Being Chinese | After sitting through the Spring Festival Gala with mainland Chinese friends, I had to introduce them to a delightful ritual from SGP

[Tragedeigh]

Being Chinese |​

After sitting through the Spring Festival Gala with mainland Chinese friends, I had to introduce them to a delightful ritual from Singapore​

Reading Time:3 minutes

Chang Zi Qian
Published: 9:30am, 17 Feb 2026

www.scmp.com

If the world assumes Chinese to be a monolith, then Lunar New Year brings a curious paradox. This is the festive season that ostensibly brings all Chinese people together, yet I have found it is also when our cultural deviations are most sharply magnified.

In Singapore, the celebration has always been joyous and largely predictable. Then I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and suddenly, thanks to my mainland Chinese friends, the festival took on new meaning and my festive experience began to feel more like an anthropological study.

It all started last year when I tried to wish my professor at Berkeley Law, who hails from northeast China, a happy Lunar New Year. As I proffered two mandarin oranges with ceremonial gravitas, she looked genuinely startled, as if I was handing her a live fish. Uncertain, she took one orange, passed the other to another professor standing nearby and walked away. I stood there, frozen, realising she had no idea I was just trying to bainian – or extend New Year greetings – as I had been doing since childhood.
This epic fail threw me off (though she did email me a few days later, having cracked the code). I immediately launched an emergency survey of my mainland Chinese friends and a classmate from Sichuan confirmed that he would have been equally baffled by my offering. “Why oranges? Why not durians?” he asked.
I had to keep a straight face when I explained that durians are not in season during Lunar New Year and that Singaporean Chinese give and receive mandarin oranges because in Cantonese, the word for the citrus fruit sounds like that for “gold”.

To my surprise, even my classmate from Guangzhou, the capital of the ancestral Cantonese heartland, hadn’t heard of the practice, putting paid to my assumption that ours was a Southeast Asian continuation of a good old Cantonese tradition.

Around the time of the mandarin orange incident, I was also subjected to the acid test of Chinese connection: Chunwan. To my friends from mainland China, this annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala televised on the eve of Lunar New Year is the heartbeat of the season, signalling the start of a “golden week” national holiday back home and representing their shared experience.
As I sat among them during a replay of the show, however, I felt like an outsider looking through a frosted window. There was a heavy awkwardness in watching a spectacle where jokes didn’t quite land, accents were sometimes hard to follow and the grandiosity felt performative.

While my friends were basking in national nostalgia, I was longing for my kind of Lunar New Year – complete with the suave bravado of Chow Yun-fat in God of Gamblers, the slapstick humour of Stephen Chow Sing-chi, or another high-octane narrow escape by Jackie Chan. To me, Lunar New Year isn’t a polished variety show. It’s the frenetic energy of Hong Kong cinema, the clatter of mahjong tiles and the annual blackjack get-together with family and friends – and I was missing all of that last year.
Having sat through Chunwan, I made sure to introduce my mainland Chinese friends to a uniquely Singaporean (and Malaysian) festive activity. On the seventh day of Lunar New Year, traditionally celebrated as everyone’s birthday, I got together with some friends for the ritual known as lohei. After explaining how we would have to pile up sliced raw fish, shredded vegetables, crackers and stir everything together, I presided over our table as the self-appointed master of ceremonies.
Feng sheng shui qi – “let the wind blow and the water rise” – was one of the auspicious phrases I yelled as I got everyone to join in tossing the ingredients: the higher the toss, the better the luck! It was rowdy, messy and fun. An overseas Chinese person was showing and telling them something they didn’t know about Lunar New Year, and my friends were surprised and delighted by the Singaporean-style chaos of yusheng, as the dish is also known.

Personally, I feel coming together to toss fish and vegetables is more inclusive than gathering round to watch Chunwan. For a few minutes, a Singaporean Chinese tradition took centre stage and our versions of Lunar New Year didn’t seem so separate.

But just how Chinese is my version of Lunar New Year? Ask someone from northeast China and they will be surprised at my enthusiasm for the festival. (From their perspective, I am, after all, a foreigner.) Ask someone from Guangzhou and we are both confused about mandarin oranges. Ask a Hongkonger and they will decide I’m playing mahjong wrong.
Nevertheless, this Lunar New Year, I will still be tossing a salad Beijing hasn’t heard of, playing mahjong by rules Hong Kong doesn’t entirely recognise and showing up with oranges that baffle half of China. And I’ll be doing all this in my Singaporean-accented Mandarin.

Here’s the thing though. Despite our differences, there is one festive tradition that unites every Chinese person across nationality, dialect and family origin. All of us speak the fluent, unabashed language of red packets, whether we call these envelopes filled with money hongbao, ang pow or lai see. If you ask me, our shared DNA of chasing prosperity and extracting cash from relatives and friends is where our experiences perfectly align. Happy Lunar New Year!