It’s “Lunar New Year” now. Of course, there are many lunar calendars with differing starts of the year but let’s just pave over that to Frankenstein together some generic nonspecific holiday because Gyna bad.
It’s “Lunar New Year” now. Of course, there are many lunar calendars with differing starts of the year but let’s just pave over that to Frankenstein together some generic nonspecific holiday because Gyna bad.
The problem is that the US’s conception of Lunar New Year is basically Chinese New Year, so it’s very obvious that the push has more to do with malding over China than being inclusive. For example, giving kids red envelopes is largely done in Chinese New Year and Vietnamese New Year (Tet). For Japanese New Year, they have a totally different style of envelope and for Malaysia, the envelopes are green. So, if your “Lunar New Year” is just giving out envelopes of a particular design with a particular color, then it’s more whitewashing than inclusivity. Different Lunar New Year has different traditions. Chinese New Year and Tet might share the same color envelopes, but the Chinese zodiac and Vietnamese zodiac are different. Last year was Year of the Rabbit in China but Year of the Cat in Vietnam, so if your “Lunar New Year” celebrates the year of the rabbit last year, then “Lunar New Year” isn’t Tet because the rabbit isn’t part of the Vietnamese zodiac. And as a final point, the Lunar New Year isn’t universal, meaning it can fall on different days depending on what country you’re talking about. So, it isn’t a given that Chinese New Year and Tet fall on the same day and if your “Lunar New Year” perfectly matches the date of Chinese New Year, then “Lunar New Year” is just Chinese New Year.
You can see this in the 2023 Lunar New Year article from CNN: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/lunar-new-year-2023-illustrated-guide-hnk-intl/index.html
“Saying goodbye to the Tiger, we enter the Year of the Rabbit on January 22, 2023.” Goes back to what I said about Tet being the Year of the Cat, so they’re already excluding a particular lunar new year.
The first graphic is just the basic aesthetics associated with Chinese New Year. Red is only the definitive lunar new year color for Chinese New Year and Tet. It’s not particularly relevant for the other lunar new years. Eastern dragons aren’t that prominent in the other lunar new years either. Some of the other zodiacs don’t even have the dragon.
The spring banner graphic. I mean, it’s just stuff written in Chinese. People in Korea aren’t hanging up red banners with Hanja lol. I don’t even know if those Chinese phrases are meaningful in Korean Hanja.
The food is just Chinese food. Every lunar new year has their own particular set of dishes to consume with their own particular symbolic meaning. Like, it would actually be inclusive if they had a dish for each different lunar new year, but it’s just Chinese food for totally-not Chinese New Year.
Going back to what I said earlier about red envelopes, that’s largely a Chinese New Year and Tet thing.
Xin nian kuai le and gung hei faat coi are just greetings in varieties of Chinese. One Japanese greeting during Japanese New Year per Wikipedia is kotoshi mo yoroshiku o-negai-shimasu. For Tet, Vietnamese people would say Chúc mừng năm mới. It isn’t really inclusive if you only have traditional Chinese greetings in your article about not-Chinese New Year.
Goes back to my earlier point about different Asian countries having different zodiacs. You can’t really have a one-size fits all zodiac, so they settled for the Chinese zodiac.
At the end of the article, we finally have acknowledgment that other Asian countries other than China exist. Like, they had a grand total of two sentences devoted to lunar new year traditions that aren’t related to Chinese New Year.
Taken by itself, you could chalk this up to dumbass white people thinking Asia is just China, but given the geopolitical realities between the US and China and the role of MSM as a component of the state apparatus, as shown in the ridiculous weather balloon saga, we absolutely cannot give these dumbass white people the benefit of the doubt.
I would personally chalk it up more to the liberal language of inclusiveness rather than Sinophobia. I bet most liberals in the US are aware that the lunar new year is celebrated in other cultures, but know very little about those other celebrations. In this light I can see the instinct to be inclusive and then getting details wrong. I expect they see it as a “I should say happy holidays rather than Merry Christmas” sort of thing.
What’s the adage? Never attribute to malice what could just as easily be attributed to ignorance?
Little personal anecdote: I used to live in the Bay Area and the town would put up banners that said “gung hay fat choy (sic)” on the lampposts around new year. Tonight I was coming home from the airport in my new city which has a much larger Vietnamese population and the little traffic advisory sign said “chuc mung nam moi”.
Liberal language of inclusiveness and cultural melting pots is white supremacist and genocidal. The melting pot is a play put on in company towns where all the indigenous and different cultures would wear outfits from their original culture, go through “the crucible” where “all ethnicity is melted away” and come out the other side as identical clean cut Americans in suits.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Melting_Pot_(play)
Flattening cultural differences and making different cultures into one big blob is destruction of culture and genocidal in nature. Especially when it’s aimed at Asians and Chinese in 2024 you should be extremely suspect of White Liberals and diaspora Asians who have internalized White Supremacy and sinophobia conflating all Asians and destroying their culture and de-chinafying all Chinese culture.
This is why we teach tolerance and respect and honoring of different cultures. You should be interested to learn of other cultures, there should be healthy and organic cultural exchange, but active efforts to homogenize various cultures into one should be rejected.