jZepp: The Chopstick Chronicles: On the Eve of the Dog, a Fish

by Eating China

Whenever I am casually asked by Taiwanese what Christmas is all about, I have a stock answer ready. I don't dwell on the origins or the religious rituals, instead I just equate Christmas with the Chinese New Year. Both occasions involve a holiday, a family reunion, the eating of ritual foods, and gift giving, (for Chinese that means the gift of cash – brand new bills). Everyone is supposed to have a great time. Many people, in particular children, actually do.

If you live abroad. particularly in a non-Christian country, getting into the Christmas spirit can be challenging. For a long while I did not bother too much with Christmas, other than knocking back an excessive number of cold ales with other far flung foreigners. Since having a child though, I have made more of an effort to inject some of the old spirit back into Christmas. So every year we put up an authentic plastic Christmas tree (it is exactly the same as the one we had when I was a kid – what could be more authentic than that?), Santa calls, we exchange presents. and play that Bing Crosby song ad nauseam. We have, I think, managed to instill a little of the excitement of Christmas in our son. So in that sense, Christmas is a success. But for myself, it is hard to really get into Christmas without an actual holiday and lots of family and like-minded friends around.

Now here we are just five weeks after Christmas Day and Chinese New Year has arrived. While it always seems to come a little too soon – the Christmas tree only got packed away a couple of days ago – living in Taiwan, I find myself getting far more excited about Chinese New Year than Christmas. As a foreigner, everything, of course seems exotic. That's one reason. But it is also that there is a holiday, (six days, including weekends for most workers), and everybody is celebrating together. There is an atmosphere, a festive atmosphere.

The Chinese New Year is the most important of all the Chinese festivals. The full gamut of customs associated with the New Year are many, complex and can be onerous. For many families nowadays, it is New Year Lite. But the family reunion dinner on New year's Eve remains sacrosanct.

These days, hotels, big restaurants, convenience stores, and even supermarkets are willing to arrange delivery of all kinds of sumptuous dishes right to your dining table on New Year's Eve. But where's the tradition in that? And while the caterers might cart away the dirty dishes, there will still be some cleaning up to do.

At most New Year dinners, the food is not particularly exotic. A typical spread looks like an abundance of home-style dishes. Yet nearly every dish is meshed in some sort of symbolism. Customs vary, but come Saturday evening, one of the dishes you will find on Chinese dining tables worldwide, is fish.

At any time of the year Chinese prefer their fish whole – head, tail, skin, and often fins, all intact. Being used to fillets of fish, this took me quite a long time to get used to when I first came to Taiwan. The small bones in some fish annoyed the hell out of me, and often at a banquet I would just avoid the fish. Gradually, with the aid of the perfect tool for picking fish meat away from bones – chopsticks – I came to appreciate the flavour and juiciness of a whole fish, cooked in its own natural package, so to speak – its body.

At New Year, the symbolic value of a fish far outweighs its nutritional and taste value. This is because the word for fish (yu) has exactly the same pronunciation in Mandarin as the word for surplus, and so on the last night of the old year, the fish is left half eaten. The remainder, including the intact head and tail, symbolizes abundance, a surplus to carry through to the new year. The other half of the fish will be consumed the following day. Right now fish is the only thing I am certain to prepare for our New Year's Eve dinner. This is how I am going to do it: Steamed Fish Recipe. It is a really simple dish that requires only the most basic arsenal of Chinese ingredients. Happy Chinese New Year!