So I completely missed, overlooked, forgot about Chinese New Year this year. (I blame Jungle Book, but that's another blog post that I'm behind on).
Growing up, such a thing would never have happened. Right after the greed and gluttony of Christmas, would be the second wave of little red lucky money envelopes. It was a pure cash grab. All you needed to do was recite in a sing song voice, with some degree of sincerity, the ritual words of "Gong Hey Fat Choy" and do a little china-bow with a little china handshake. There were other lines I had to memorize too, besides that little token one. I would spew them off to the great amusement of my parents who take pleasure in translating back to me what I just said in chinese.
My parents were really generous with the lucky money. (But always playing the game "How much did THEY give YOU?") Every year, they would whip out the stack of envelopes and stuff them with two dollar bills for the children of friends and other acquaintances. When the government introduced the twoonie, they ran to the bank to get crisp new five-dollar bills. There was one year when the bank DIDN"T have crisp new five dollar bills. No, they only had the crappy USED ones. Guess whose mother made her try to iron them out? After I burned the first few accidentally on purpose, my mother had to reconcile herself to the fact that she was giving out wrinkled bills. Oh, the shame. I doubt the greedy bastards on the receiving end cared. *I* certainly never did.
So my parents would give OTHER children a fiver (there was talk about changing the fiver to a coin at one point... asian children in Canada pretty much shit themselves thinking about the possibilities of an upgrade) but to their own offspring, my sister and I would get at least a twenty or a fifty-dollar bill to help us on our way. Most of our relatives were equally generous. Good lord, we were spoiled. (My sister hoarded her money. I tended to buy a lot of books from those Scholastic flyers. I was an addict even then.)
The tradition is that once you get married, you have to give the lucky money to all of your unmarried younger relatives and you stop collecting these envelopes yourself. As I got older, I started to think that this was a really good reason to stay single (okay, secretly living-in-sin) for as long as possible. While my relatives pitied my unmarried state, I would laugh into my cha siu bao and collect enough lucky money to pay for a really cute pair of shoes.
This year, I got a terrific lecture from my dad about driving in general and driving in to do my theatre work. Apparently, I'm still not old enough to make these decisions for myself on what I want to do with my spare time because it causes him to worry. HOWEVER, it looks like I AM self-sufficient enough to warrant ten-dollars in my lucky money envelope. $10?! WTF? That totally does not cover the cost of my winter boots. This is the biggest bum deal ever. (So it's true, the Year of the Pig really is an unfavourable year for Snake people. Excuse me, while I hide in the padded cell my parents made for me ....but I digress)
So yeah, THIS is my parent's way of hinting that I need to get married and start having babies. This is their way of motivating me to have babies so that I can collect money from my offspring while they are still too young to know what's going on.
Yes, asian parents steal from their own children.
No one feels ashamed.
No one feels remorse.
Every Chinese kid is outraged when they figure that one out.
Not one is compensated.
Yes, we are a passive-aggressive and sneaky race.
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