One Lunar New Year, two ways: Tết and Taiwan

For a Vietnamese person living in Taiwan, the Lunar New Year is familiar and slightly foreign at the same time. The date is the same, the colour red is everywhere, and families travel home. But the details are different enough to notice.

What is shared

Both cultures follow the lunar calendar, and the New Year is the most important holiday of the year. Houses are cleaned before it, debts are ideally settled, ancestors are honoured with offerings and incense, and the first days are for family. Children receive money in red envelopes: lì xì in Vietnam, 紅包 (hóngbāo) in Taiwan.

Small differences

Before the holiday. In Vietnam, the 23rd day of the last lunar month is when families send off the Kitchen Gods (ông Công ông Táo) to report to heaven, often releasing live carp into a lake or river. In Taiwan, companies hold a year-end banquet called 尾牙 (wěiyá) to thank staff.

On the doors. Taiwanese homes put up red couplets with lucky phrases, and the character 福 (fortune) is often hung upside down, because "upside down" sounds like "arrived" in Chinese. Vietnamese homes have couplets too, but the peach or apricot blossom tree is the centre of the room.

At the table. Vietnam has bánh chưng or bánh tét, sticky rice cakes wrapped in leaves. In Taiwan, the New Year's Eve reunion dinner often includes fish, because the word for fish sounds like "surplus", and a hot pot that the family gathers around.

Between the two

Many Vietnamese students in Taiwan cannot go home for Tết, as the holiday often falls in the middle of the academic calendar. So we make a smaller version: a few dishes, a call home at midnight Vietnam time, a branch of flowers if we can find one.

What I have learned is that the holiday is not really about getting every custom right. It is about pausing, together, at the turn of the year. That travels well.

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Photos: aiworldexplore, vietfotos, xuanduongvan87 on Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License. These are not my photographs.