Happy Chinese New Year!
“….of course, you visit your friends and relatives, generally bringing along a bag of oranges, because ju, the Chinese word for “orange,” sounds like the word for “good luck.”
(Note: Oranges are the Chinese New Year equivalent to Christmas fruitcake. Because everyone is going from house to house visiting people, bringing oranges with them, 99.9 percent of these oranges never actually get eaten — instead, they’re transferred from household to household in an endless cycle of re-gifting until they become desiccated, fossilized lumps. A friend of mine once speculated that there is, in fact, only one bag of oranges in the Chinese community.)”
– excerpted from ASIAN POP
Lunar New Year 2.0 by Jeff Yang
