Year of the Ox Greeted With Food, Family : Asian Americans Use Start of Lunar New Year to Teach Children About Heritage

It’s lunar new year and hundreds of thousands of people of Asian ancestry in the Los Angeles area are ringing in the Year of the Ox with family reunions and festivities.

“Gung hay fat choy!” said Irvin Lai, president of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, as he prepared to finish his work Friday afternoon.

The Cantonese salutation for “happy new year” will be repeated countless times in Chinese homes and businesses until March 7.

“If we follow our tradition, we would be observing the new year for 30 days,” Lai said. “But these days, with families scattered all over the place, most of us just pick a day or two to get together for traditional meals, honor our ancestors and give children lai see (lucky money in red envelopes).”

Los Angeles’ Chinatown was unusually quiet Friday as some people closed businesses early or took the day off for a long weekend to celebrate the start of the year 4695 in the Chinese lunar calendar.

But Koreatown was bustling with activity as last-minute shoppers flocked to supermarkets and bakeries.

At San Soo Dang, a popular Koreatown bakery, owners Helen and Leo Hahn could not keep up with the demand for traditional pastries made of sticky rice, beans, nuts and fruits.

*

“I’ve had to tell callers not to come, unless they’ve ordered ahead of time,” Helen Hahn said as she scurried in and out of the kitchen for fresh batches of the delicacies.

The couple have been working since 4 a.m. and by noon they were turning away customers who needed large quantities of pastries.

Be they Korean Americans or Chinese Americans, the new year’s tradition is seen as an important way to teach children about their Asian heritage.

Although Lai is a third-generation Los Angeles native, he has always maintained Chinese cultural traditions, he said. His extended family of 20, including his mother and seven grandchildren, will gather at the family’s Crenshaw district home for holiday meals of duck and chicken, tangerines and oranges, which symbolize gold.

*

“My grandchildren--all seven of them--will be lining up waiting for lai see,” Lai said. “To youngsters, Chinese New Year is about money and food.”

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Chinatown has scheduled a monthlong celebration that includes tonight’s Miss L.A. Chinatown pageant at the Los Angeles Regal Biltmore Hotel, the traditional Golden Dragon Parade on Feb. 15 and an annual golf tournament March 7 to mark the finale of one of the most important holidays for Asians.

Today, Radio Korea is sponsoring a new year’s street festival, beginning at 10 a.m. in front of its Koreatown headquarters at 626 S. Kingsley Drive. Activities include contests in Korean chess, arm wrestling, kimchi and soup making and a martial arts exhibition and fashion show. Visitors will be served a free bowl of ttuk-kuk, the traditional Korean new year’s day rice dumpling soup.

More than 1.3 billion Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans, whose cultures were influenced by China, observe the lunar new year around the world.

Across the Pacific in Hong Kong, millions celebrated the last lunar new year under British rule Friday with floats and flowers. But in an inauspicious start to the year, a float plunged into a crowd, killing one and injuring 31 others.

Hong Kong will return to Chinese rule at midnight June 30, after more than 150 years of British rule. The usually hectic Hong Kong was quiet for the holiday, with record numbers of people traveling across the border into China to visit relatives.

In Koreatown, Jimmy Kim, an account manager for Pacific Bell, who spent part of his lunch hour standing in line to buy rice cakes, said:

“I’ve been living in the United States for 20 years, but I can’t greet a new year without partaking of rice cakes.”

Kim bought a bag full of songpyun--half-moon-shaped finger-size cakes stuffed with sweet red beans, sugar and sesame seeds.

“I want to share them with my co-workers,” he said, as he hurried to his car.

“New Year’s Day makes me think of home,” said Chun Rea Kim, a Koreatown mother of a fifth-grader, who was waiting to pick up rice cakes to take to her daughter’s school party at Hankook Academy in the Mid-Wilshire district.

According to the Chinese zodiac, each new year is ruled by one of 12 animals--rat, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, dog, horse, sheep, rooster, pig, monkey and ox. The Year of the Ox is associated with diligence and good omen.

“This is the year for sharing and selflessness,” said Hak Kim, a lifelong student of the Asian zodiac. “Like the ox, which helps people [working alongside farmers], and even in death becomes useful by leaving meat and leather for others, people born in the year of ox are sincere, hard-working and patient,” he said.

“The main thing to remember in the Year of the Ox is to work hard and think good thoughts.”