Every year I throw my Lunar New Year party, I try to do things a little bit differently to make it better, different, or more special with the food. This year, I made some more intricate Vietnamese dishes. I also created food labels for everything, even marking the ones that were vegetarian or contained pork/mushrooms/shrimp (for people with allergies to those foods). That’s partly to make my life easier with questions on ingredients/what the dishes are, so I don’t have to re-explain myself a dozen times, and so that people know what they’re eating right away. But what I wasn’t quite expecting this year is that the gifts we got were extra special, nice, or fun!
Kaia received several generous hong bao from friends, as it’s a cultural tradition that the older generation should give hong bao/li xi to the younger generation. One of my friends gave me a small money tree several weeks in advance for Lunar New Year party hosting. A third friend drove all the way from New Jersey down to Manhattan Chinatown to a popular (and pricey!) Malaysian jerky shop to get us an entire pound of pork jerky. She also gave us a couple boxes of bean-based pastas, a single orange for good luck (haha), and some homemade lentil-based breads she’d just baked. Another friend brought beautifully boxed and individually wrapped Japanese Yoku Moku “cigare” biscuits, plus an entire box of sumo citrus! I love sumo citrus, but they are quite expensive, so we rarely buy them. Originating in Japan, Sumo citrus are actually not an orange, per se, but a cross between satsuma, mandarin, and navel oranges. We even got a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. A friend who recently came back from India brought us a framed Madhubani painting, which is a style of painting traditionally done by women from her dad’s old village in Bihar. And then there was the most bougie gift of all that Chris’s friend gave me, perfectly wrapped in glittery pink wrapping paper: a Williams Sonoma gold and white ceramic dragon candle, made especially for Lunar New Year. I placed the candle, alongside my 3D cherry blossom birthday card from a friend, in our dining area to display them both. That huge gold candle definitely is the most flashy, showy thing I own to date now…