It's funny, but in the US we are usually invited to 2 or 3 parties for Chinese New Year, with other adoptive families and the Chinese Club of Western New York, where Helen takes Mandarin lessons. But here in China...Chinese New Year is a family affair, the campus has emptied out, and we are left to our own devices this year. With a little research I have set out to recreate a Chinese New year at home.. first we decorated our door with the banners you see above...they translate to wishes for happiness and prosperity for our family. Just about every home will replace last year's banners with new ones, and many will leave them up all year. It is also customary to hang a decoration with the character "Fu" 福 which means "good fortune, blessings". You hang it upside down, because the word in Chinese for "upside down" sounds like the word for "come", so when people tell you "Fu is upside down", it sounds like saying "Fu comes"... did you follow that?
The older kids and I ventured out yesterday afternoon to see the shopping crowds and start loading up on food for our homemade New Year feast. The storefronts are all decorated.
We went to the No. 7 market..the biggest street market in Xiamen, in particular on a quest for Jiaozi pi (dumpling wrappers) which surprisingly enough, proved impossible to find. Instead I was presented with a bag of flour by several vendors. As Thomas said -- "they don't have the pre-made wrappers...they have Chinese grandmothers to make them". I called my tutor from the market and she promised to bring me some with the filling her mother made...but I bought the flour just in case and spent this morning looking up recipes. It is traditional to make the dumplings on New Years Eve together.
The market proved to be interesting, with stalls of all kinds of fish...
Very freshly killed ducks, and some live ones, too....
All kinds of prepared foods for the holiday..we bought some crabmeat dumplings...
And at the sweet counter, glutinous rice cakes stuffed with sweets and a bread dish which the vendor said was "traditional Chinese New Year treat"...kind of a Chinese hot cross bun I guess.
Finally our quest for wrappers took us to Trust Mart, the local Target/Wal-mart ish store...with a big inflatable out front and....
THOUSANDS of shoppers inside..its a good thing they didn't have what I needed, because I did NOT want to stand in that line!
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