恭喜发财！

Youth can not know how age thinks and feels.  But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.  --J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

While in Korea, I experienced a lot of generosity from friends and strangers who hosted me even though I don't have any kind of familial, let alone ethnic or cultural, ties with them.  In Hong Kong, I'm hosted by blood relatives who've known me before I was even born.  These extremes have made me think a lot on the nature of hospitality, how it feel different when we're receiving from our family.  And since the Lunar New Year is about relatives gathering, I've also been able to experience a lot of the changes in my family.  In the states, I occasionally hear about a relative here or there who passed away or a new one born.  Finally seeing them in person makes me a little nostalgic.  As much as my relatives boss me around and bring up shame-inducing childhood memories to tease me, I sometimes still wish I could live in Hong Kong and be around them more often.  Not to mention all the extra red pocket money I get for being here. ;)

My cousins are popping out so many nephews I lose track of them sometimes.  This one is really into the paper plane I made for him.

HK style milk tea.  One of my favorite things.

Having New Year's Eve dinner with a small fraction of the family.  Didn't want to disturb the good meal to take a good panoramic.

汤圆tong yuen is like a rice cake stuffed with sesame paste which we have for dessert during New Year's.  Though in my household, I probably ask mom to make it at least once a week when I'm home.

The Cantonese are into a New Year's Eve tradition called 行花市 hang fa sze where hordes of people stay up late to go to a flower market where hawkers yell out their good deals on flowers, New Year's decorations, and other useless things.  I had never experienced it before, so I woke up my mom and aunt in the middle of the night to take me to this one.  It was crazy in all the ways I was warned it would be.

The best part of my 行花市hang fa sze experience was probably having 糯米糍 lok mei tse.  It's kind of like 汤圆tong yuen but with sesame coating the outside of the rice cake.  Maybe I've been having too much rice cake.

We got us some flowers!  Hopefully it was worth the loss of sleep.

This is one of my aunts, 萍姨 Ping Yi, in all her New Year's glory.  Ping Yi was born with achondroplasia and epilepsy and is unable to walk due to falls which paralyzed her legs.  We picked her up from her disabled persons' home to stay for a couple nights for New Year's.  I remember being a kid and wondering why Ping Yi and I were the same height even though she was my aunt.  Now, my other aunts are old enough and I'm able-bodied enough that I got the job of carrying her whenever she needed to leave the wheelchair.  Oh...how time changes things.

盆菜poon choi (upper left) is a traditional Cantonese dish eaten on special occasions like New Year's and is basically an amalgam of different meats and vegetables mixed in a bowl. We had it the first night of the New Year.  There's supposed to be a lot of cultural symbolism involved in its preparation, but I'll leave that to Wikipedia.

We're playing 麻将 mahjong, don't mess.

My first time meeting a second cousin!

More food, because I can.  This meal cooked by my great-aunt.

More of the nephews I can't keep track of getting a kick out of Agent Dash. No need for legos or stuffed animals these days.  The iPad is taking over.

I just really like this picture.

Today I went to the Tai Po Waterfront Park and biked along the waterfront behind my cousin and her son.

And my uncle bringing up the rear.

The view from the waterfront.

There's an anti-corruption hotline!  Wonder if I can call from the mainland.

I have quite a bit of free time here, so I subscribed to the trainchinese app to try and prepare for my language placement exam at PKU.  It's surprisingly addicting!  And effective as well.  I think a new era of Chinese school is upon us.

Hopefully I'm not boring you precious blog-followers of mine with pictures of food and family.  Realistically though, those are the two things being in Hong Kong has been about, and I wouldn't have it any other way.  Even though Hong Kong is still very much a foreign place to me, there are so many ways the culture and people in this city help me understand myself.  I can look at the way my aunts take care of my aging grandparents or how my cousins raise their children and think about how future family life might be like for me.  At the same time, I can look out in the streets from the 35th story apartment I'm staying in and imagine what the past here might have been like for my parents.  There are so many things I'm going to miss about Hong Kong, but I still get to be here for another week!