Happy Chinese New Year, year of the snake

Heather Frederickson

Gung hei fat choi.

That’s Chinese for Happy New Year. Sort of. Actually, it’s a traditional expression of wishes for prosperity in the New Year. How appropriate, seeing as how the Year of the Snake began last Wednesday.

Have you all experienced a Chinese New Year before? Of course you have. You may not celebrate it, but you’ve lived it. The second new moon after the winter solstice marks what is also known as the Spring Festival.

Well, maybe not in Utah with all this snow.

In any case, I decided how fun it would be to share my experiences growing up in a town where increasingly less English is used on storefronts – often replaced with traditional character writing.

Chinatown was always my favourite stop downtown. We only went through there maybe once every six months or so, but I enjoyed it. The sounds of speech so alien from my own, the smells unlike anything my parents ever whipped up, the sights so much like the movies (there really are chickens and rabbits hanging in some windows) -it was fantastic.

Plus, you could walk down just about any alley to buy firecrackers. No kidding.

My Mom and I actually did that once. I was in grade six or seven and it was the week before Halloween. My older brother had bought some (illegal) firecrackers from a friend of his the year before, and I simply had to have my own to “play” with. So we hopped a bus and headed for the “big city.”

I had no idea my mom knew the city so well. We got off the bus in the heart of Chinatown and within a few minutes’ walk turned down an alley. I kept my eyes peeled for ninja stars to come flying out at us and for either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mel Gibson to jump out and rescue us. Aaaaaaaaah. The imagination.

We got my firecrackers (a brick of 500 boomers) and headed home again, the whole time my mom telling me how to avoid blowing my fingers off.

My school days were also filled with various facets of different Asian cultures. I think it was that same year we had a student teacher whose ancestry was Japanese. We spent six months learning about all things Japanese and even got to make sushi. Well, it had raw fish in it, so I guess it was really sashimi. Whatever the name, we all got sick from it. All that sticky rice and seaweed was wonderful. Especially all over your hands. But when it came time to taste it, I watched others bite into it before deciding to carefully take mine home for my parents. They didn’t eat it, either.

I loved Chinese food, though – fried rice, chicken chow mein, prawns (mmmmm, my favourite) and the like. Stuff my friend calls “white” Chinese food – the food made for North Americans. Apparently, many Chinese people don’t eat that stuff. I had no idea. I thought Chinese food was Chinese food. I never thought the stuff I got was made for me. This from a woman whose mother ordered Chinese food for me once in the language of the waitress. I’ll take what she said as gospel. And here I was thinking I was culturally aware.

My high school was almost half Asian students. That’s a huge number, considering we were one of the smaller schools with less intensive ESL programs. But it made our culture that much richer. I loved it.

At the time, I completely forgot so few places in the nation were as colourful as mine. I forgot I lived in one of the more diverse areas of the country.

As I got older, we welcomed a greater number of immigrants from India, Jamaica and all of the Pacific Rim. It was something I took for granted, this myriad of wonderful faces, and wish I could see that in Logan.

No, I won’t hold my breath. But I will wish everyone “Gung Hei Fat Choi” in this lovely Year of the Snake. And I wish you all get to experience a culture as diverse as the one I’m from.

Heather Fredrickson is a senior majoring in journalism. E-mail comments to her at slr4h@cc.usu.edu.