I Forgot About Lunar New Year

My mom called me at 1pm on Friday.

I thought that was weird because that’s midnight in Vietnam.

What is she doing up?

I picked up the phone to fireworks flying off in the sky. She was face-timing me from the balcony of her new condo.

Fuck.

It’s Tết (lunar new year).

Tết is a very big day in my culture. It’s most comparable to Christmas, but even then it’s not the same.

You celebrate Tết for 10 days and you spend a whole month preparing.

It’s filled with ancient traditions and stories.

For example, by the month of December (on Lunar calendar) you have to settle all your debts. You don’t want to carry the bad luck of owing money, or being owed into the next year.

Then a week before Tết, we have a ceremony to send our Kitchen Gods back to the sky.

Kitchen Gods?

A long time ago, there was a couple living in the countryside. One day, the man got drunk and hit his wife. In distraught, she ran away.

Later regretted his decision, he set out to look for her.

Two years went by. The man eventually ran out of money and had to start begging on the street.

One day, his wife ran into him. Recognized her husband, she invited him home and cooked him a meal.

Just then, the wife’s current husband came home.

Afraid her husband would get jealous, she hid the man in a pile of straw outside.

That night while making dinner, the husband accidentally set the straw on fire.

The wife saw the fire and jumped into the straw, trying to save the man.

Mourning the unexpected loss of his wife’s death, the husband jumped into the fire with her.

Moved by this tragedy, God turned them into Kitchen Gods. For eternity, they live happily together in everyone’s kitchen. They report the family’s affairs to God at the end of every year.

So we do a little ceremony to send them back to the sky every year.

The night before Tết, families get together to make the traditional banana leaf rice cake (there’s a story behind that too).

We watch the clock strike midnight together.

It is said that the first person to enter the house after midnight passes their luck to the entire family.

One year, my cousin was so excited to tell me something that he ran in my house without waiting for my dad to enter first.

That made my parents really mad because they said he was unlucky.

Then we spend 10 days visiting relatives and eating together.

Every family we visit, adults would give children red envelopes for good luck.

It’s the best part about Tết. We use that money to gamble.

For 10 days that’s all we do.

Eat. Visit people. Gamble.

It’s the best part of anyone’s childhood.

It all came back as I hung up the phone with my mom.

It made me sad.

Here I am trying to learn a third language and culture, while having completely forgotten about mine.

I think about my mom being in Vietnam all alone in her new house, my stepdad being in the states all by himself.

We’re all scattered.

Most days I exist in a completely separate world than my parents. We don’t think or worry about the same things. We don’t even think in the same language.

Our perspectives on life are completely different.

The gap grows exponentially larger as I lose myself in the future while they spend their time contemplating the past.

It feels weird that at one point, my mom was all I knew.

It boggles me that the divergence could grow so vast while just a few decades ago I made sense of the world through her.

It’s natural yet it’s strange.

I was her roommate. I was there through her ups and down. I witnessed all her major milestones as she witnessed mine.

Now that I’ve moved away, I feel the part of her in me shrink smaller and smaller.

Like the way memories fade.

Even when I visit my parents now, I feel there’s a barrier that’s keeping us from really seeing each other — human to human.

The hierarchy of family that only lets us see each other as mom, dad and daughter.

I don’t know what to make of it.

I feel a bunch of mixed feelings — nostalgic, sad, curious, and baffled.

I wonder if one day, we will find a point of convergence.

A point where after space apart, we relearn about each other again.

This time through compassion, love and a willingness to see each other for who we are.

I think that’s a good goal to have.

Anyways,