Chinese New Year Books for Kids

It has been a very long time since I've posted anything. Many apologies to my readers! 

In August, we welcomed baby Ailin (爱霖), whose name I translate (with some creative liberties) as "deluge of love." Born during a summer downpour, she is all sweetness but being a mommy to three has taken more of me than I imagined, and I am just now starting to write down all the ideas that have been circling in my head for months.

In honor of Year of the Horse, here is a list (and mini reviews) of some of my kids' and my favorite English-language children's books about the New Year.  

My First Chinese New Year by Karen Katz (Henry Holt and Company: NY, 2004) is the story of how a little girl prepares for the Chinese New Years with her family: sweeping the bad luck away with a broom, purchasing plum blossoms, getting a haircut and wearing new clothes. The book features Katz’s signature colorful and endearing illustrations. Unlike Katz’s board books, this book is geared toward older babies, toddlers or even preschool age.

  

In Bringing in the New Year by Grace Lin (Alfred A. Knopf: NY, 2008), a young girl tells of her family's preparations for the Lunar New Year: hanging red couplets, making dumplings, sweeping the floors, getting a haircut, and wearing new clothing. The celebration culminates in a dragon dance, which is depicted on a large three-page fold-out. 

Children will be swept into the New Year's celebrations by Lin's vibrant illustrations. Parents will appreciate the cultural notes Lin provides about the traditions described in her book. 

A New Year’s Reunion by Yu Li-Qiong and Zhu Cheng-Liang (Candlewick Press: Mass, 2011) tells the story of Chinese New Year, as experienced by Maomao, a young girl whose father works far away, and can travel home only for the important holiday. When the father arrives home, the family of three make sticky rice balls (yuanxiao), fix up the house, and watch a dragon dance weave its way through town.

The illustrations are touching, the bright colors of the Chinese New Year celebration and child’s clothing contrast the dark colors of the father’s clothing.  I love this book because it captures Chinese New Year as experienced by many families across China. It captures both the joy of being reunited as well as the sorrow of separation when the father must return to work, all through a child’s eyes.

Long Long’s New Year: A Story about the Chinese Spring Festival (Tuttle Publishing: Boston, 2005) is a story about a young boy (Long Long) who helps his grandfather (a cabbage seller) earn enough money to buy food and supplies for his family’s Spring Festival. 

The story captures the hustle and bustle of small village life in the days leading up to New Years. The illustrations, which look like they were painted on antique rice paper, are replete with details of village life and will appeal to adults and children who will enjoy looking for hidden details.

Silk Peony, Parade Dragon by Elizabeth Steckman (Boyd Mills Press: PA, 1997) is the story of Silk Peony, a magnificent dragon who is rented by a powerful mandarin for the annual New Year’s parade. Based on legend, this is the story of how the dragon came to lead the New Year’s parade.  The traditional story and whimsical illustrations of dragons are sure to appeal to young children and the young at heart.

The Star Maker by Laurence Yep (Harper Collins: NY, 2011) tells the story of young Artie during the months leading up to Chinese New Year in San Francisco Chinatown during the 1950s. Throughout the book, Artie is vexed with how he will come up with the money to buy firecrackers**for all of his cousins to set off during the Lunar New Year, a boast he made to his cousin Petey during a family dinner. This is a story of a young child’s perceptions of family (his idolization of his Uncle Chester, disdain for cousin Petey, and respect for Granny), in the context of 1950s Chinatown. A chapter book, this will most appeal to kids in 1st-3rd grade. 

**Parents, don't worry: In the preface, Yep explains that even though firecrackers were legal when he was a child, he always set them off when his parents were close by. He encourages children reading his story to stay away from firecrackers due to their danger**

A Nearly Perfect Chinese New Year

Over the years, I have come to realize that, as good as our intentions may be, our bicultural family cannot celebrate Chinese holidays the way they are celebrated in China. 

We face some inherent challenges: we are separated from our Chinese family by a 12-hour plane ride; we live in a state where fireworks (the legal ones) are  available only during summer months; we often have to cram our holiday celebrations in with our regular routine because don't get time off from work and school as in China. And then there's the fact that when we do make holiday plans, things rarely go as expected. 

Take this Chinese New Years for instance: I started out with a "to do" list, the traditional preparations for the holiday. 

1. Clean the house.  
We cleaned the house, and then it got messy again. Valentines Day was just a few days away and boxes and cards needed to be crafted for school parties. When we finished, the living room was strewn with decorations and crafts for both holidays, along with the usual collections of toys, books, shoes, snack bowls, etc...All in all, it was very un-clean. 

2. Buy fresh flowers.  
This was on the "to do" list, but I got sidetracked with all the Valentines Day preparations and ran out of time. Oops!

3.  Skype with the relatives in China. 
Miraculously, we secured a good connection on New Years Eve (their New Year) and were able to talk long enough for everyone to wish each other Xin Nian Kuai Le (Happy New Year) and Gong Xi (Congratulations--the typical New Year's greeting). Before signing off, my mother-in-law reminded me to prepare hong bao (red envelopes) to slip under the kids' pillows at night. 

4. Prepare Hong Bao.  
"Do we have any hong bao?" my husband looked at me hopefully. If I answered "No," one of us would be off on a wild goose chase looking for the Chinese envelopes at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night in a mid-sized Midwestern city. Instead, I told him that we had a couple from last year that we could reuse. And I had cash to fill them! (We never ever have cash on hand so I was feeling mighty proud about this.)

Fast forward to New Years Day. The kids woke up, ran into the kitchen clutching their hong bao, and exclaimed in happy voices, "Xin Nian Kuai Le!" Picture perfect, right?

Less than an hour later, I was deep in negotiations with a stubborn three year old who was determined to wear paper-thin Chinese printed shorts out the door in 40-degree overcast weather.  

"Fine. You can wear your shorts," I conceded, "but you have to wear pants either over or under them." Minutes later, my three year old walked out the door wearing two pairs of pants--his thin shorts under a pair of corduroys. 

Then, there was the mouse poop...lots of it.  Mice had taken up residence in our van overnight, and turned our vehicle into their shredded, poopy Mousedom. Wasn't this the Year of the Snake? Where was my snake when I needed it? As much as it turned my stomach, I didn't have time to clean this mess up now.  We were late to see a Lion Dance at a local restaurant where we had planned to eat dim sum. 

When we arrived, the restaurant was bustling. We waited over an hour with other Chinese and American families, packed shoulder to shoulder. While we waited, the kids watched the Lion Dance performers warm up, don their bightly-colored costumes, and begin their dance (accompanied by loud gongs and drums) into the restaurant. 

One hour later, we were eating a delicious meal and watching the performance again, this time from the inside. The kids, happy with their full bellies, watched the lion eat a head of cabbage suspended from the ceiling, and then shake its dancing tush in their father's face. 

Did we have a perfect Chinese New Year? No, but nearly.

Cinnamon Mooncake Cookies (Holiday Recap)

After a luxuriously long holiday break with the fam, I'm back to blogging! I didn't do as much baking this year, opting instead for rest (after a long virus--yuck!) and spending time with my in-laws and kiddos. 

One recipe my daughter and I did try this year was Cinnamon Buddha Cookies (seen here at Spoon and Chair) using the mooncake molds my husband brought back from China earlier this year.






Spoon and Chair's recipe (which is based on Dorie Greenspan's Sweet Tart Dough Recipe) calls for Mooncake cookie molds, not mooncake molds--which I think are deeper--but we improvised and used the smaller of my mooncake molds (approx. 3 in. in height). They worked out just fine.

The dough is a breeze to make. The recipe calls for mixing flour, powdered sugar, cinnamon, and then butter and 1 egg yolk in a food processor (see recipe for exact measurements). 

This is then chilled in the fridge for two or more hours. We'll probably reduce the chill time next time we make these; two hours of chilling made for a pretty tough dough. We really had to work it into the mold with our fingers. We then used a knife to scrape off the extra dough in the mold (to make cookie prettier!). 

 Making these cookies is a great way to relieve holiday stress. The recipe notes that you have to "whack" the molds against the counter to pop the cookies out.  With our molds, "whack" was an understatement. We had to "ka-whack" the dang things for the cookies to pop out.  We followed Carolyn Phillips' suggestion at Out to Lunch with @MadameHuang to flour the molds each time before adding new dough. Without the flour, we would have had to literally dig the dough out with our fingers.  

Mooncake cookies are a great all-around cookie for holidays---Christmas, New Years, and Chinese New Year (which is next on our family holiday countdown. Put it on your calendar: February 10!). They taste wonderful--like slightly sweet, cinnamon-y shortbread. Plus, when they're baking, the cookies make your house smell like Christmas, due to their 3 tsp of cinnamon.  And did I mention how pretty these cookies are? 

Bakers note: We followed the recipe's instructions and baked for 20 min. Our oven might be too hot, but this left the cookies a little overdone. We'll reduce baking time next go around. Also, with our molds, the recipe only made eleven cookies--which means that they disappeared in a matter of hours. They are that good. 

Lantern Festival and "Togetherness"

“Today is the last day of Spring Festival. You must cook yuanxiao for the children and light lanterns,” my mother-in-law called from China to remind me.

Spring Festival is the fifteen-day period in which the new lunar year is celebrated. Lantern Festival (or Yuanxiao Festival) marks the last day of the celebrations. At dusk on this day, families gather together to eat sweet or savory sticky rice balls (yuanxiao), light beautiful lanterns, and celebrate “togetherness” (tuanyuan). 

“Hao Aiyi (Youngest Aunt) waited in line to buy yuanxiao for four hours yesterday. That store on Huaihai Road (a famous commercial street in Shanghai) has the freshest yuanxiao in all of Shanghai.” She continued,  “And then she went to Yu Garden to buy a rabbit-shaped lantern for Da Yima (Eldest Aunt).”

Before we hung up, I told her that I’d try my best to share Lantern Festival with the kids.

How did this holiday sneak up on me?  It shouldn’t be a surprise; Lantern Festival happens every year at the same time—fifteen days after Chinese New Year. But here I was, again, ten minutes before bedtime looking at a package of freezer-burned yuanxiao. Memories of Mid-Autumn Festival came flooding back. 

I felt guilty for missing yet another Chinese holiday, but more than that, I felt sadness that all the yuanxiao in the world couldn’t bring my in-laws and us together to celebrate this holiday. My husband was out of town visiting my father-in-law, who was finishing up his last year of work before retirement, and my mother-in-law was in China caring for her sister, who was undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer.

This weekend my husband will fly my father-in-law back for a short visit. Though my mother-in-law will not be able to join us, we will celebrate being together for a few short days.

And we might even eat yuanxiao!

How do you and your family celebrate “togetherness” during Lantern Festival?

Jiaozi-making Party

This weekend we invited friends over to celebrate the Year of the Dragon with us by making Chinese dumplings (jiaozi). This was our first jiaozi-making party since our college days, when we co-hosted a party for 20+ international students in our friends’ tiny apartment.

This year, since half of our guests were children under the age of seven, we wanted our party to be simple and kid-friendly. We used frozen dumpling wrappers from our local Chinese food store.  They defrosted on the counter in about two hours with the wrapper off. 

We made two different fillings, pork and shrimp and pork only, based on our friend Rob's recipe from years ago. 

Rob’s Dumpling Recipe

2 lbs of ground pork, turkey, or shrimp (We ground shrimp in our food processor.)

2 Tablespoons soy sauce

2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons black pepper

1 teaspoon white pepper

2 teaspoons of brandy, sherry, or other aromatic alcohol (We used Shaoxing cooking wine.)

1 teaspoon sesame oil

Mix all of the above together and let sit.

1 inch fresh ginger

3-4 stalks spring onion

Either 8-10 celery stalks or one small head of Chinese cabbage (Cabbage should be approximately 1/3 of meat mixture; we used about ½ of a large head for one recipe.)

Mince ginger, green onion, and cabbage, each separately. 

(A food processor works great for mincing Chinese cabbage, but we found that it needed to be cut into big pieces before being tossed into the processor to ensure uniform mincing.)

Squeeze excess water out of cabbage.

Mix minced veggies into meat and store in fridge until party.

Makes filling for around 90 dumplings. (We divided the recipe in half and used pork only for one half and pork and shrimp for the other.) 

Everyone helped with the wrapping, though the two-year-old’s dumplings were subjected to a second inspection to make sure the edges were totally sealed. Since our expert jiaozi maker from Beijing wasn’t able to come and instruct us, we experimented to find the best way to crimp and seal the dumpling wrappers.  This experimentation resulted in beautiful creations subsequently named “the stegosaurus” and “the full moon.” 

                                

(Above, the "stegosaurus," "the wave," and "the purse")

When the dumplings were ready to eat, we set them out with other simple dishes: cool cucumber salad, a tofu dish, stir-fried bok choy (qing cai), and white rice.  We also provided kid-friendly food such as “fishie” crackers, juice boxes, and berries.  After dinner, the kids scampered off to play while the adults enjoyed cherry pie, fresh whipping cream, and spiral jade tea.

All in all, it was tremendous fun, and my daughter is already talking about next years’ party.  I think we will add a vegetarian filling to the line-up as well as a contest (and award, of course) for the most creative wrapping style.  For those of you who want to get a head start on the competition, the filling must stay within the wrappers.

If you are planning to host a dumpling-making party this weekend, check out Carolyn Phillip’s wonderful recipes and instructional video. Also check out Kelly the Overthinker’s dragon cake.  So cute! I wish I had discovered this one last week.