Enculturation of New Year

Enculturation is the process in which a culture is passed on from one generation to the next by being members of events in that society. For me, my encounters of enculturation in being Chinese American happen during a memorable experience of celebrating Chinese New Year in Asia and realizing my version of Chinese New Year is indeed unique from the traditional kind you would find in my grandma's hometown of Hong Kong because I have been raised to celebrate a unique Chinese American New Year. For anyone of Chinese ethnicity, Chinese New Year is the most important holiday in the year -essentially the Christmas of Americans. My parents would go all out with the food, gifts, and decorations to celebrate this holiday, something they wouldn't even do for Christmas, but Chinese New Year is that particular exception. When I turned 16, I was blessed with the opportunity to travel to Hong Kong to celebrate Chinese New Year in Asia with my grandparent in order to learn more about my heritage. However, to my surprise, this wasn't my type of Chinese New Year I was raised with, but something completely unfamiliar. It may be the traditional Chinese New Year of my grandparents, but it's not the one that I know because everything they did was slightly more elaborate or just plain different from my version of New Year. My version of Chinese New Year Is different because my Chinese New Year is a unique holiday that my parents have combined into an American Chinese New Year that I now know today as the only way to celebrate Chinese New Year for myself because I have been raised in this version of Chinese New Year by Chinese American parents.

Growing up in San Francisco, I have always been surrounded by the Chinese community. However, I was raised in a household that spoke strictly English and the only time that I embraced the Chinese side in me was during Chinese New Year. My grandparents immigrated here in the early 1960's and 1950's and my parents soon became first generation Chinese Americans that resented the Chinese language. They hated speaking Cantonese because they were heavily picked on for being Chinese, so they resented the language. Gradually, they lost the language completely and by the time that I became the second generation of Chinese American in the family, my parents only spoke enough Chinese to order Har Gow and other dim sums at the restaurant. Through being raised in a household that doesn't speak any dialect of Chinese, I soon became like my parents, American born Chinese that didn't speak a word of Chinese. Because of this lack of the Chinese language, my encounters with Chinese New Year soon became an emersion of American and Chinese culture simplified into one traditional holiday.