The Indelible Chinese Art of Eating Your Words
Celebrate Lunar New Year with a tray of togetherness
This year, Lunar New Year falls on February 10th. I’ve been scouring Chinatown and various Asian markets for my usual assortment of candies to usher in the year of the Dragon. The sweets scattered throughout this month’s essay are auspicious for the new year, but they are of course good year-round. And, for the most part, they are perennially in-stock at the retailers mentioned below.
In case you didn’t know, I grew up in Hong Kong. Sometimes I think I mention this too much. Other times, I indulge myself and say it over and over, like an incantation. I repeat my origin story to remind myself that it is still true. Hong Kong is my home.
New York has been home for the last 16 years, but Hong Kong’s gravitational pull grows heavy on me during the holidays. And there is no bigger holiday in the Chinese calendar than the two week long Lunar New Year celebration, which kicks off this weekend.
Living in Hong Kong, I took for granted the ways in which food was so integral to life and, in turn, how the language evolved to reflect that. I also took for granted the impressive rhetorical capacity of Chinese language, where whole parables are condensed into four-character idioms.
For example, the phrase 畫餅充飢 (huàbǐng chōngjī)1 literally means “paint a picture of a cake to satisfy your hunger,” but the modern-day interpretation, which springs from this story, is to feed off false illusions. In this Chinese aphorism, the image of cake is hardly as good as the real thing and I couldn’t think of a more persuasive figure of speech (of course, the cake in question is probably closer to a flat savory pancake, like a jiānbǐng).
Growing up in Hong Kong, I saw how it was impossible to separate a good life from good food. To many Chinese people, as the late Eileen Yin-Fei Lo wrote in The New York Times in 1983, “food is rarely just something to eat.” It plays an integral part in rituals, it heals like medicine, and it is an important tool for identity building. Naturally, food is also a means of self-expression.
Just as people are encouraged to “eat bitterness” as a metaphor for endurance, it’s equally necessary to invite sweetness into the start of each new year. This is symbolic, yes, but food can also make the point explicit, hence the custom of eating sweets for a sweet year ahead. As the chef, writer, and artist (and my high school friend) Kiki Aranita put it, “You want to get the year started on the right foot — or the right food, rather.”
In Hong Kong, it was customary to assemble a compartmentalized box of sweets and snacks called cuánhé, 攢盒, or a tray of togetherness. My mom, who also has a voracious sweet tooth, heartily adopted the tradition and in the chilled months of late winter, a black lacquer box would inevitably appear on our dining room table filled with candied fruits from the market — a sign that the new year was approaching.
The box is filled with foods that are symbolic either because they are homonyms — words that sound like other, useful words such as health, prosperity, and unity — or they resemble something lucky, like gold. Eating them is akin to summoning their embodied promises.
A tray of togetherness is typically set out for the stream of relatives who come visit during the holiday. For my family, observers living in the culture but not exactly a part of it, we couldn’t really participate in this. Still, the customs of my inherited home have made a lifelong impression.
I started making my own tray of togetherness in 2021, when Hong Kong’s borders were closed to the outside world because of Covid. Feeling a strange sense of distance from myself, I decided to cobble together a few candies that would remind me of home. First, I needed a vessel to hold my fortune. I bought a simple tray from Pearl River Mart, which is currently selling this design. Six compartments are lucky, but eight are even luckier.
While there are specific sweets that are customary, there are no hard and fast rules for what to put into a tray of togetherness. I asked another high school friend, chef and cookbook author Jon Kung, about his memories of the tradition. Like me and Kiki, Jon often uses food to contemplate what it means to be a third culture kid (look at us now, you guys!). “They weren’t ‘the good sweets,’” he said about the tray of togetherness. “But there were some gems in there, such as white rabbit candy.” Mainly, he added, the boxes are a gesture of hospitality. “The intentions are what’s important.”
So, around this time each year, I set my intentions with a big box of candy. This is a good English catalogue of the most fortuitously duplicitous sweets for any tray of togetherness. From watermelon seeds for fertility to candied sweet potato for an overflowing pot of gold, you can pick and choose your fate. Here’s what I choose for mine:
Red, 紅, for vitality, luck, and celebration.
Red, or hóng, references the life-giving blood in our bodies. I know I just said that there are no rules, but a well-rounded tray of togetherness should probably have a touch of red.
One candy that is synonymous with the new year and a staple in many trays of togetherness are lìshì, 利是, lucky candies, which you can find at most Chinese markets, especially around the holiday. I grew up with Hong Kong’s Garden brand of lìshì candies. They are pale pink and have a milky sweet flavor, but what’s inside doesn’t really matter. The shiny red wrapper is what you’re after. Bonus: the word lìshì means profit.
Coconut, 椰子, for family unity.
The word for coconut, yezi, also sounds like grandfather and grandson. In a patriarchal society, this implies a strong family bond.
Coconut-flavored things are everywhere, so this is an easy compartment to fill. I have mixed readily available Dang coconut chips with more traditional curved triangles of sugared coconut meat, which are powdery and sweet. If you walk down Mott or Elizabeth Streets a week or so before the new year, you’re bound to find small markets hawking bags of candied coconut. They can be cloying, so sometimes I’ll swap in nutty, toasted coconut toffee, ideally from Hong Kong’s own Yan Shing Kee.
Pineapple, 王梨, for success.
In Hokkien Chinese, the word for pineapple, ônglâi, sounds like “fortune come.”
I’ve been a freelance writer for the last four years and I need all the help I can get, so dried pineapples are a fixture in my tray of togetherness. Yun Hai Shop in Williamsburg sells bags of dried Golden Diamond pineapple, a Taiwanese varietal with fine, almost creamy fibers. I like theirs best because it strikes a good balance between sweet and tart.
I also like to add pineapple cakes to my box, though I never saw much of this in Hong Kong. A college friend from Singapore introduced me to pineapple cakes much later in life — little flaky balls of pastry filled with spiced pineapple jam. Taiwan has its own version, which are more often like square-shaped short crust cookies filled with sweet jam. Té Company in the West Village sells boxes of delicate pineapple cakes, which owners Elena Liao and Frederico Ribeiro perfected over numerous R&D trips to Taiwan.
Gold foil-wrapped chocolate coins.
In this case, the figurative becomes literal. Chocolate coins are an outright wish for wealth.
I like the embossed gold coins from a company called Foiled Again! because they use Callebaut milk chocolate, a nicely smooth Belgian chocolate. The company is primarily a wholesale business, but I’ve purchased individual bags on Amazon for both Lunar New Year and Eid (they also have Diwali and Hanukkah designs).
See’s Candies also sells milk chocolate coins especially for Lunar New Year. See’s started as a chocolate shop in Los Angeles in 1921 but for some reason, it expanded to Hong Kong in 1976 (it was the store’s first international location). I grew up going to See’s Candies in Pacific Place, H.K.’s best mall in the 1990s, and I remember pining for those crisp, chocolate-coated molasses sticks.
There is one See’s Candies location in New York, on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village.
Ferrero Rocher chocolates are another favorite in Hong Kong as the gold spheres sort of look like ancient currency. “Also, they are sweet and have a big nut inside so this is a really genius candy,” my friend Kiki noted, referencing the doubly auspicious value of nuts.
Ginger, 生姜, for health. Peanuts, 花生, for longevity.
Money is nice, but I believe that health is the real source of wealth. Both ginger and peanut have the character 生, which means birth or life. This extrapolates to long life and good health. Like coconut, these are loose categories that can be adapted to your taste, but whatever you choose, it should be sweet.
I like the ginger lemon gummies from Haribo, but candied ginger or Gin Gins chews are also good. For peanuts, I’ve used simple honey roasted peanuts, gold-wrapped peanut butter chocolates, but really, the sky is the limit.
Sesame cookie balls, 開口笑, for happiness.
If I had more sections in my tray, I’d include these fried balls of dough with gaping cracks that resemble wide grins (the name, kāikǒuxiào, translates to “smile”). My mom always buys me a packet when they show up in the markets and I love the oily crunch and starchy sweetness.
Or, I’d just choose my favorite candy. Sugartown in Chinatown carries strawberry-flavored chicken feet gummies which are red and yellow (perfect) with a deliciously velvety chew. They also carry White Rabbit candies in rare flavors like red bean.
By now, my daughter knows Lunar New Year is special to me so this time of year has become special to her, too. We recently discovered a picture book called The Tray of Togetherness, by Flo Leung. In it, the little narrator sings, “Will you make a wish? Will you take a wish?” And then, “Our tray of togetherness is filled with the many sweet wishes we give each other.”
This year, as illustrated by my tray of togetherness, my greatest wish for my family is a year full of sweetness and prosperity. May the year of the Dragon also bring you and your loved ones an abundance of health and happiness. 恭喜發財! Happy New Year!
Where To Shop (click for a map!)
Yun Hai Shop, for dried pineapple
Té Company, for pineapple cakes, seed brittles, and nut nougats
Pearl River Mart Foods, for assorted candies or pre-assembled trays
See’s Candies, for gold foil chocolate coins
Sugartown, for assorted sweets
Hong Kong Supermarket, a one-stop shop for all of the above
A note on language: My Chinese language teacher in Hong Kong was from Taiwan, so the pinyin (and thus pronunciation) of all Chinese words in this essay, save for the Hokkien word for pineapple, is Mandarin, not Cantonese. And the characters are traditional, not the simplified script used in the mainland.