15: The meaning of Chinese New Year

Like I would know.

It’s Chinese New Year¹, which means pretending to know what’s going on even though you really haven’t got a clue, making it exactly like - well, life in general. So in that intrepid spirit, here’s an expat’s guide to Chinese New Year in Singapore.

CNY (calling it CNY is the first part of sounding like a pro) starts straight after Christmas, when shops replace their Christmas merchandise with CNY equivalents overnight. Both colour schemes involve plenty of red and gold, but while Santa and Rudolf stay the same each year, the incoming zodiac animal changes, with 2024 bringing the year of the dragon.

At the same time, Christmas playlists are replaced with an infinite loop of traditional CNY songs whose Chinese lyrics are lost on me, but which I assume - just like all ancient and culturally meaningful artefacts with intangible heritage - are designed to make you buy stuff. Just like Christmas, nothing is sacred where retail is concerned, with dragons co-opted to sell everything from 24-packs of Carlsberg to 24 hours of car rental.

Specialist shops also spring up, selling decorations, charms and trinkets made especially for the occasion - the shop below, on Pagoda Street in Chinatown, is typically kaleidoscopic.

No doubt these items all have some kind of significance, just like baubles and tinsel probably have some kind of significance too. But nobody seems to think too hard about that. Instead, you buy a few new ones, dust off the old ones and hang them around the house and office to signal festive jollity.

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The customs of Chinese New Year are not limited to shopping and decorating, however. Saying the right greeting is an essential part of the pretending-to-know-what-you’re-on-about hoopla. The main thing to say is gong xi fa cai which is something about wishing people prosperity. Phonetically, it’s ‘gong see fah chai’ which is manageable without too much embarrassment and is therefore a handy phrase to deploy whenever needed.

One such occasion is the exchanging of gifts, which forms another essential part of the CNY experience. These aren’t the sort of gifts that children ask for from Santa, but time-honoured traditional items such as cold hard cash.

Not just any old cash, however: it must be crisp new banknotes, handed over (always two hands, don’t forget) in ang baos (red packets). Long queues form at allocated ATMs around the island to secure the freshest notes, with daily limits on how many can be withdrawn (see Starting CNY on a good note from the Straits Times to be pleasantly surprised by how interesting the underlying logistics turn out to be).

Another main gift is oranges, as pictured above at Fairprice Finest in Katong V mall last month. Again, they symbolise … something. At a guess, prosperity and/or auspiciousness, which are the two foremost qualities for CNY and are ascribed to pretty much everything.

Simply giving people oranges is all that is required. You might give someone oranges, and they might give you some back. Gong see fa chai me old mucker. I’m not sure what the protocol is on quantity of oranges, except I’m pretty sure it needs to be more than one. Either way, you generally don’t eat them, as far as I can tell, but leave them on display.

There’s so much other food to eat at CNY that oranges are at the back of the queue anyway. After a face-filling Christmas, another snackathon might be the last thing you want but there’s little choice. Neighbours bring snacks, colleagues bring snacks, friends bring snacks. Bak kwa (honey-spiced pork jerky, delicious), fortune cookies, love letters (sweet crunchy pastry that’s shaped like a scroll, meh), pineapple tarts (cakes filled with firm pineapple jam, tasty but stodgy) - it’s a festival of calories.

Then there’s yu sheng, the ceremonial dish which resembles a food fight using salad. Apparently a Singaporean invention, it seems to be an integral part of company culture, during which colleagues armed with chopsticks gather around a plate of shredded vegetables, raw fish, crackers and dressing before dramatically mixing it all up while shouting out their wishes for the year - prosperity, auspiciousness, health, happiness and so on.

The CNY buildup continues for weeks on end, culminating in a national public holiday. To outsiders, the customs seem exotic at first, but they are no more or less strange than wearing paper crowns and wrapping a fir tree in blinking lights. That’s the meaning of Chinese New Year: food, drink, gifts, oranges, decorations, music, more food, work parties, family gatherings - it’s basically Christmas but with dragons. What’s not to love about that?

1. ‘Lunar New Year’ seems to be the preferred, ethnically neutral term used in official communications, but in Singapore at least, Chinese New Year is the phrase used by everyone in everyday conversation.