Reunion dinner

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar and is thus quite different from the Western calendar. The most important festival, 春節, or Chinese New Year, often falls on the first week of February, but this year it falls earlier, with the first day of the holidays being this coming Saturday, the 21st of January.

The Chinese New Year is celebrated with family and relatives in your original home town. The festival thus marks the start of the largest human migration, as more than an estimated 300 million Chinese leave the cities and return to their family in the country-side. On the eve preceding the New Year (the Western analogue to December 31st), one eats a traditional and symbolic "reunion dinner" - 團年飯, or literally a festive dinner. Since most of the GLOBE'rs will be travelling to their families next weekend, we had a GLOBE reunion dinner yesterday.


Consisting of 12 courses, most of them of symbolic meaning, the dinner is a fantastic insight into tradional Chinese values. 12 people are seated at a round table, and we had dishes such as squid, roast pork, chicken, dried oysters, mushrooms and lettuce, steamed fish, crab balls, and red bean soup. It was delicious! All the meat was served with the head (pork, chicken and fish), to underline that the food is in fact fresh, which is of serious concern to many Asians. 

Furthermore, Chinese have a funny belief that if you have something, then a similar-sounding event will happen. So since the word for eight (bā -八) sounds similar to the word for wealth (fā - 發), hotel rooms, telephone numbers and licence plates containing the number 8 all have a considerably higher prices than their equivalents without the number 8. The bad number to get is 4, since it sounds like death, and consequently many roads skip the numbers containing the digit 4 - for example 13 will be followed by 15.

So at the dinner, the best thing was the dessert, the twelfth and final dish, called "longevity buns"- 壽包. Literally translated as "life bundle", they are soft, spongelike cakes with a dark, warm custard in the middle. One bun for each was a perfect cap to our feast, and sent us on our way with good fortunes in the year of the dragon.

Of course, the actual reunion dinner will take place in 7 days time, on January 22nd, the last day of the lunar calendar. I will experience that in Cheng Du in China at the house of one of my classmates, and I can not wait!