Duties for CNY

Chinese New Year at mum’s home, our home, is quiet and unassuming. It is as exciting, or uneventful, as any other day in the year. We don’t have a lot of people here (we don’t have anyone here) and it’s just us doing things we want to do, waking to the next morning all groggy and slow starting and dressed down. Exactly suitable for us, just how we like it. 

Last night had been a long night of playing cards, and then sitting under the fluorescent light awkwardly pinching together the dumplings and lining the tray with my brother’s and my badly shaped creations. They taste better after passing through all our fumbling chicken hands. This had been his first year joining the dumpling making. Once we inhaled enough ingots like a coin machine, we drifted off to sleep, feeling the weariness of ageing one more year.

The walls watch over our peace and the conservative hotpot big enough for our smaller appetite through the new paintings I’ve done for the year of the ox. Or, through the red blush of Chun Lian and Fu, constructed with weak flabby brushstrokes of amateurs (my mum and I never seem to improve in our calligraphy). Not the prettiest, but it’s ours. To peace and health. (And staying together for one more year and the next and so on, I added to myself).

Chinese New Year at my father’s house is loud and crammed with the egos of young children. The twins are ecstatic about the festival (because it means lawlessness and doing whatever they want, free-flow ipad usage, unlimited snacking, oh the simple joys of a child). Idleness is punished: it’s either kitchen duties or the baby-sitting.

We learnt that every family had their own way of making dumplings when we hunched over the low table making it the way we have been brought up with (and of course we were doing it wrongly). Like parts of a factory line we each had clearly delineated tasks, my brother rolling out the skin into circles (as circular as a child’s sharp edged drawing) and I laying out each inconsistent ingot like mutations on a petri dish, and the youngest screaming in their own games contributing to the festivity in their foolish contagious joy.

On either sides of the phone screen we had our reunion (safe distancing to the max) and said those same unimaginative blessings we have been saying as children to family we don’t care about. They’ve grown older and we’ve grown older. To longevity and wealth (and the ensuing awkward silence as we stare and dart to look at the adults, what now?)