Sacramento’s virtual Lunar New Year + Toisanese food blogger: Your AAPI newsletter
It is Thursday, Feb. 11, and this is The Sacramento Bee’s AAPI weekly newsletter.
Here’s a recap of the stories I’ve covered and ones I’m following:
Lunar New Year, which falls on Feb. 12 this year, is usually a day to be celebrated as loudly and colorfully and with as many people as possible. It’s a holiday that’s usually greeted in Sacramento with lion dances, fireworks and song-and-dance performances.
“We’d like to have (Lunar New Year) virtually to comfort, to encourage and to connect all our community,” said Debbie Wang, president of the Chinese New Year Cultural Association, which usually holds one of the largest celebrations in Sacramento each year. “Maybe the result is not like the real one on stage … but people are still looking forward to it.”
With large gatherings out of the question this year, many community organizations in Sacramento are turning to Zoom and finding creative solutions to maintain the spirit of welcoming a new year.
This year, CNYCA will have an online event that pulls videos and photographs from the last 23 years of CNYCA celebrations. There will also be special video messages from local politicians such as Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, state Treasurer Fiona Ma and state Sen. Richard Pan.
Asian Resources Inc. will combine a Lunar New Year celebration with a cultural lesson through a drive-through showcase today from 3 to 6 p.m. The event will take place outside ARI’s headquarters on Elder Creek Road and will educate attendees about Vietnamese, Chinese, Iu-Mien and Korean traditions.
It’s a holiday observed by many Asian cultures, not just the Chinese. Many of the traditions are highly similar, such as spending time with family, wearing new or red clothes and giving out envelopes of money, but not every community celebrates it as seriously in America. And for countries like Korea, the decision to celebrate is a political one as much as a cultural or traditional one.
The holiday goes by many names — Tết in Vietnam, Losar in Mongolia, Imlek in Indonesia and Tsagaan Sar in Tibet, to name a few. Many of these communities traditionally hand out gifts like mandarin oranges or red envelopes filled with money, usually from an elder to children, or unmarried people. The Iu-Mien community, a Southeast Asian minority group from China, traditionally gives out dyed red eggs.
Food blogger Lisa Lin knows people can find traditional Chinese recipes intimidating. That’s why she retests all her recipes multiple times, breaking down the dishes into standardized measurements and clear, step-by-step instructions for easier digital consumption.
“When I go to develop recipes ... I keep in mind the frustration I felt when my mom would give me directions,” Lin said. “If nobody takes on her recipes, then no one in my family is going to pass it on.”
Lin went viral in 2018 for a video she filmed with her mother Lan on how to make peanut candy. In the video, Lan, 75, coaches her daughter on how to melt the sugar in stages to achieve the candy’s trademark snap.
What stands out immediately is Lan speaks Toisanese, with Lin pausing to translate. Compared to Mandarin and Cantonese, it’s a less-common Chinese dialect to hear in the United States.
“There aren’t as many Toisan-specific influencers, and so I think (readers) really appreciate it when they see food that I make, that my mom makes from (rural Toisan),” Lin said. “That part’s very rewarding to me.”
Lin made the jump from a legal career to full-time food blogging in 2014, starting with healthy food recipes that were popular at the time. After two years, she admitted to herself that those recipes didn’t fulfill her.
That’s when she got the idea to lean more into the food she personally cared about — Asian recipes she grew up making and eating with her mother. It was an idea she’d casually considered before, but dismissed, fearful that her blog would be overlooked or deemed too exotic by a mainstream audience.
“When I first started blogging, a lot of people would say, ‘Oh, don’t box yourself into a niche, because you’ll only be known for that,’” Lin recalled. “But when I started cooking more Asian food, more people responded to it.”
Lin said it can sometimes be stressful to work with her mother, who cooks from the heart rather than uniform measurements, and editing the videos afterwards is always an ordeal. But the reward is recipes and cooking videos that feel genuine, personal in the way that lingering in the kitchen with your family feels.
“Interacting with people who watch the content that I make with my mom’s videos is the best,” Lin said. “What I enjoy the most is engaging with my followers ... That part’s very rewarding to me.”
In other news
Kyle Larson grateful to get second chance in NASCAR (Associated Press)
- Police Step Up Investigation Into Assault on Asian American Seniors in Oakland Chinatown (CBS San Francisco)
- Chang-rae Lee Lets Loose in “My Year Abroad” (The New Yorker)
- This Congress member wants Biden to hire more Asian Americans in government (Vox)
- A Cantonese Lunar New Year feast we could all use right now (Los Angeles Times)
- An elderly San Francisco man was killed in a ‘brutal’ attack. His family says it was a racist act. (SF Gate)
- Daniel Dae Kim, Daniel Wu offer $25,000 for info in Oakland attack on elderly man (Los Angeles Times)
- Asian Americans Are Calling on Allies in Response to a Wave of Violence (Vice)
- Asian Coaches Association advocates for ‘minority of minorities’ in college basketball (The Washington Post)
As Lunar New Year approaches, many Asians worry about future journeys (National Geographic)
My “Minari”: On Asian American Immigrant Cinema (Los Angeles Review of Books)
This week in AAPI pop culture
“Minari,” the movie that swept film festival awards and was the critical darling of 2020, will finally open in (some) theaters and virtual screening rooms this Friday through film studio A24’s website.
The movie tells the story of a Korean family who moves to rural Arkansas in the 1980s with dreams of starting a farm. Based on the director and writer Lee Isaac Chung’s own life, the film stars Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung, Noel Kate Cho and Alan Kim.
Kim, who was only 7 years old when the film was shot, is the indisputable breakout star. He and Youn, who plays his grandmother, act as the movie’s emotional anchors, especially when things on the farm turn for the worse. Frequently while watching the film, I thought to myself “I would literally die for this child.”
“I found Minari by my mom,” Kim told Interview Magazine. “She asked me if I wanted to be in a movie? So I said yes.”
Though the film was controversially shut out of the Golden Globes’ top awards due to its mostly Korean dialogue, it’s the favorite for many Hollywood awards this season. Buzz is building for Yeun to become the first Asian American ever nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor, and it’ll likely be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in March.
Tickets for virtual “Minari” screenings are $20. If that seems steep, you can also wait until Feb. 26, when it’s released for video on-demand (though it may not be substantially cheaper).
But if you have the means and the time, please, please watch this film. It is achingly beautiful and funny and gut-twisting. It nails the precarious highs and lows of immigration and assimilation so acutely that I gasp-sobbed. And if nothing else, watch it for two hours of Steven Yeun’s beautiful face.
Got a story suggestion? Please reach out to me at awong@sacbee.com.
That’s it for this week’s newsletter. Tomorrow is Lunar New Year — wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, stay safe and take it easy. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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