Wǒ Men Podcast: The Chinese New Year Traditions You Need to Know

02/15/19 • 40 min

Originally broadcast February 2018

China has transformed greatly over the last few decades, and Chinese New Year has also come to mean very different things from generation to generation.

When our parents were children in the 1960s, their pleasure at this time of year was being able to finally enjoy vegetable balls fried with the oil that the whole family had been saving for the entire year. By contrast, when we were kids in the 1980s, meat dishes, sweets, new clothes and endless playtime with our cousins made the Chinese New Year the happiest time of the whole year.

Today, we can purchase imported food and new clothes on e-commerce platforms every day. Material pleasure doesn’t thrill us anymore. Instead, the New Year has become an obligatory time to face relatives’ constant questions about why we don’t have boyfriends/girlfriends, or if we do, why we don’t have babies yet.

Times have changed.

On this episode of the podcast, we recall our memories and discuss all of the interesting and weird (and superstitious) customs and traditions that surround Chinese New Year in our own families, particularly in the old days.

Do you know when is the proper time to eat dumplings on New Year’s Eve? Do you know why you are supposed to wear red during the New Year? Do you know what tricks there are to make sure you’ll stay out of trouble in the coming year (at least, the ones that Yajun’s grandma believed in)? You can answer all of the above questions in this episode.

Previous episodes of the Wǒ Men podcast can be found here, and you can find Wǒ Men on iTunes here.

Have thoughts or feedback to share? Want to join the discussion? Write to Yajun and Jingjing at [email protected].

Originally broadcast February 2018

China has transformed greatly over the last few decades, and Chinese New Year has also come to mean very different things from generation to generation.

Times have changed.

Previous episodes of the Wǒ Men podcast can be found here, and you can find Wǒ Men on iTunes here.

Have thoughts or feedback to share? Want to join the discussion? Write to Yajun and Jingjing at [email protected].

Previous Episode

Wǒ Men Podcast: A Chinese View Behind the Scenes at Davos 2019

The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland is one of the most prominent meetings of world leaders, business executives and scholars to discuss pressing international topics and issues. Many of us hear about it from afar, either from media coverage or our Twitter/WeChat feeds. But what does Davos really look like? How is the conference put together? And with the US-China relationship currently in a somewhat tense place, what do people talk about at Davos?

As a member of the Global Programming team of the World Economic Forum, Wǒ Men Podcast host Yajun helped to design and select the speakers for some of the 300 public sessions, particularly on the topics related to China. For this episode, she takes us inside Davos, shares her observations and interviews some of her colleagues who try to move the needle in a positive direction on major international topics. She also shares her view on perceptions of China at the conference and how China can better engage on the international stage.

Please do listen to the end of the episode and imagine Yajun walking on the street covered in snow wearing heavy snow boots in the dark and worrying about falling on the street. (Actually, she did fall and bruised herself, but compared with four other colleagues who fell and broke their arms and legs, she was quite lucky.)

Next Episode

Wǒ Men Podcast: Under Red Skies – Inside the Minds of Chinese Millennials

Karoline Kan is a second child born among the one-child generation in 1989. In order to give birth to her, her mother hid from local officials for almost ten months. But the challenges didn’t end there — to her paternal grandparents, she was an unwanted girl, an idea that shadowed her whole childhood.

Yet she was also a lucky girl with a strong mother who pushed the family out of a remote Chinese village and completely changed Karoline’s life by providing her with the best education she could. In her late twenties, Karoline, a girl with a humble background, became an author and international journalist for The New York Times.

Recently, she published Under Red Skies, widely touted as the first English-language memoir written by a Chinese millennial.

We were honored to interview her this past weekend at the Yenching Global Symposium hosted by the Yenching Academy of Peking University. On this live episode, Karoline talks about the millennial generation in China and foreign media’s coverage of this group. She also talks about how numerous historical incidents have impacted her and her generation and shaped who they are today.