I don’t know how to celebrate Lunar New Year

Gabrielle Liu - Junior Copy Editor

In my culture, adults give hong bao, red envelopes with cash, to younger family members during Lunar New Year. It symbolizes elders passing blessings and wealth on to younger generations, preparing them for the future. I wonder what kind of future that is.

I wonder what it means to be Asian in majority white spaces “post” pandemic. Despite the pandemic’s lengthy duration, a few years is a short time to process the violence we now know can arise from the more common micro-aggressions, ignorance, and disdain we have experienced in our day-to-day lives. Having conversations about racism is awkward because entrenched racism affects other minorities to a deeper extent and the model minority myth has designated East Asians a status where they’re neither fully accepted nor rejected in majority white spaces. One thing is clear, however: we should acknowledge that Asian racism sits within a context of white supremacy, genocide, and ongoing violence against Indigenous and Black people on the continent – this is the responsible way forward.

According to Statistics Canada, reported hate crimes against East or Southeast Asians rose by 301 per cent in 2020. Similarly, in 2021, there was a targeted shooting in Atlanta killing six women of Asian descent and in 2023 a university student was repeatedly stabbed on a bus for being Chinese. One Canadian youth reported that their principal allegedly said “my ‘kind’ was not the one that started the virus” when asked to put on a mask. These are only a handful of accounts.

And, Lunar New Year – in all its joy, food, and tradition – cannot shelter us from this reality. Eleven more people have died in a shooting during a Lunar New Year celebration at Monterey Park, L.A.

We live in a culture of invisibility and constant messaging not to subvert order. I was taught not to draw attention to oneself, not to speak up, to listen and learn from authorities and from elders. Deference and “hunkering down and moving on” is typical in many Asian cultures, compounding the resistance to speaking out lest we sacrifice the white man’s favour. Apart from some current privileges we hold, I think that is why we rarely examine Asian discrimination in North America, and why there is no Asian student association at Bishop’s. Last year, I did not even mark Lunar New Year on my calendar. It was my non- Asian friends who invited me over to make dumplings. This year, we did so once again.

The dumplings we made looked more like xiao long bao rather than jiaozi, but they warmed and ached my heart at once. The experience left me wondering when and how we, as an Asian community, can begin talking about the toll these last few years have had on us.