolizing good luck, which in China involves not just chance but the power and opportunity that goes with it.

My student’s mother and father spoke little English, and we spoke less Chinese, but we presented our bottle of rice wine (not knowing we should have brought a bag of oranges) and then were served waves of food in embarrassing quantities. Innumerable dishes of candy, fruit, nuts, strange-looking chicken, shredded pork, vegetables, and sticky rice, soups unknown to Western tongues, and more items downright unrecognizable.

A pile of long strings resembling translucent gummy worms was placed before us. “What is it?” I said. Our hostess thought with her finger on her chin, then replied, “Sea life.”

Sea life. I picked up a few strings with my chopsticks. They crunched and squished simultaneously in my teeth, and tasted the way fresh kelp smells. Not bad, I thought, and ate more strands. Later we discovered the sea life was, in fact, pickled jellyfish.

Other traditional foods of the Spring Festival include jai, a mix of wok-fried root vegetables; a whole fish, for prosperity; fried noodles, uncut for longevity; chicken, with head and feet the prized delights; small bok choi fried in butter and garlic; zongzi, sticky rice wrapped in reed leaves; and jaozi, steamed dumplings stuffed with pork, my personal favorite. The dark rice wine was heated to make it richer, and lichees came out toward the end, with oranges and tangerines for abundance.

Besides eating at New Year, the Chinese also light fireworks, which are illegal in most cities for obvious reasons. The law, however, seems to be part of the fun. All the way home from our New Year’s feast we heard explosions and saw the green, red and yellow tracers of fireworks sent up from parking lots and courtyards. By the time the taxi dropped us at our building near Fudan University in northeastern Shanghai, a distant ka-boom, or rat-tat-tat of a pack of ladyfingers, or bottle-rocket whistle split the air every few seconds. From our fifth-floor windows we saw flickers on buildings in every direction.

By 11 o’clock, seconds or less separated the pops, cracks and bangs. By 11:30 they sounded like rain, and as the New Year entered at midnight, they became a thunderous downpour and continued ceaseless for two hours, a storm of uncountable explosions scaring off the evil spirits and making way for the Year of the Snake.

The year 2000 had been the Year of the Dragon, an auspicious time for us to have arrived in China. The names of the Chinese years span 12-year cycles: Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep (or Goat), Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig, Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit. The snake is also known as the little dragon, and the next year, 2002, was the Year of the Horse. The year just leaving us has been the Year of the Sheep, and 2004, beginning Jan. 22, will be the Year of the Monkey -clever, inventive, affable and impatient. When figuring whether you are a Monkey, Dragon, Rat and so on, if you were born in late January or early February you need to check the date of that year’s new moon to know your animal.

On the last day of the New Year celebration, the Lantern Festival occurs. It’s the day of the first full moon, falling this year on Feb. 6. The custom dates back at least 1,200 years, when people of the Tang dynasty hung lanterns out to light the way for the new year.

The custom has continued from antiquity, with untold millions of Chinese every winter congregating in anticipation of spring renewal. The food, fireworks and lanterns are threads from the past and into the future which everyone, even the countless ancestors, are bound by every year. We were lucky to catch a glimpse of them in giant Shanghai.

Dana Wilde is a copy editor at the Bangor Daily News. He can be reached at dana.wilde@umit.maine.edu.