by Julie Pham
(This article was originally published on Northwest Vietnamese News and has been reprinted under an agreement.)
I get to celebrate two New Years annually.
There is Jan. 1, the first day of the Gregorian calendar year. And then there’s Lunar New Year, which falls on the first day of a calendar that follows the cycle of the moon, usually sometime between late January to mid February.
Continue reading Perspective: Reclaiming My Other New Yearby Jenne Hsien Patrick
When Mama cooks dinner she makes one dish
per person plus one or two; we patiently wait,
tightly packed, seated round the table made long
with two extensions that are never put away. My thighs brush
against 阿姨 on one side and my sister on the other,
at the long plastic wrapped table you can’t see the top of,
every inch is covered in plates of food. In front of me
is a mountain of rice in a bowl and a whole fish in broth,
Continue reading POETRY: Ode to Everyone At the Tableby Kristina Rivera
Intentionalist is built on one simple idea: where we spend our money matters. We make it easy to find, learn about, and support small businesses and the diverse people behind them through everyday decisions about where we eat, drink, and shop. #SpendLikeItMatters
Lunar New Year has begun, and we have officially entered the Year of the Ox (and made a much-needed exit from the Year of the Rat).
Lunar New Year is a significant holiday in many cultures across Asia — such as in China, Vietnam, South Korea, and Malaysia — and marks the first new moon of the lunar calendar. The celebration lasts up to 16 days with food, festivities, family, and fortune at the center of it all.
In-person festivities will be limited this year, but that won’t stop us from enjoying some food to ring in the new year. Here are three Intentionalist suggestions on where you should eat to celebrate the Year of the Ox:
Continue reading INTENTIONALIST: Where to Eat for Lunar New Yearby Ching-In Chen
I grew up making dumplings with my family — my mother preparing pork, shrimp, tofu, egg, and spinach, all seasoned by soy sauce and sugar, and enlisting my little brother and I to help wrap while my father was stationed by the stove as “the boiler,” watching to make sure the pot had boiled three times.
As a very anxious and socially awkward young person, I often felt like I didn’t belong anywhere — not in school and not in my family. Concentrating on pressing the dumpling skin together over the filling, I got to a humming place where my body and mind worked in concert with each other, each finger moving surely into the next motion.
As a young adult living far from biological family, the thing I missed the most was the family tradition of making food together. I experimented with creating my own traditions for birthdays and other holidays with makeshift kin. I started to host an annual dumpling-making party around my birthday, close to the Lunar New Year. A way to take stock of the community I had gathered or maintained over the past year. An invitation to build in the new year by inviting newer friends to make food with me.
Continue reading Dumpling-Making Kinby Jiéyì 杰意 Ludden
新年快乐 Xīnnián kuàilè!
I was born in 1991 on the first day of Lunar New Year in Nagoya, Japan to a Chinese mother and a white American father. My brother, my dad, and I moved to the States when I was 5 and my mom followed a couple years later. Throughout elementary school, we would go back to China to stay with my mom’s family every other summer. We’d spend the whole school break there, almost three months at a time, and come back just in time for school to start in the fall. One year in early elementary school, we landed on the first official day of school, so I started school a day late. The, at the time, 14-hour time difference meant that I was so sleepy that first day back that I fell asleep during class. I’m grateful that my teacher was understanding.
Continue reading Year of the Oxby Mark Van Streefkerk
Vietnam is the world’s second largest coffee-producing country, a fact largely unknown to most consumers, though that is changing for those who visit Hello Em Viet Coffee & Roastery. Hello Em is Seattle’s first Vietnamese coffee roastery. Co-owners Yenvy Pham and Nghia Bui carefully oversee every part of the process from sourcing and importing beans from Kon Tum and Buôn Ma Thuột to roasting in house on a Neuhaus Neotec air roaster. The roasted beans make up their signature coffees: the anh roast, a single origin robusta, and em roast, an arabica blend of coffees from Vietnam, Oaxaca, and Ethiopia.
Continue reading Hello Em Viet Coffee & Roastery Serves Coffee, Pastries, and Bánh Mì in Little Saigon
