From the heart of Beijing to the edges of the global stage, you're at Roundtable.
Across cultures, the final night of the year carries unusual weight.
In Spain, people count down grapes.
In New York, crowds watch a ball drop.
In China, the ritual has long been quieter but no less symbolic.
Staying awake together as the old year slips away.
When was the starting of this tradition?
How did people spend Spring Festival Eve in ancient days?
How come staying awake to see which sketch lands, which celebrity appears and whether the Spring Festival Gala is quote-unquote better than last year becomes part of the ritual?
Let's discuss all the above and more.
For today's show, I'm joined by Steve Hatherly and Fei Fei.
Now pull up a chair and join the conversation.
For centuries, staying up on Chinese New Year's Eve meant huddling around a fire or an oil lamp, sharing food stories, games and the quiet warmth of family time as the old year faded away.
Today, the fire is gone, but the fun remains.
Since 1983, the Spring Festival Gala has turned staying up late into a national screen-centered ritual, drawing millions of families toward the same show at the same moment.
As private reunion and mass media merge into a new kind of togetherness.
What exactly have we gained and what might we have lost?
And in an era of endless screens, what does it really mean to stay up late together?
Yes, we're talking about something that has been in the gene of Chinese people's spring festival for quite a long time.
That is the staying up late thing.
Yeah, and watching the spring festival gala.
For our generation, at least.
And also for my parents' generation, I would assume.
Because right now, whether or not you choose to watch the gala I think it's about four or five hours long you will turn on the TV, play it in the background, even though you would be playing mahjong with your family in another room, but you still need the music, the singing and the sitcoms.
The sketches come playing as part of the gala.
This is my second gala and there was no mahjong in my house for the first one, because the TV was not put on for passive reasons.
It was my first one with my wife here in China.
That makes her sound Chinese.
No, she's Korean.
But it was our first gala to see together or at all.
So we watched it from the beginning all the way to the very end for five hours.
Wow.
And we loved it.
Feifei, have you ever appeared on the Spring Festival Gala before?
Of course not.
Me neither.
I have.
Aw.
Fitbit famous over here.
Bring it on.
I was in the...
Tiny upper left hand corner for about 0.02 seconds.
But it's still billions of views.
I didn't even see it.
You shouldn't saw it and texted me and he got a screenshot of it.
So that was a cool.
That was a cool thing.
I was blown away last year.
You know, we talked about it, of course, before it actually appeared on television.
I learned that, yep, it goes back to 1983 and it is the tradition.
People put it on even if they're watching intently or not.
But I was absolutely floored by the quality of the production and the scale of the production all over the country.
This is hundreds, if not thousands of people involved in this.
You told me last year, Niu Honglin, that the preparation for one gala probably begins as soon as the previous gala finishes, meaning it takes probably about a year to put together.
Of course, starting from figuring out what are some technologies to use, planning the entire structure and just throughout the entire journey, talking about what celebrity should be invited, what kind of shows are selected, and a lot, a lot of rounds of rehearsal in different ways.
Sure, sure.
But yes, the most intense part period of preparation would happen near the spring gala airing period of time.
But yes, the entire preparation would probably take up the moment the last one was aired.
If you've never seen it before, i'll just simplify it in one sentence the entire country takes part in a live television show At the same time.
It's incredible.
We will go even deeper into the gala, especially the part where Steve said the entire country takes part.
And it's true.
Especially these days.
There are many, many interactive activities you can enjoy during before and after the gala period of time.
And also by the time we air this episode, yes, we're doing a pre-recording.
We are going to celebrate Spring Festival at home as well.
Not hearing, so it's not a real live show per se.
But by the time we air this, it will be the first day of the Year of the Horse.
So I guess happy New Year.
Happy Chinese New Year.
So tell us in the comments or in the form of an email to roundtablepodcasts at qqcom, whether or not you stayed up late yesterday last night.
Do kids typically have a bedtime in Chinese culture?
Yeah, sure.
Around nine.
Around nine.
Maybe.
Different family, different habits.
But spring gala night, no bedtime.
Yes, it's different.
They also were encouraged to stay up late.
At least stay till midnight.
And this tradition has been there for a really long time.
At least around 1500 years.
At least.
Because that's according to some of the historical texts that we can find.
During the Northern and Southern dynasties Nanbei Chao, which is 1500 years ago, they recorded about people staying up late, drinking all night to welcome the new year.
Drinking all night.
Yeah, that's what... That's exaggerated.
When you don't have the Spring Festival Gala, that's pretty much what you can do.
When you don't have better things to do.
So before 1983, because this is when the...
It was televised nationwide at that time, too?
Yes.
But before that, what would people do?
In 1982, what did everybody do?
That's very specific.
But before we have televisions, staying up late is, of course, one option.
But what people do mostly?
Well, according to based on where you were from.
For example, in some families from the southern part of China, their big feast happened at night, which is dinner time.
So they probably would be eating a lot, drinking some time chatting with friends, playing some mahjong or poker games.
But when it comes to northern families, where I am from, at least our big feast, we...
We have our big feast twice on the Chinese New Year Eve.
One happening around lunchtime where you can have different dishes, maybe drink a little, playing some mahjong and poker as well.
And around midnight, we would eat.
Midnight?
Around midnight.
Another feast at midnight?
Just eating dumplings.
Oh, okay.
Celebrating the... transition, the transition with dumplings.
But according to you know, but for families in the southern part they don't eat dumplings.
I would say they eat like different rice based food, for example the sticky rice balls, or where my husband from, in Fujian, they eat what they call Guo, which is kind of a, some kind of a cake.
It can be with stuffings of meat or sweet beans, or they can have no fillings at all.
But it's some kind of a cake made of sticky rice and steamed as well.
Yeah, there's the dumpling thing for the northern part of the country.
There's the glutinous rice balls tangyuan for the southern part, some provinces in the southern part of the country.
Both are relatively okay for dumplings.
They're not round, but they have fillings, and their name suggests the transition from the previous year to the coming year.
So it's a jiao zi or, to be more precise, jiao means exchange, whereas zi means midnight, so that's the time of the exchange.
And for Tang Yuan, because it's round, we like round things.
We believe it's auspicious.
It shows that the family's complete things are complete in a rounded manner, meaning that they're 100 perfect.
So there's that.
And there are always fillings.
I don't get how come these fillings Good festival food are related to fillings, but 年糕 is not.
年糕 is the sticky rice cake kind of thing.
It's also for certain parts of the country must have during spring festival periods.
So you can see China's huge.
So we have different traditions.
And I'm sure over time, people got bored of the same filling.
So they just came up with new creative things to put inside.
Creative does not begin to describe the weird thing you can have in a dumpling or a glutinous rice balls or even mooncakes.
I personally have tried something.
Sticky tofu filling.
I don't remember if it was mooncake or sticky glutinous rice balls.
It was strange.
But as long as you put aside the bias that it should taste a certain way, you're fine.
But if you think it should taste a certain way, you're not happily surprised.
Grandma and grandpa don't like the changes.
No, no, no.
And also for the spring festival Eve's night.
If you have the older generation, your grandparents or your parents in the house, you would always stick to the traditions.
There is not the time for you to, you know, be creative and try new things.
You need to stick to the traditions especially well.
At least in my family, my mom believed you know certain foods carry certain meanings.
So you need to have them. for this night so that we can have a good year ahead.
Okay, I feel like you're mad at me right now.
That's very serious.
Like when we are making the dumplings, we are not allowed to make mistakes.
You cannot mess up the dumplings at the night.
We're not that serious.
But we do put one or two coins in the dumpling so that whoever gets the dumpling... Dies.
That's not the spirit of the new year.
You got to be careful with those, though.
You can hurt your teeth for sure.
But the idea is that it's for good luck.
The funny thing is the rules are always different in my family.
I mean every year, some year.
The rule is that whoever gets a dumpling would have to send red packets to everybody around the table.
And sometimes the rule is whoever gets the coin in the dumpling would receive red packets from everybody on the table.
That'll pay for that broken tooth.
Right.
So, and I do remember vividly one year when I was six or seven, no one gets the coin, and i ended up going to the walk and fetch for that coin.
And it turns out the coin was in that walk because that dumpling could not hold the coin anymore and it broke in the broth and they gave me red um envelopes.
At the end i was very happy.
Yes, so yeah, there's that tradition, and other food should appear on the table as well.
If he mentioned that, traditions are traditions, especially when the elder generation is celebrating together with the well we we celebrate.
Oh, by the way, i think it's a bit like christmas, that is, you would celebrate it with extended family, not only your small family, but also the grandparents, the cousins and everybody.
So for us, for example, fish would be a must have on the table.
Pretty much on every table on that night.
Throughout China, I would believe there will be a fish, some kind of a fish dish, on their table.
And there are also a lot of taboos surrounding how you eat that fish.
Fei Fei is full of rules.
She's very serious.
Did you have a happy childhood?
That's from my grandma.
At least she has a lot of rules.
For example, we're not allowed to mess around the head and the tail of the fish.
By saying messing around, do you mean that they have to be complete on the table.
Yes.
So that it means that we have leftovers throughout the year.
Because the pronunciation of fish in Chinese is 魚, which also is the pronunciation of another character, meaning surplus.
Meaning you always have your surplus in your wallets, in your bank account or anywhere in your home throughout the year.
So we always do that.
And also when it comes to, for example, the choice of vegetables and fruits.
There are also some traditions or rituals around that as well.
For example, the Chinese cabbage is sort of the star of the table as well, because cabbage, 白菜 meaning, also carry the same pronunciation as 白菜, meaning a hundred of wealth, meaning a lot of wealth.
I'm curious, in Western culture, do you have this similar pronunciation?
And also this focus on wealth.
Yes, do you have that?
I can't think of any comparison, really.
Yeah, not really.
Christmas and New Year's, we have our traditional foods.
Oh.
Turkey.
Yeah, do we have turkey because you like the country?
Because we like the country?
See, similar logic here.
I've never heard that before.
No, I don't think so.
We eat turkey because we like to eat turkey, I guess.
But yeah, I can't find anything similar here.
Maybe it's because the Chinese language will only have limited number of pronunciations for characters.
But when we put those characters together as words, they form different meaning and different characters with similar pronunciations.
Yeah, we were talking about this on Takeaway Chinese, one episode where I think it kind of clued into me when we were talking about names.
And you said Chinese people don't have names.
I said there are no Chinese such thing as chinese names that say chinese people don't have names.
That's what you told me.
And i said what?
And uh, you said, and you explained it very well you said like uh, john or steve or whatever, that's like a name given to somebody, but we have characters and the characters are chosen by the family members and then the characters are given to the baby and then it made sense.
So it makes sense again in this instance, because you'll have overlapping characters sometimes.
So I think that's what the reason is.
Feifei's.
Maybe talking about this now is because this character represents this, but it also has the same pronunciation.
But it represents that.
Fortune and good luck and fish and also I get it.
Yeah.
Fish is a good example.
And besides fish nowadays, I think, when it comes to the spring festival major dinner or lunch for some family, it is getting more and more demanding.
What I'm trying to say here is that it has to be auspicious.
It has to be pretty on the appearance of the different dish.
For example, I think some family would buy the kind of dessert that is in the shape of a very beautiful fish.
And the dessert itself is made with sticky rice, or sometimes hawthorn, which makes it red, which is again lucky, a lucky color.
Red and gold.
Yes, in the Chinese culture.
So there's that.
And also it has to be very with different varieties of choices.
But why would you say it's getting more strict?
I would have thought, or assumed that, because of everybody's busy schedules these days, that people would have a little bit more leniency, maybe ordering online some of the dishes or side dishes or desserts or things like that.
So I would have thought it would be a little less strict, not more.
I'm talking about the final results.
You're looking at the entire table full of different dishes.
They all look good.
They smell good.
And you can see the kind of luxurious ingredients like lobster and different types of crab.
And I'm not saying all these dishes are handmade by whoever's running the family dinner.
Many of them could be pre-cooked food ordered from online.
All you need to do is microwave it and you have a perfectly tasty and beautiful dish.
So you mean it's about the strictness in the presentation, right?
And the taste of it.
And I think that has to do definitely with economic development.
Like when in, for example, in 1982, before we have the Spring Festival Gala, having some sort of a meat dish would be considered a luxury at that time for some families.
And now, you know, You get very picky.
You eat meat every day, so having some sort of just random meat dish wouldn't be considered special or a feast.
The bar has been raised.
So now you not only need meat, you also sometimes need some kind of seafood, probably imported across the globe.
Yeah.
And fruits imported from around the world.
And so that you know yeah, every year I think we heard complaints from some people in recent years that it's getting less the feel, the vibe of Chinese New Year's Eve compared with when they were a child.
Because you don't anticipate that that much anymore.
Yeah, because for children first of all, you can eat some of the things you are not allowed to eat in other days and you have your new clothes piling up in your pockets and also new clothes.
But right now you won't be very excited about a new set of clothes and no one would give you red packets.
You'll be the one who handing them out because you grow up.
It doesn't because we don't give red envelopes to kids anymore.
We still do that and i was wondering because for my family, We receive the red envelope today which well, not really today, but the first day of the new year.
But some family would receive the red envelope in the New Year's Eve.
Some would even receive the envelope during that major dinner and then put the envelope under the pillow that exact night, the Spring Festival Eve night.
Whose pillow?
Ah, they get it back to the kids.
Yeah, so the red packets are still a major part of the holiday culture.
I guess it's just done differently now.
Is it done digitally now too?
Yeah, sure.
Especially for families who are not living in the same places.
And it was just send them a red packets online through WeChat, for example.
And they also have like, different covers for those digital packets right now.
That, which is another fun part that people can have a little bit of fun with over here.
The funny thing is, when it comes to red envelopes, red packets in the northern part of the country it tends to be you give it to those who are young kids, So older generation would give it to younger generation mostly.
But in southern part, especially Guangdong province, it's a gesture for everybody.
You would give red envelope to the staff member working in your residential community.
You would give the employee some red packets from the employer, but the amount of money contained in the packet would be much, much smaller.
So it's kind of like a good gesture and a good way to celebrate the new year, just something nice to do to whoever.
Yeah exactly, and also they give up.
In southern part of China they give up pretty much red envelope on every occasion.
For example, a newborn in the family.
You move to a new home landed, a new job and your family and friends will give out some of the red envelope without having to be majorly you know with major expenses wrapped inside it.
Mostly it's just changes, like 10 kuai or 20 kuai.
Yes.
Yeah.
And when Steve asked, what did you do when you didn't have Spring Festival Gala to watch?
I was pondering on that question.
And I realized one thing that my family used to do was to play with firecrackers.
And playing with is the word I used because I was the kid and I was really just playing with them.
There are those... that are very, very loud.
There are those that are beautiful and splendid because you're doing it during nighttime.
They're just pretty.
And what I didn't realize is that that tradition also has a long history and they take different forms in different period in the Chinese history.
And the starting form is what we call year fire, which is a flame lit in the courtyard, originally meant to ward off evil.
And then it turns to the kind of almost toy or childish activity that can be enjoyed for the entire family.
But that's one thing.
Another thing is for my family, for example, my parents.
When I was little they would go out and lit up the crackers for the sound and it's also for auspicious next year.
So for them, they're not playing.
It's a part of a ritual.
So it started with the flame in the courtyard, but then it moved on to firecrackers these days.
At least for my family.
And I think this ritual this either lighting up a fire and also playing, or just lighting up some of the firecrackers in the past has attachment when it comes to drive off the evil.
Because in the past, the Chinese New Year is some sort of related to some of an evil spirit.
And there will be traditions and rituals surrounding how to drive off that evil so that we can enjoy auspicious New Year.
But now it's more just about fun and entertainment.
I used to hate those firecrackers and midnight meals.
It was so loud.
You can't mess around with the firecrackers?
I can't hear the Spring Festival Gala.
It was so loud.
So I really hated it when I was a child.
One thing we have to say is that I think for the past five years or ten years, i cannot remember vividly because those are firecrackers and they pose harm to the quality air quality in the city and especially if you're doing it in a very populated city.
Imagine every family doing it at one night.
How bad the air quality can turn to the next day.
So it was banned in city center, especially for several years.
And I think that has something to do with the kind of material and the kind of technology technology used in the making of firecrackers.
But somehow, because if we're talking about less populated areas and countryside or the outskirt of a major city, I think it's still allowed.
And it is part of the, you know, spring festival fun.
So I have a question.
I know that during the New Year, people say 新年快乐, which is Happy New Year.
Mm-hmm.
Xin means new and Nian means year.
But Nian had some sort of connection to a monster living in the sea.
Am I correct about that?
Maybe not the sea.
Different Nian lives in different parts.
Oh, different parts.
No, no, no.
It's symbolic.
It's just a monster.
It's definitely a monster.
And then that's why a lot of the traditions and rituals surrounding about driving off the evil which is this monster.
And I think in the Song Dynasty they have like a whole formation, whole parade in the capital city to do that for the whole day on the Chinese New Year Eve.
So when they decided they found that evil spirit in the city, they buried it and then you can start.
You know the night markets and all the celebrations.
So that's about 1000 years ago.
So it's cool that this is kind of you.
You guys are both sharing information today, which further solidifies the fact that cultures are different, even in all, you know, even within china yes, and family traditions are different.
Uh too, and when i was much younger, i thought this is a entirely everybody, like 14 billion people, would celebrate it the same way, in the sense that we Spring Festival as the most important festival of the year.
But that's not really the case, because, you know, we have 56 different ethnic groups here in China.
And for different ethnic groups they would for some ethnic groups.
They have their own traditional New Year, which falls on different time of the year.
It's not only the spring festival period of time.
For example, in Xizang, I think their Xizang New Year would happen a bit differently.
I think sometimes close to spring festival period and sometimes a little bit further, like a month away from it.
And also for the Dai people, they have their Dai Xin Nian, Dai New Year as well.
So, yeah, this is a country full of different varieties.
But because the spring festival period is a national holiday, everyone would get to enjoy it at least.
Yeah, and there are a lot of surrounding activities.
Like we said, a lot of delicious food on this night.
A big gala has been thrown for five hours for people to watch.
And I think this year the people are also allowed to come online during the Spring Festival Gala online livestream, which adds up on the fun, and then and you can interact with the programs in the sense that at certain time when the hosts say hey, it's the time when the spring festival gala sends out red envelope, all you need to do is scan the qr code on the screen or type something and then start shaking your phone.
You can be the one who's grabbing the red envelope as well, and that's how people, whoever's watching the gala, would be able to literally participate in one of the most watched show on earth.
Yeah, I mean that sense.
You're not only just watching the gala with your family, you're basically watching the gala with the whole country.
That's very cool.
Yeah.
So it's already the first day of the Year of the Horse.
Let us know, did you enjoy the Spring Festival Gala this year?
And let us know what is your favorite spring festival related event that you enjoy every single year.
