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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. This weekend shooting in California at the start of Lunar New Year celebration shook all of us, but for Asian Americans who have seen a rise in violence and vitriol during the pandemic, it must be particularly jarring. Let's spend some time this morning coming together to celebrate this new year, a year of the rabbit in the Chinese zodiac or year of the cat in the Vietnamese tradition. Listeners, if Lunar New Year is part of your tradition, how are you celebrating this year? Did you do anything special yesterday to mark the occasion on day one?

Are you traveling this year? If you were born in a year of the rabbit, any year of the rabbit, what significance does this year hold for you? Give us a call, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Joining us is Nancy Yao, president of the Museum of the Chinese in America or MOCA where there must be many stories of facing tragedy going on including that of the institution itself just reopening after a fire three years ago. Welcome, Nancy. Thank you for joining us this morning.

Nancy Yao: Happy New Year, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to start before we talk about the year of the rabbit or the year of the cat and happier things with a reflection on the effort of the community of this unfolding story of the shooting at the dance hall in California?

Nancy Yao: My heart breaks for those communities around Monterey Park in Alhambra. Having lived in that area in the early '90s, I know what a tight-knit group that is. A lot of more recent immigrants were there around the '80s and '90s from Taiwan, from the diaspora. This ballroom also very, very common that you see seniors going to ballrooms to learn dance, to use those spaces as safe spaces, to do some exercise that's a little bit low cardio. It's just so tragic for this to happen around the Lunar New Year where I grew up hearing from my parents, "You can cry the rest of the year but do not cry on the new year day."

It just breaks my heart so much. Everyone at the museum as the story unfolds, we understand the nuance. We understand some of the complexity around, perhaps this is issues around mental health, perhaps it is issues around being an immigrant. We don't know, but our hearts go out to those who have been affected by this tragedy.

Brian Lehrer: I will acknowledge again that the Museum of the Chinese in America has been closed because of the fire three years ago and you're just reopening in time for Lunar New Year. What are some of the events you're looking forward to?

Nancy Yao: We do Lunar New Year like no other place. We've got an eight-week intensive virtual and in-person and also pop-ups throughout the city. Everything from book talks with Michael Kimmelman about his more recent book on the intimate walk around New York City and having helped him look at Chinatown a bit to a pop-up exhibit of Chinese dresses at the Winter Show at the armory. Then at our space just opening it up for people again to enjoy the time, enjoy the space, and just think about food, understand the culture. Again, MOCA is for everyone. It's for every New Yorker, for everyone who visits New York, for everyone who embraces an inclusive narrative in this country. We have food, dance, everything, mixologies, all kinds of fun things.

Brian Lehrer: You have a list of eight Lunar New Year no-nos, eight Lunar New Year foods to eat, eight Lunar New Year movies and TV shows to watch, and eight Lunar New Year gifts to give. We're obviously not going to have time to go down the full list in each case. Let me take a caller, Stan in Manhattan, who if I understand my screener correctly may be flying in the face of one of these no-nos. Stan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Stan: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. I always go to Chinatown for Chinese New Year because I'm married into a Chinatown Chinese family. I went Saturday to get my haircut and noticed that there wouldn't be any parking on Sunday. You're supposed to get a haircut before New Year's. [unintelligible 00:04:40] I'm a member of the Guides Association and we listened to you talk two or three years ago at MOCA.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Stan. I guess I misunderstood. I thought he was flying in the face of a no-no number for Nancy which is, do not get a haircut during the first Lunar month, but he went on the day before.

Nancy Yao: He was well-trained, obviously, by the family he married into. Good job, Stan.

Brian Lehrer: Who else wants to talk about any Lunar New Year observation? We just have a few minutes. 212-433-WNYC. Call right up, you'll get right on. 212-433-9692 and tweet @BrianLehrer. Nancy, in the meantime, let's go down some more of these no-nos. Do not give $4 in a red envelope. You want to talk about the red envelope?

Nancy Yao: Absolutely. The younger kids, they say, "Oh, this is the most practical holiday. I just get money, cold cash, and I can buy what I want from it." That's true. That's the only gift that we actually give to family members is red envelopes, but it's very important to have the right amount of money or the right denomination. The $4 is a homophone for death, so you would never want to give $24 or $4 or $14. You'd rather give something like $6, which is a homophone for smooth, or $8, which is the homophone for prosperity or making money. So much of the Chinese traditions around Lunar New Year are based on words that sound similar, so homophones in a language. The foods we eat, the traditions we hold, they're all related to this play on words, which I always thought was so fun.

Brian Lehrer: From the eight Lunar New Year foods to eat list, number one is a 10-vegetable dish. Well, that's very healthy. I don't think we do anything as healthy on US New Year's Eve and--

Nancy Yao: Or Thanksgiving. There's nothing healthy about Thanksgiving.

Brian Lehrer: That's right. There you go. A 10-vegetable dish, is there a significance?

Nancy Yao: There is. There's a Chinese idiom, [Chinese language], which is 10 things makes 10 perfection. When you have the 10-vegetable dish, which some people also refer to as Buddha's Delight, it's supposed to hope for a beautiful perfect year, that there won't be anything missing, that everything will be complete. The number 10 symbolizes that in that perfection. Some of the other foods like noodles, you want a long life, so eat the longest noodles and don't cut them in half. Eat them just long and slurp them up or however you want to eat them. Of course, dumplings are golden [unintelligible 00:07:26]. They look like the traditional gold commodity that was exchanged in the early part of Chinese history.

Brian Lehrer: Slurp up those long noodles for Lunar New Year. Here's another culinary one coming in on Twitter. A listener writes, "For Lunar New Year, I ate hot pot in Flushing and went shopping. I bought [unintelligible 00:07:46] kumquats. I spent yesterday in related meditations and reflections." Is there a meditation and reflection aspect to the holiday in addition to the fun stuff we've been talking about so far?

Nancy Yao: Your listeners are very learned about this history, probably because most of them are New Yorkers, and I appreciate it, especially as a Flushing girl. I know you're from Bayside. Yes, there is meditative components around it. There are things that we find. I had a hard time yesterday, the first day of the year, not to clean up, just to relax. We live in such an insane, complex, fast-paced world. You are really meant to not lift a hand on the first day of the year. Again, all of the things that happen the first day and through the 15th day are meant to be hopefully good signs for the year to come. Good job to your listener. He just relaxed and didn't do laundry, didn't wash the dishes, didn't take out the garbage, didn't sweep. Those were all supposed to happen when Stan got his hair cut, the day before.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Maggie in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Maggie.

Maggie: Hi, I'm not sure it's me. Yes?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Maggie: Okay. When I was little, I remember our parents used to stay up on New Year's Eve and wait for the midnight hour. I'm in a family of seven. We used to fight to be the first one to take a bath in that evening because he or she who takes the bath first, the first who take it, will have good luck for the rest of the year. We also have a strange day-- not strange, but on the seventh day of the new year, it's considered everybody's birthday. That's all I have to say for now.

Brian Lehrer: Well, then, happy birthday to you coming up on Saturday, I guess. [unintelligible 00:09:41] in Warren, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, [unintelligible 00:09:45].

Caller 3: Hi, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. How are you?

Caller 3: I'm a long-time fan of your show. I came from Mainland China. My husband and I, we pretty much do the same thing. There's a famous popular variety show made by CCTV. That's the big family show for the whole country. We can also watch it on YouTube. We did that on Saturday and then, of course, the New Year's Eve making dumplings on Sunday. That was another special thing we did. We actually went to a movie theater in New Jersey to watch a movie that was also released in China for the New Year's Eve. It's called Wandering Earth. It's episode second. It's a sci-fi movie.

Brian Lehrer: A Lunar New Year sci-fi outing or staying in and watching it. [unintelligible 00:10:57], thank you very much. Please call us again. Nancy, I want to make sure we get in here that according to the Chinese zodiac, we have now left the year of the tiger and are now in the year of the rabbit. What's the significance?

Nancy Yao: A lot of people thought the year of the rat was tricky, and the year of the tiger from all my collection of data was not the smoothest year. A lot of people are looking at the characteristics of the rabbit, peaceful, harmonious, hopeful, fun-loving to really be symbolic for 2023's year of the rabbit. I think that's something that we've all been looking forward to some more stability. It is characteristically a very good year for us. Rabbits are cute and have a lot of these endearing qualities. We're still hopeful for that despite some of the things that have happened in the last couple of days in California.

Brian Lehrer: In the Vietnamese tradition, it's the year of the cat. Do I have that right?

Nancy Yao: That's what I understand, and I'm going to a Vietnamese American party to get all the details on that. The cat from the Chinese zodiac mythology was lazy and didn't want to compete in the race, and that's why he slept through it. That's what I understand about the cat. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] When's the big parade in Chinatown?

Nancy Yao: It's this coming weekend and Sunday, so please everyone come out for that. Of course, individuals can visit Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Flushing in Queens. There's so many different places to enjoy the continued celebrations. If you're on the streets in any one given day, in the next probably 13 days, you may see lion dances and dragon dances bidding good fortune to the retailers. That's a very traditional thing where the retailers will come out and give a red envelope with some good luck money to the lion dancers which are normally nonprofit organizations that make their annual revenue from those types of experiences.

Brian Lehrer: Briefly, do the different Chinatowns in New York City coordinate events?

Nancy Yao: Not really, not from my understanding, but as [unintelligible 00:13:11] shared earlier, your guest from New Jersey, what I love about her traditions are they're a little bit different from the earlier immigrants' into Chinatown and the early part of the 20th century, but even post-1965, CCTV is really a PRC programming that became very popular since 1980 and onward for those immigrants and folks who came from the PRC, whereas those who came earlier in '65 from Taiwan and Hong Kong, they have other traditions and not really focused as much on a programmatic element. I really like the continued diversification of the celebration, not only for non-Chinese Americans but for Chinese across the country.

Brian Lehrer: PRC for those who didn't get the initials, People's Republic of China, meaning Mainland China. We will have to leave it there. We thank Nancy Yao, president of the Museum of Chinese in America. You can find out more about their reopening and celebrating this year of the rabbit at mocanyc.org. Nancy, Happy New Year.

Nancy Yao: [Chinese language], Brian. Have a great year.

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