Celebrations to Mark Chinese Lunar New Year

As a child, May Chin celebrated the lunar new year with several other families in her village of Kaiping in the Kwong Tung province of China.

But nowadays, the Reseda resident marks the first day of the year and the first day of spring with her Chinese American friends at the Evergreen Senior Center in Northridge.

Earlier this week, the close-knit group gathered at the center for a pre-holiday luncheon to celebrate 4698, the Year of the Dragon, which officially begins today.

The lunar new year is the most significant holiday among many Asian peoples, including Vietnamese, who call it Tet Nguyen Dan, and Koreans, who call it Sol. Those born in Dragon years are said to be wealthy, wise, powerful and eccentric.

Around Los Angeles, public celebrations will welcome the new year with parades, arts and crafts festivals and religious ceremonies.

Organizers expect 20,000 people to crowd Alhambra’s Valley Boulevard today from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. At 11 a.m., a parade--including a float carrying a group of couples who will be married on the parade route--will make its way west on Valley between Del Mar and Garfield avenues.

Weekend visitors at Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights can offer incense to Buddha and pray for prosperity and happiness in the new year. Chinese art and hand puppet shows will also be presented today and Sunday.

Smaller gatherings will revolve around gastronomic delights and adherence to age-old traditions for bringing in the new year.

“In the village, we prepared for months,” Chin said. “We raised chickens, six or seven families raised a pig together, we planted and grew our own vegetables--everything was from scratch.”

Fresh flowers represent renewal, fruit depicts prosperity and pistachio nuts symbolize happiness, she said.

Chinese families on both sides of the Pacific will ritually clean and paint their homes, buy new clothes and wash their hair to cleanse themselves and their surroundings of evil spirits before the lunar new year begins, said Nancy Cheung, the center’s program director.

“Even though I came from Hong Kong to America, I still passed [the traditions] on to my children,” Cheung said. “You don’t want to lose it.”

Times staff writer Ann L. Kim contributed to this story.