One of the few Chinese phrases I learned from my mom is "Gong hei fat choy" (恭喜發財) - a traditional Cantonese greeting for Lunar New Year that means “Wishing you happiness and prosperity.” 

I don't remember being taught these words; they simply exist in the back of my mind, along with memories of standing in a shopping mall courtyard, enthralled by a giant red lion with massive blinking eyes who danced on four legs to a steady drum beat. 

Growing up, we didn't really have traditions for Lunar New Year. Sometimes we went for dinner at my aunt's house, sometimes we went to watch the lion dancers, sometimes we wouldn't mark it at all. When I went no-contact with my mom as a teenager, I lost touch with my Chinese family and didn't think about Lunar New Year for a long time.

But as I got older and became more interested in re-connecting with Chinese culture, Lunar New Year felt like an easy entry point. I had some relationship with it already, there's lots of info online, and much of the holiday is focused on delicious food and good company.

A dear friend of mine is also mixed race and going through a similar journey, so a few years ago we decided to start a new tradition: getting our families together for a Lunar New Year feast. After scores of awkwardly pinched dumplings, countless hands cramps from carving intricate paper cut outs, and laughter stretching across piles of long, loudly slurped noodles, the holiday is finally starting to feel like mine. 

So much of what was passed down to me from my mom and my maternal family was difficult, but reclaiming Lunar New Year and shaping my own traditions around it has helped me see that I don't have to carry everything that was handed to me. I can choose to put some things down, and to reshape others into something new. 

This made me think of the book I'm recommending this week, by Chinese-Canadian novelist Jen Sookfong Lee, which is a darker (decidedly more demonic) view on a similar theme.

Wishing you a happy and prosperous year ahead,

This story is told through the lives of women who span five generations, from single mom Alice, who is struggling to keep it together in contemporary Vancouver, to her great-grandmother Gigi, who was imprisoned as a comfort woman in Hong Kong during World War II.

Alice wakes up one morning to find her kitchen clean and her kids’ lunches packed… but she doesn’t remember doing any of those things overnight. The strange pattern continues, and eventually Alice realizes that someone–or something–has been doing her chores for her. 

This is the first rupture in a series of events that will crack Alice’s family history and understanding of reality wide open, forcing a reckoning with the ways that legacies of trauma have haunted the lives of mother and daughters in her family tree for generations.

Please note that this book includes explicit mentions of sexual violence and abuse.