Welcoming the year of the rat

This was my second Chinese New Year (CNY) spent away from home. I had no mood to celebrate since my family was not around and there was no holiday in Baltimore. In New York where there is a large Chinese community, Feb 7 was a holiday. Anyway, I spent CNY working away on my experiments.

With the addition of two Chinese colleagues to the lab in late 2007, we decided to take Wednesday morning off to watch China's CCTV countdown towards the year of the rat. Since Eastern USA is 13 hours behind China, we had to catch the program at 7am i.e. waking up at 6am to go to Jianshi's place.

I was told that the singers/performers had to pay the producer to appear on the program. That was new for me since I thought that the producer will pay artistes to sing or perform on stage. According to Jianshi, there was a large viewership in China and from overseas Chinese like us. Paying the producer is like advertising for your career.

While watching, we made some dumplings. I learnt that Northern Chinese eat dumplings while Southern Chinese eat glutinous rice balls (tang yuan) and Singaporean Chinese and Taiwanese have steamboat. Interesting!

Thereafter, we went back to work after lunch.

In the evening, I was invited to eat steamboat with a small group of Singaporeans. It felt good to speak Singlish and Teochew. We ate and chatted till 11pm. I had a whale of a time and was exhausted by the time I reached back to my apartment.

At 1am plus, I called back home to send my mum CNY greetings. I was exhausted when I hit the bed.

On Friday, Feb 8, I was invited to attend a CNY celebration at the Singapore Embassy in D.C.. I wore my suit while most of my Singaporean friends were put off by the formal attire.

There, I met a lot of familiar faces I knew from attending Cecilia's events. At the beginning of the reception, we had YuSheng, a Singaporean signature CNY dish which can be described as a Chinese raw fish salad. Auspicious greetings are said while adding spices, sauces and ingredients and mixing the salad. The tradition is to toss the higher to bring in better luck for the new year. Chinese loves auspicious stuffs.

In this new year, I am hopeful of finally publishing a paper. It will serve as my reward for my stay here.