In America, Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year, to be more inclusive to other Asian cultures) plays a small role, falling somewhere between Cinco de Mayo and St Patrick’s Day. Here in Asia, Chinese New Year is a huge deal. It is like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year all combined into one week. Many institutions, including the University, were closed for a whole week and I definitely put it to use.
On Feb 2nd, I had dinner with my father’s relatives at my great-grand aunt’s apartment in Tin Shui Wai. She lives in a residential building that is over forty stories high. My great-grand aunt looked after me when I was a toddler but I never met her family. At the dinner, I got to meet them all including Hailey, my very cute 10-year old cousin. I was so impressed at how much better her English was than my Cantonese. After dinner, the timing worked out and I was able to FaceTime my dad and grandmother who are both back in the US. We passed around the phone and it definitely felt like a big reunion.
Around 10pm after dinner, we drove to the flower market in Tung Tau Playground, where it was surprisingly busy for so late at night. The Chinese New Year Flower Markets usually start a week before the first day of the Chinese Lunar Calendar and kick off the CNY season. Covering multiple basketball courts were rows and rows of stalls selling snacks, souvenirs and stuffed animals (mostly pigs this year!), and flowers. During dinner, Hailey kept telling me about the sweet frozen strawberries and how I had to try them. So once we got the market, the first thing we did was to get a stick of strawberries each, coated in frozen syrup and rice paper. It was definitely a yummy (but eventually sticky!) treat.
With all the time off that week, I got to explore the city even more. After hiking Lai Chi Chong with my mother’s relatives, the next day, I went with a group of exchange friends to the biggest and most well-known flower market, the Victoria Park Flower Market in Causeway Bay. (This is the same area where domestic workers spend their Sundays. I found it so unbelievable when I first saw this but I digress.)
It was maybe five times bigger than the aforementioned Tung Tau Flower Market had been with twenty times more people. Sandwiched between excited people, it took us ages to shuffle with the crowds through the dozens of stalls. Most of which were run by university students selling cute plushies, canvas bags, and pins. Each row of the stalls had banners above them indicating which direction to walk through them. Surprisingly, people followed the direction of those banners and, even though I had never been pressed up against more strangers than in that event, it was actually well-organized and not as stressful as I might be making it sound.
ABC in HK 