Today is the 15th day of Chinese New Year and to many it signifies the end of the Chinese New Year celebration period.
It is also the last day of the year when you get to be a tosser.
Let me explain.
Apparently, the Chinese have been eating raw fish long before the Japanese transmuted it into some glorified dish and enriching countless kitchen helper-type losers who have remade themselves into renown sushi “chefs” and charging an arm and a leg to con you into eating their omakase meals. But it was in the 60’s when four Singapore cooks who transformed raw fish into the biggest food scam of all time.
They created a dish comprising of silvers of uncooked fish and mountain-loads of cheap ingredients like thinly-julienned radish and carrots, each of those ingredients are homophones of auspicious words or phrases. For example, the word “yu” meaning “fish” corresponds to a homophone of a word meaning “abundance.” And as each ingredient is added, something positive would be said. For example, “nian nian you yu” (“may there be surplus year after year”) is uttered as the fish is added.
A medley of cheap ingredients glorified to a “must-eat” dish.
And because the dish is a salad of sorts, diners would have to toss it. Great! Everyone’s a tosser during Chinese New Year. All diners at the table would stand up and proceed to toss the shredded ingredients into the air with chopsticks while yelling various good luck wishes out loud, or simply “lo hei, lo hei” (literally Cantonese for “hauling up joy”). It’s a loud, raucous cacophony, a high drama experience and absolutely messy in every sense of the word. Everyone’s OK with it because Chinese New Year is meant to be loud. And talking about loud, boy, you should see the outfits some people wear during this period. Cringe time!
Even clueless foreigners are roped in to be part of this ridiculous circus.
This dish is now served during Chinese New Year all over the world and raking in shitloads of cash for eateries that always always – I’m repeating the word for emphasis – overcharge for it. Even Italian restaurants have gotten into the act. Regular fish could be substituted for more pricey ones like salmon or fish could be replaced with “high end” stuff like scallops or abalones thus upping the price higher still. (I guess the Chinese are happy to pretend that those mollusks are fish too.) Friends who run restaurants tell me that the killing they make during this period is often what helps keep their restaurants afloat for the rest of the year.
For a plate of the cheapest ingredients, you can find in the market and tiny morsels of fish or even scallops, etc, be prepared to pay an exorbitant price for it. But people pay even if it costs couple hundred bucks for a portion, because it’s New Year, and it’s a “must-eat” dish and with the luck-and-wealth-obsessed Chinese, you wouldn’t want to give it a miss, after all, you only get to be a tosser once a year. In fact, each year, even well before the New Year period begins, I would witness a friend metamorphosing into a frenzy and obsessive state of catatonia just to make sure his (very dysfunctional) family must absolutely partake of this dish.
It’s funny, laughable and pathetic.
So sue me.
I’m being honest.
By the way, for the uninitiated, “tosser” is a vulgar British slang word referring to what in Biblical times would be called “onanism.” It is one of my favorite words.