by Amanda Ong

Like many Chinese Americans of the diaspora, I have never spoken the dialects of my family with any fluency. There were the words I knew only in Chinese to speak in public without anyone understanding, like “that’s cheap” in Cantonese, ho pang, or “too expensive” in Shanghainese, gesu. There were the words we used at home because they were intimate to us, like pet names, but there were never words that flowed into full sentences, conversations, articulate thoughts. Still, I always knew the language of food. And there is no time that is more important for food than the Lunar New Year. Long noodles are for a long life, whole fish is for abundance, egg dumplings are for money, mandarin oranges are like gold.