2024 - The Year That Lunar New Year Went Mainstream in the United States

So we're less than a month into the Year of the Dragon, and I cannot believe how mainstream Chinese New Year became this year.  Seemingly every national brand, every major retailer, every designer name, had some kind of New Year special.  Indeed when I saw Lunar New Year Hershey bars and M & M Candies, I almost lost it.  Why so suddenly and why this year?  I haven't the faintest clue.

 

The cynic in me knows it's just a marketing ploy, but I'm certainly not unhappy with this development.  But it's not just the suddenness of being able to celebrate Lunar New Year with Mickey Mouse that I find overwhelming.  Rather it's something deeper than that.

You see, growing up in Los Angeles as a kid in the 1950s and 1960s we never celebrated Chinese New Year.  While that may sound strange, it was a different Chinese America back then.  Most all my family and Chinese friends were American born Chinese. My parents were American born as were all my aunts, uncles and cousins.  My parents' friends were also American born Chinese. The only immigrant Chinese in my life were my material grandparents, and they were so busy working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week at their small neighborhood grocery store near the University of Southern California campus, that there was no time for any kind of family gathering.  

You may wonder how this American born Chinese society developed in mid-20th Century United States.  It was the result of the Chinese exclusion laws, enacted by the United States in 1882, and not repealed until 1943, which prohibited most Chinese from immigrating from Asia to the United States.  And even after repeal of the law in 1943, the annual immigration quota for China was 105 persons, until repeal of the national origins quota system in 1965.  In actuality, there was some continued immigration of Chinese to the United States during the Exclusion and low quota periods, but much of it was illegal.  Indeed, three of my four grandparents came to the United States illegally. 

Actually there were two different Chinese American societies during the Exclusion period.  There was the second and third generation model I described, but to be an American born Chinese obviously meant that both your father and mother resided in the United States.  However during the Exclusion period there was an incredibly imbalanced sex ratio among Chinese in America, as high as 27 males per female.  Consequently during the early 20th century, the American born Chinese model was very rare, and most Chinese Americans were male "bachelors."  

Technically they weren't bachelors, as most of them were married, but their wives were back in China, unable to come to the United States due to the immigration laws.    As time went on, the ratio did begin to equalize as many old bachelors died off or returned to China.  And the American born segment of the community really really expanded after World War II, as the so called War Brides changes to the immigration law enabled many Chinese American men to have their spouses join them in the United States.  

So as I was growing up, there were a good number of second and third generation Chinese Americans in Los Angeles, and indeed there were few Chinese American contemporaries in Los Angeles who were not American born.  It took a while after the end of the national origins law passed in 1965 for the presence of new immigrants to be reflected.  Indeed, as late as 1970 I was stunned to learn that one of my Chinese American friends had been born in China, and immigrated to the United States as a 5-year old.  No wonder it was my generation of Chinese Americans that first applied the term "FOB" to new immigrants from China.

With this background where many Chinese Americans in Los Angeles didn't celebrate Chinese New Year, no wonder why I'm so totally blown away by the mainstream attention paid to Lunar New Year this year.  One final example of this revolution involves Chinese food.  Of course, most Chinese Americans in Los Angeles now follow the Chinese New Year food traditions, and it's been this way ever since the wave of Chinese immigration has swelled the Chinese population in the Los Angeles area from the 10,000 when I was born to the more than 500,000 today.  And it's certainly not unusual for Angelenos to want to partake of a Chinese restaurant meal around Chinese New Year, as I would receive more requests for Chinese restaurant recommendations from non-Chinese friends during this period.  However, I really don't recall any active marketing of Lunar New Year by Chinese restaurants.  But this has changed, as for the past two years Paradise Dynasty in Costa Mesa, which has a mixed clientele of Chinese and non-Chinese diners, has actually developed a limited curated Chinese New Year menu, this year available through March 31. 

 

And me.  I'm certainly not complaining about the new normal.

Laughter and Tears--Chinese Food on the Sapphire Princess Antarctic Cruise

Since we and everyone else began to take cruise ship vacations again after COVID, I have noticed that the percentage of Asians, primarily first generation Chinese Americans and Chinese Canadians, has been significant.  As such, on the two Mexican Riviera cruises we took out of Los Angeles about a year ago, there was quite an offering of Chinese food, some good, much not so good,  but at least conspicuously present and recognizable at most meals.

Likewise on last month's Sapphire Princess cruise starting in Buenos Aires, cruising four days in the Antarctic, and ending in Chile, there was like a high quotient of Chinese passengers on the boat.  And overall this was the best vacation trip I have gone on.   However on this trip, when it came to Chinese food it was pretty uniformly gruesome.  The overriding feature was the large number of dishes with familiar Chinese names that neither looked nor tasted like the real thing.  

 

Hot and sour soup looked like chicken rice soup and tasted like chicken broth with some pepper added.  

 

Kung pao chicken was big chunks of chicken white meat in tomato sauce.  Peppers?  Peanuts?  What are those?

Sweet and sour pork was unbreaded pork strips of pork (fajita like) in a clear sauce.  (Sorry, no picture.  I couldn't bear to photograph it at the time.)  Sesame chicken looked like McDonald’s chicken nuggets with a dipping sauce.  And mind you, this dish was in the main dining room, not the buffet.

 

They had char siu – in cutlet form in a goopy sauce.  Another day it was the carvery item (without the goopy sauce.

 

Shanghai beef fried rice (what’s that?) looked more like Spanish rice.  

 

And how could you come up with a head scratching version of jook?  Well, by making it greenish yellow, I guess.

 

And unlike the Indian food, which had it’s own section at lunch and dinner every day, the “Chinese” food was very sporadic.  There was one “Mongolian night”, but the only notable feature about that was that it was cooked to your order.  You’d choose from beef, pork, chicken or vegetables, then either chow mein or rice, then spicy or nonspicy.  Oh, and this was the last dinner on the cruise so they wanted to do something special for the Chinese passengers.  (Note that dishes were for "Display Purposes Only.")  Why bother?

 

I posed the question to myself during the cruise "What Chinese recipe book were they working from?"  However, now it's clear to me that Princess did not have a recipe book for their Chinese food.  They gave the names of Chinese dishes to their cooks, and told them to make something up from scratch based on the name.  That's the only possible explanation.