How We Celebrate Chinese New Year With Golden Eggs and a Feast

What do you think of when Chinese New Year rolls around? For me, it's the dreaded golden eggs: a specialty from the region of my ancestry, Fuzhou, that are essentially hard-boiled eggs. At any other time of year, they're—at worst—innocuous, but on this, the ultimate of feast days—the Spring Festival Reunion Dinner that takes place on the eve of the Lunar New Year—those eggs play an irrevocable role.

Golden eggs are thieves of joy. (Read on to find out why.) They remind me of how my family has celebrated the holiday in China and beyond, including all the dishes and their symbolism for the year ahead. Here's how my family continues to carry out our heritage and customs in the States.

Preparing for a Lunar New Year Away From Home

As my family acknowledges the Chinese Lunar New Year a world away, we follow only the loosest of guidelines. After all, we can't shut down for a week of celebration and then spend another full week visiting family and friends. We can't shoot fireworks all the way through the Lantern Festival, which marks the end of the holiday season. Without a sizable local Chinese population, we can't watch lion and dragon dances and scare away evil spirits with gongs, cymbals, and firecrackers.

Holiday Routine

Despite obstacles that prevent us from practicing many New Year traditions, we can carry out these customs:

• Clean the house the week before
• Shop for a new outfit
• Put up red banners with gold-foil couplets and characters that symbolize fortune
• Burn incense at family altars
• Gleefully accept red envelopes of lucky money (until we reach a certain age)
• Watch the annual CCTV variety show gala into the wee hours

Traditional Superstitions

We also hold on to these New Year superstitions:

• Skip the morning porridge to avoid poverty
• Refrain from putting negative words into the atmosphere
• Stay away from financial matters
• Refrain from sweeping the floors, putting out the trash, and washing our clothes or hair on New Year's Day for fear of washing away any good luck

The Feast Setting and Prep

Here in the States—like many immigrants—we make the celebration our own, doing the best we can with what we have. We eat our feast in the storefront of our suburban Chinese takeout on Long Island, New York, as soon as the dinner rush shows signs of dying down.

Our restaurant was open all day on New Year's Eve but would officially close early, at about 10 p.m. Until then, my parents would still jump up from their seats to service customers as walk-ins would gape over our exotic alien bounty, like cuttlefish and sliced abalone or alabaster Hainan chicken, chopped up with pink marrow peeking out from the bones.

A chef and restaurateur, my father took this holiday—the most important of the year for Chinese folks worldwide—as a challenge to outdo himself in the kitchen: to take requests, rediscover forgotten flavors, dust off old family recipes, and experiment with new ones while playing with unfamiliar regions of his homeland.

The special requests we'd make of our father spanned an amalgam of dishes from regions across China—each with wholly distinctive flavor profiles—and even some Americanized Chinese favorites. Among the panoply of dishes at the reunion feast are, inevitably, golden eggs.

Golden Eggs: Thieves of Joy

Eating a whole egg in any kind of preparation is an important part of welcoming the new year and celebrating the Spring Festival—the rounding of the cruel curve of winter in Chinese culture. Like everything else around this cultural holiday, it's dripping with more symbolism than sauce.

The golden eggs sit in a cloudy broth, glittering with the fat melted off meaty pork shoulder bones that have simmered for hours, verdant scallions punching color into the pleasant taupe of the soup. The eggs bob innocently among meatballs made of white finfish, whose centers surprise with treasures of flavorful ground pork, and smaller, denser ones with a springier bounce and sharper flavor. Boiled, peeled, and then deep fried before being dropped into soup, these eggs take time and care to prepare.

Egg Symbolism

The spherical shape of the egg—and any other round food, for that matter—signifies a wholeness, particularly for the family unit, and fertility. It also stands for prosperity: the whites for silver, the yolks for gold. The illusory gilded layer added by the frying stage of these particular eggs is an attempt at extra credit by my family of overachievers.

In the soup tureen, there's one egg for each of us at the table and a few extra to manufacture a good omen for the year ahead. Leftovers are intentional: The more food on the table to start and left at the finish, the stronger the message of a wish for overabundance in the year to come.

My Family's Sentiment

Deep mystical metaphors aside, my siblings and I resented these eggs. They're bland and boring: a total waste of time and precious stomach space on an evening meant to be a marathon, not a sprint. With as many as 17 dishes for our family of six to sample in a tableau sprawled across multiple tables shoved together unceremoniously, it felt like an affront to the bounty our father would present.

As special to our heritage as it was, what use did we have for eating a hard-boiled egg when duck would be glistening under crisp, russet skin just to the side of it, waiting to be wrapped in pillowy mantou buns? When tender pea shoots, hiding whole cloves of garlic like clownfish in anemone, provided a bright emerald contrast to the nondescript beige bowl of soup and spheres?

We kids would grab an egg as soon as we sat down to get it over with quickly. We scarfed it down practically whole to eagerly proceed to the good stuff: lobster tossed with ginger and scallion in traditional Cantonese preparation, and black snails we'd carefully pull from their shells with toothpicks, all squishy and delicately curly at the ends.

We were excited to devour the prime pieces of tangy Peking pork chops while they were still crispy under their mahogany glaze. We competed to grab the best parts of the whole sea bass that gaped slack-jawed and glassy-eyed at us under a blanket of haystack ginger and scallions, swimming no more but in a pool of soy sauce and hot sizzling oil no less.

Our Feast Menu Must-Haves

Golden eggs aside, my father would become a one-man whirlwind, taking very seriously the superstition that the greater the variety of dishes, the better our fortunes would be. In other words: The more food, the greater the plenty in the coming year. Here are the non-negotiables we could expect to see at the feasting table.

Da Yu, Da Rou for Abundance

Our New Year's Eve feasting table reflected the guidelines for "da yu, da rou," which translates to "big fish, big meat." The daily Chinese diet is typically vegetable-heavy, with a handful of different entrees shared family-style and taken bite by bite from community plate to mouth to accompany our individual bowl of rice. But on this evening, one that was supposed to establish the precedent for the year to come, all the stops were pulled.

Da yu is the real protein showpiece: an entire fish, cooked and served gutted but whole, with the head pointed toward the guest of greatest honor. Associated with this tradition is the phrase "to have both a head and tail," which means to see things through to the end with discipline: a resolution if I've heard of any!

The da rou consisted of duck for loyalty and future fertility (and because we loved it); a whole chicken for prosperity, family unity, and togetherness; and pork for strength, wealth, and peace. Lamb and beef—a symbol of greatness and power—are also welcome, if you have them, but are not as common.

More Big Fish

The more big fish, the better. Fish symbolize abundance and plenty due to the word's homophonic nature. The word "yu" sounds similar to that used for "surplus," and leftovers at New Year's are a good sign that you'll enjoy plenty of it in the days to come. Shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, scallops, and all manner of shellfish add variety to the table and are imbued with their own meanings.

Nian Gao for Growth

Nian gao is a sweet rice cake with red dates or jujubes. Its translation can be interpreted as "higher/taller year," and it symbolizes growth in every aspect: increased fortune, knowledge, income, and health. For children noshing on this symbol of wealth and fertility, nian gao also symbolizes literal growth.

Citrus for Wealth

Young ones would also enjoy round citrus fruit like tangerines, mandarins, oranges, and pomelos as part of their dessert. The fruits' spherical shape mirrors the same wishes as the golden eggs, and their deep hues represent gold and wealth.

Dumplings for Financial Success

In the north of China, dumplings are a popular reunion feast tradition easy for Americans to adopt. Chinese families often turn making dumplings into a group activity, spending hours wrapping them together while spilling a year's worth of figurative tea as they sip on the actual stuff.

Every family has its own recipes, so there's no right or wrong way to enjoy this treat. Whether you make them yourself or not, eating dumplings at the reunion feast is a good way to stack the odds of financial success in your future, as their crescent shapes resemble the gold ingots used in ancient Chinese trade.

Noodles for Longevity

Other food traditions common to the reunion feast are bowls filled with seemingly endless, springy noodles, which symbolize a long, smooth, unbroken life. Longevity noodles (yi mein) are the standard-bearer for the occasion, but since everyone is not a fan of their distinctive sodium bicarbonate treatment, other forms can take their place. Lo mein, glass, egg, or any other type of bundled noodle is an appropriate substitute because you want strands that won't sever easily, like vermicelli rice noodles.

Load up your noodle dish with mushrooms of any and all kinds, sauté with garlic chives, or accent with peanuts to multiply your wishes for plentiful days ahead. And go ahead and slurp—it's a compliment and a good omen if you can make it to the end of the strands!

Bamboo Shoots for Abundance

If plenty is what you're looking for in the upcoming year, there's a long list of ingredients you should consider when planning your reunion feast menu. It makes sense that abundance is a priority in a country whose majority has historically not had that. Extreme poverty has been impressively eradicated in China, but those roots run deep.

To protect against want, look for recipes with bamboo shoots or anything that comes naturally in multitudes: tofu, cabbage, grapes, jujubes, kumquats, corn, and lotus. These typically represent surplus, an important theme for the agrarian Spring Festival holiday.

Spring Rolls for Bundles of Goodness

You also want to choose foods that are tidily and satisfyingly wrapped, like spring rolls, cabbage and lettuce rolls, rice bundles, and other cute packets. The thought process around dumplings and their resemblance to gold, as well as bundling up some goodness for the new year, also holds true here.

Mixed Vegetables for Togetherness

Culturally, family is a vital guidepost for the Chinese. Much of the meal is dedicated to symbols of harmony, unity, and togetherness. Fertility also comes as part and parcel of that train of thought. Mixed vegetables, cooked together in a symphony of flavors, are present at every Lunar New Year dinner in multiple combinations. What better way to show the principle that a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts?