Today is the fourth day of the Chinese New Year.  The initial excitement has quieted down -- the last minute emailing of post cards on the net, the phone calls to relatives and friends near and far, the feast with relatives on New Year’s Eve, and the distribution of Hong Bao (Red Envelopes) to the younger generations…things are back to normal again.

For the Chinese, Chinese Spring Festival is like Thanksgiving and Christmas combined, the biggest holiday in a whole year that traditionally lasts for fifteen days, each day with different themes filled with banquets, parties, singing and dancing, fireworks, and people visiting one another offering best wishes for happiness and prosperities in the new year.  But for Chinese living outside China, it is quite a different story.  Most of the time, you have to go to work, just like every other day throughout the whole year.  If you live in anywhere other than a major city like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisc….where there are some concentration of Chinese population, Chinese New Year may just pass you by quietly without you even realizing it. No celebration, no banquets, not to mention fireworks.

Fortunately, Chinese New Year fell on Sunday this year, so people had a chance to celebrate the holiday for a whole weekend without worries about work.  But life simply does not stop just because it is a special holiday for the Chinese.  As usual, we had to take the kids to drawing class, Taekwondo class, ice skating, piano lesson and basketball game during the weekend…which left us with only a Saturday evening of free time to get together with some relatives for a dinner party, to teach the kids about Chinese tradition, which is not an easy task.  To them, Chinese New Years is equal to the Red Envelope - Hong Bao.  The happiest moment for them is not when they were presented with a plateful of Chinese dishes (most of which they would hesitate to touch), or the time when they had to repeat over and over again to grandpa and grandma, every uncle or auntie: “Zhu Ni Xing Nian Kuai Le, Sheng Ti Jian Kang, Wan Shi Ru Yi,” the meaning of each word they hardly truly understood.  It is the time when they finally settled down before going to bed for sleep, and pulled out all the Hong Bao in their pockets, to count how many hundred dollars they have accumulated.  “Dad, why don’t we have Chinese New Year every day? So we can get all the money without even having to work,” the kids asked before dozing off into the dream land, with happy smiles on their faces.  Very innocent question, and very reasonable to them as well.  To them, that is the whole meaning of the Chinese New Year.

Teaching the kids about China and its cultures is like fighting a war that can’t be won, yet we refuse to surrender.  We know eventually we would lose the war, but if only we can win some battles along the way, it is already quite comforting. At least, they learned that family members should try to get together during the Chinese Spring Festival, and youngsters should pay respect to the elders, and the elders should also love and care for the young ones (as manifested through Hong Bao)…and they memorized “Zhu Ni Xing Nian Kuai Le….” For now, it is better than none