“As for celebrations… we always celebrated Chinese New Year and Moon Festival by eating special food or having parties with family friends or relatives. I always looked forward to these holidays! For Chinese New Year we’d get our red envelopes full of money from each of our older relatives as long as we recited the phrase “xin nian kuaI le” or happy New Year to each of them (laughs), and I mean common its fucking money for saying a small phrase. And we’d either have a nice meal out or like we’d all make dumplings together. Hm, then Moon Festival was marked by moon cakes – we’d try out all these different types but my favorite was always red bean, you should have one if you haven’t had it before!! I guess these were pretty significant in my life because it brought our Chinese community together more and like gave me at least some reason to be proud of my ethnicity as a kid when I really didn’t understand what was going on or anything like that, that’s why it is like so significant to me.”

I think that big family celebrations where the whole family is involved allow family members to come together and explore different aspects they were not aware of before and little celebrations in which they get like money or such makes the smaller children want to participate and learn more about their culture as they grow up. It’s folklore used to bring families together.