SASKATOON -- Friday Feb. 12 marks the first of 15 days of the Lunar New Year, which is celebrated by millions of people around the world, including here in Sask.
“It's basically Asian New Year,” said Helen Chang, director of the Chinese Cultural Society of Saskatchewan (CCSS). “Vietnamese New Year, Japanese New Year, it's all the same. I call it Chinese because my family's Chinese.”
The celebration is said to cause the largest human migration in the world, as people travel from across the globe to be with their families.
“Whether that's in China or whether that's just to visit family wherever they are in the world,” said Chang.
Like most other celebrations and gatherings, the pandemic will give a different look to the Lunar New Year in 2021.
“I think even last year was starting to get disrupted because of COVID, for sure this year, hopefully nobody's going anywhere,” said Chang, who says the CCSS usually puts on a banquet with other organizations.
“There's banquets, none of that's happening. Well, a few places are still trying to do parades, socially distanced. Banquets are out, which is kind of a sad thing for a lot of people if you think about Chinese New Year.”
Chang is also an instructor at Kung Fu Regina, where she says they’ll usually visit schools and restaurants to do Lion Dancing, which is not happening in 2021.
“We did a private zoom, just some students, and some cameras set up in the training hall just to give everybody a feeling of what life used to be like last year.”
Maylane Wong’s family owned the famous Golden Dragon restaurant in Saskatoon, which closed in 2008.
She says while the restaurant didn’t organize any official gathers, people would still show up for their own celebrations.
“That's what it's all about, right? The food and the fellowship,” she said. “All the people coming together, looking forward to the new year, and thinking about the blessings of last year.”
The Lunar New Year is also notorious for some of the largest fireworks shows in the world.
“You're trying to get rid of bad spirits, bad energy,” Chang says. “The fireworks go right along with Lion Dancing, we're making a lot of noise with drumming and gongs and cymbals, and just making a lot of noise to kind of freshen everything out, drive away bad energy, bad spirits from last year, and kind of make a new start.”
Wong says she has memories in her heart of her father Bing-Lam Der inviting Lion Dancers to the restaurant, with the neon sign of the Golden Dragon serving as a perfect backdrop.
“They would come to the front of the restaurant, because there was this beautiful neon Golden Dragon sign, so they will dance in front of it, and make all that noise and celebrate,” she said.
Chang says some of the “bad energy” lately comes from racism towards Asian people due to the pandemic, including her own experiences and incidents such as a racist rant at Mai’s Kitchen in Saskatoon.
“I wish people would not be so ignorant, that they would learn about other cultures,” she said.
“Using Chinese New Year as a time to remember that there's all kinds of cultures, there's all kinds of communities, and that we're all one big community, you know like, we're all people. We're all one.”
