How Do You Celebrate Lunar New Year?

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Okay, Lunar New Year celebrants it is your turn. 212-433-WNYC. Today marks the Lunar New Year. Now listeners happy New Year. We will open up the phones for those of you celebrating the holiday today, tell us how you celebrate and what traditions you're participating in today. Even what superstitions, and we will get to why I ask it that way. 212-433-WNYC. If you celebrate the Lunar New Year, how will you be celebrating? How have you celebrated in the past? 212-433-9692. By way of a little bit of background, while some calls start coming in, the Lunar New Year is represented by a cycle of 12 Zodiac animals, as many of you know.

A new year means a new animal and 2022 is the Year of the Tiger. According to USA Today, "The tiger is commonly associated with something like bravery, courage, and strength, and can also be viewed as an uplifting animal that can give people hope, especially with COVID-19," says USA Today. Who was born in the Year of the Tiger? Who wants to call in?

There's another invitation for you. If you were born in the Year of the Tiger, which means if you are now something that's a multiple of 12 on your birthday this year, what does the Year of the Tiger mean to you? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Now, Lunar New Year is sometimes referred to as Chinese New Year.

Chinese American listeners we welcome you to call in. 212-433-WNYC, but we should say for the sake of everybody else, that it's actually celebrated in communities around the world, including South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, and more very diverse countries. How does your community celebrate, especially if you have strong ties to any of those cultures? How do you as an individual celebrate the Lunar New Year? 212-433-WNYC. Do you want to share some special games that you play? I see there are games, or explain what's traditional costumes look like. That's what people who don't celebrate the Lunar New Year are probably seeing for the most part on television.

A few particular kinds of mostly Chinese garb. Anybody want to explain those or talk about what you use in your Lunar New Year celebrating country? 212-433-WNYC or culture. 212-433-9692. I said superstition. In China, according to CNN, you'll want to avoid purchasing footwear for the entire Lunar month as the term for shoes, [foreign language], if I'm saying it right. Sounds like losing and sighing in Cantonese. According to Travel + Leisure magazine, one of the most unique superstitions of the Lunar New Year in the Philippines is choosing to wear polka dots as their round shape represents prosperity, money, and good fortune.

Maybe you want to talk about some of the traditional gifts that you give on this day if you don't want to shout out a superstition 212-433-WNYC. Because I understand some of the gifts are supposed to bring good luck. 212-433-9692. Again, anyone born in the Year of the Tiger. If you're turning 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, 84, any 96-year-olds celebrating their birthday this year, Year of the Tiger. Give us a call and tell us what the tiger represents to you. I'll throw in one more specific invitation. If you're South Korean, happy birthday, according to Travel + Leisure magazine, everyone ages one year at the start of the Lunar New Year celebrations.

It's a complex system, including something called gestational age. Do we have any South Koreans who observe this tradition of having a Korean age and can you explain it to everyone else? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Betty in the Bronx, Year of the Tiger baby. Right, Betty?

Betty: Yes, today actually is my birthday.

Brian Lehrer: February 1st.

Betty: February 1st, yes, 1951, because according to what I've seen, it's not just the year it's also the date and when I was born in 1951 February 1st, it was a Year of the Tiger at that time.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any association with it? As a tiger you are-- Fill in the blank.

Betty: Fierce, I guess. I always happen to like cats. I actually am a cat rescuer as well. It's interesting that this creature, I think it's a very powerful and strong animal, and I associate those kinds of things with my personality.

Brian Lehrer: Betty, thank you so much, and happy birthday. Carol in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Carol.

Carol: Hi, Brian. I'm so thrilled to talk to you. I was born 1950 in February and am a 72-year-old tiger.

Brian Lehrer: Happy Birthday.

Carol: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: And?

Carol: And-

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Carol: I'm a Chinese art specialist. I've been involved with China for more than half my life, and so I take this very seriously that it's my year, and so I have to wear a red string or some red toenail polish or something all year to protect me and my Chinese friends tell me that I just absolutely have to do that.

Brian Lehrer: Why red do you know?

Carol: It's a lucky color.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Let's go next to Julie in Hamilton, New Jersey. Hi Julie, you're on WNYC.

Julie: Well, hello, how are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Happy Year of the Tiger and Lunar New Year. I see you were a teacher who participated in Lunar New Year celebrations.

Julie: Yes, I teach preschool music class at First Presbyterian Church of Hamilton Square, and we celebrated Chinese New Year. Happy Lunar New Year. I have these really neat red ribbon wand sticks that we use to pretend like we were dragons marching in a parade, and we had a couple of Chinese New Year songs that taught the children to hop and wave the tails, and we just had a really good time. Then at the end of class I shared the red envelopes with some pretend money in it and a fortune scratch-off card and showed them how to scratch it off at home when they take it home. It was just a really nice way to teach the children about a holiday they may not be familiar with yet.

Really enjoyed it, and I learned more about it myself.

Brian Lehrer: Julie. Thank you so much for your call. On Twitter listener, Michael Wright cleaning the house before today, wearing red, eating whole steamed fish, going through some of this Lunar New Year traditions. Wright cleaned up the house in advance of today. He's wearing red, eating whole steamed fish, tangerines, spending time around the house today, paper signs, certain walls in the front door and the most important red envelopes. 212-433-WNYC. 433-9692. Nicole in Fort Lee you're on WNYC. Happy Lunar New Year, Nicole. Hi.

Nicole: Yes, happy Lunar New Year. Yes, I'm Nicole.

Brian Lehrer: Tell us anything you do for the holiday or your background?

Nicole: Yes. I am half Korean, half Japanese born in Queens actually, living in New Jersey now, and my family has raised us celebrating the Lunar New Year, according to the South Korean tradition.

Brian Lehrer: What might that include for you today?

Nicole: We usually eat rice cakes. Korean rice cakes, and it's in a soup, so it's called [foreign language] and we eat that every Lunar New Year, and once we eat that we age one year. We do have that belief.

Betty: Do you have any of those superstitions also like I was mentioning from before? Like a gift to give that's good luck or something to avoid, anything like that?

Nicole: We do also have the tradition where we bow to our elders. If my parents had grandkids, they would bow to them and then they get them with an envelope with money in it. We have a saying that means, [foreign language] and it means please receive a lot of luck this year, or that we hope you receive a lot of luck this year.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole, I hope you receive a lot of luck this year. Thank you so much for calling in. Jenny in White Plains. You're on WNYC. Hi, Jenny.

Jenny: Hi, how are you. Thank you for taking my call. I was just telling your screener that it's interesting because my husband-- I'm in a unique situation that I'm Korean by birth but adopted to a German and American parents and my husband is half Chinese and half Serbian. We do celebrate Chinese New Year--

Brian Lehrer: All kinds of things.

Jenny: Yes. All kinds of things. Anyway, we went to a restaurant that's traditional Chinese yesterday to celebrate a day early. My father-in-law who is the Chinese part of my husband [chuckles] ordered traditional pig's feet dish that was sprinkled with something called [foreign language] that we knew nothing about. It looked like this stringy stuff up on top of it. We did a little research when we got home and it turns out that it's a type of an algae and it's controversial though.

I don't know how the restaurant acquired this, but apparently it was banned from export from China because it was causing huge patches of desertification in the Gobi desert, because it can only be grown in some arid climate and something or it takes like a huge amount to harvest to make per dish. Anyway, I was just curious if anybody knew, if there were sustainable versions of this that were being grown in legally exportable ways.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

Jenny: Because it turned out-- It's very traditional to have this especially for the Chinese New Years, but it's horrible for the environment. Apparently--

Brian Lehrer: What's it called again?

Jenny: It's called [foreign language].

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if anybody's out there tweet at us, Jenny, look at our Twitter to see if anybody knows of any [foreing language] being grown sustainably. We've got 25 seconds left in the show and we're getting to give them to [unintelligible 00:12:28] in Manhattan who wants to say something about the Year of the Tiger [unintelligible 00:12:32] you get a sound bite's length of time. Go.

?Speaker 4: Oh, okay. I'm from Hong Kong. When we were young we usually just stay together to have dinner and then like the night before and then we will go to the flower market to buy different flowers and plants and go home.

Brian Lehrer: That unfortunately has to be the last word, happy New Near to you. Hope you get some nice flowers and to everybody who celebrates Lunar new year.

 

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