New Year's Eve

On New Year’s Eve, my family invited to dinner a certain Mrs W, for whom I usually harbor a slight dislike. My first reaction was one of annoyance, but soon recollecting that although she has family in Athens, they do not plan on celebrating New Year’s Eve with her, I began to feel pity instead. So the four of us (I, my mother, my grandmother, and Mrs W) decided to have hotpot.

Having finished the week’s last mock exam in the morning, I returned home for lunch and a nap. Napping is a guilty pleasure; there is a sense of time deliberately wasted. An hour or two into my nap, the doorbell rang. Half conscious, I heard Mrs W and my grandmother busying themselves in the kitchen.

At dinnertime, I went down and saw the table covered with a dazzling array of dishes. Sitting down, there was even a glass of beer at hand — I quickly realized that it was a non-alcoholic bottle brought by Mrs W. Sipping “beer”, the meal commenced. At first, the atmosphere was rather awkward; due to differences in our origins and other factors, I was not well acquainted with Mrs W, and I considered her presence an intrusion of the intimacy of a family celebrating Chinese New Year in a foreign country. The hotpot cooked slowly, and Mrs W began to make her comments, remarking on the different ways in which her pot was better than ours.

Amidst these and other comments which I did not care about, my thoughts gradually drifted away like the bubbling surface of the soup as I observed the pot simmering. My family members had all sent me hongbaos (red envelopes that represent good fortune) today, but the first to actually wish me a happy new year was a former private teacher. I call her “teacher”, but in reality we were as much friends as we were teacher and pupil. I remembered that back in China, in winter we would sit around the kotatsu, our feet buried under the blanket, the warmth seeping into our soles. Again I began to deliberate on whether or not there were people to whom I ought to wish a happy new year, but then came to the conclusion that not sending wishes at all would do just as well. Between friends, there is no need to use the New Year as a pretext for sending well-wishes; they already pass back and forth every day.

As the water boiled, our conversation gradually became more natural. We began to gossip about our acquaintances: Mrs so-and-so fractured her hand, Mr so-and-so has a grouchy father, the difference between female and male in-law relationships… at these moments gossip always seem especially relaxed and story-like, as if we are patiently unfolding the lives of others. Those participating in the conversation are aware that such gossip is essentially meaningless, because days like these do not need meaning. Yes, when I was younger I had always felt, deep down, that holidays like New Year’s Eve present a falsely ornamented picture of peace and prosperity; people who have said nothing to each other contact each other on this day, pretending that each remembers the other; family members around the dining table attempt to present, through food, money, and meaningless appraisals of the lives of others, an image of the family as a resilient and unbreakable unit. But such kind of peace and prosperity is limited to the celebration of a New Year, and even the holiday itself is an artificial construct.

Of course, after moving abroad, I changed my mind and began to rather enjoy such holidays. These holidays imply privacy; they can be spent with the family members one really cares about: a family of three (four today) having a meal together while the TV is on, just like any ordinary day with one’s stomachs being full, only that the rice is replaced by the hotpot and the satisfied signs and burpings contain no hypocrisy and no perfunctoriness. So today, after an exhausting week of exams, I did not dislike the feeling of sitting there listening to gossip. Everything seemed to be in slow motion and I could temporarily stop fixating on past faults and worrying about mistakes that haven’t yet been made (or that are waiting to be made).

Our communication was peaceful, but also asymmetrical: when it was necessary to speak of something that was not best suited for the ears of the guest, my mother and grandmother would quickly exchange a few words in the Suzhou dialect. When I wanted to communicate with my mother, I would exchange a look with her or touch her hand under the table. As for Mrs W, she took center stage, her voice booming as she decided on the persons whose lives were to become the subject of our conversation, thus putting the communication within my family in a rather murky light, “better kept under the table”, as it were. As I listened, the sense of harmony that had took over me was gradually broken. Anyone’s life seemed so story-like in our words, as if their lives abounded with meanings hidden under the naive exterior of a fable, meanings that needed deciphering before they could be made comprehensible: the woman with the fractured hand actually got both her hands fractured, and is currently undergoing rehabilitation; a man is disrespected by his family; someone’s children has no respects for the adults… I was intrigued by the theatricality, the motives behind these unusual actions, and what one is intrigued by is often something one does not possess. 

Sitting at table, my ears became receptacles for stories, but within me all was emptiness. It seemed that I had no story to tell, and even memories of my time spent with other people seemed but fragmented pieces of warmth. Even our “uninvited guest”, Mrs W herself, seemed full of stories: she doesn’t spend New Year’s Eve with her son! Yes, New Year’s eve and the act of gossip itself are both meaningless, but the colorful lives of other people really do have meaning, and in contrast, the meaning of one’s own life seem to dim. My thoughts went back to the little game I saw certain acquaintances playing online earlier: Send me a hongbao with a question written on it, and I will open the hongbao if I can answer the question. At first I considered such interactions utterly meaningless and comparable to begging for money. But then I realized that the modern person’s desire to express oneself is so great that one would utilize an event designed for family reunions to ask for an opportunity to spread one’s own “gossip”. The desire is twisted: though one secretly pines to open the floodgates, one still requests the listener to offer money for information, and claims rather pretentiously and righteously that if they cannot answer the question they would turn down the offer. Perhaps, when one is given such a hongbao and asked prying questions that seem to scent out gossip on purpose, one would feel that one’s life is a story with meaning, of which the protagonist is cared for by a lot of people after all.

Bored and filled to the brim, I listened as the others began to discuss beancurd rolls. Beancurd rolls are egg-crust-like rolls often enjoyed in Suzhou; Mrs W, from a northern province, had naturally never tasted it. Again, communication became asymmetrical: Mrs W wanted to know what beancurd rolls were, but my grandmother, believing she was asking about the roll’s name, mistakenly called them “potatoes”, which my mother was about to correct when Mrs W decided that they were "potato rolls.” Immediately it dawned on me: in Mrs W’s world, my family is likewise a family full of stories. We come from a mysterious region that produced "potato rolls”; we are three females living in Athens while the males remained at home; naturally, we have an unusual family dynamic. When I want to express my inner thoughts to my mother, I exchange looks with her or touch her hand under the table—a relationship full of storytelling potential. How many mother-daughter relationships resemble our equal and intimate friendship?

Yes, our own stories inevitably seem dull to us, but they become colorful when brought up during someone else’s meal. Our lives are like the dishes of uncooked food prepared for a hotpot: to us, cooking entails a brief dip in boiled water, but to others, our meagre servings are placed in the large, elaborately-decorated dishes seen at Michelin restaurants, accompanied by a small inedible flower that conceals the answer to our life’s riddle.

After dinner, I went upstairs and found that a friend in China could no longer wait for midnight—instead of sending New Year’s well-wishes at the stroke of Athenian midnight, he sent it at the Chinese stroke. When he said that he did not know how important New Year’s Eve was to me, I felt inexplicably touched. In a conversation earlier that day, we had reached the agreement that although on New Year’s Eve, elements of superficial ceremony outweighed its actual value, our commitment to friendship meant that we nevertheless chose to exchange well-wishes on this day.

Those who celebrate New Year’s Eve are unaware of its true significance and aware that it serves mostly as an occasion for the exchange of polite nonsense. Nevertheless, the desire to wish each other well is genuine. But as my friend said, well-wishes and blessings will not be the more special on account of this day; how we have always blessed each other is how we will continue to bless each other today. So let me include my well-wishes to all who have read thus far:

Excel at what you do, take choices into your own hands, and live the life you want, a life that has its vast possibilities expanded in front of you.

Dear readers, I am not wishing you well only on this day, but merely saying aloud what I have secretly wished for you every single day of the year.