Year of the Ram: Chinese New Year Feature
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Remembering ‘Gung Gung’ and ‘Po Po’

One San Francisco native recalls Chinese New Year with her grandparents

By Julie Soo | Special to AsianWeek

Chinese New Year is synonymous with family and food. For me, the Lunar New Year has always meant a mixing of old world and new world Chinese culture — the grandeur of old China in the early 1900s meeting funky San Francisco Chinatown.

Until my early teens in the mid-70s, mom and dad, my sister and two brothers, and some aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at my maternal grandparent’s European-constructed Telegraph Hill flat — a home filled with Chinese relics, colorful decorations of spring and aromatic special holiday food preparations. We would gather for a number of days over the 15-day celebration to feast, laugh and compare how much money we had racked up from married relatives and family friends who gave us lai see, red envelopes of lucky money, shiny new coins or crispy bills. Cute youngsters willing to have their chubby cheeks pinched fared especially well.

My maternal grandparents were an eclectic couple. Grandfather George Si Choy Young, or Gung Gung in Cantonese, was born in San Francisco in 1892 and fancied hamburgers until age 13, when his parents took him to China to finish his education and meet a future bride. If they had journeyed a few months later, they may have faced quite a different fate in the 1906 earthquake.

Grandmother Quai Hing Fung Young, our beloved Po Po, was a refined wealthy young woman who shared the same ancestral lines, in the rich coastal region of Shun Tuck in Guangdong Province. They married when Po Po was in her early teens and made their life in San Francisco just before the Roaring ‘20s began, building the only Chinese-owned fur business — that lasted some 40 years — and rearing six children.

With Gung Gung more than six years Po Po’s senior, young pictures of them — she in her fur coats and fine jewelry — made the handsome pair look like the quintessential young Hollywood starlet with her producer. Their differing backgrounds lent to lively conversation and fun at family gatherings: Gung Gung — the entertaining practical jokester — and Po Po — the strong-minded independent woman who carried the cultural traditions. Gung gung was a gentle teetotaler who listened to eight-track tapes of Chinese opera but Po Po was known to slug back a shot of whiskey now and then and puff her Chesterfields from an ivory cigarette holder while playing dominoes or Keno.

Grandmother would spend weeks before Chinese New Year shopping for the best imported ingredients to feed her family. She would prepare some special holiday snack foods in addition to the main fare: fried taro cakes with sesame seeds and aromatic cilantro; fried sweet sesame seed balls made of an orangy yam and rice flour dough with a melted chip of Chinese brown brick sugar inside; and “cakes” — mah tai go, a slightly sweet gelatinous steamed water chestnut cake, and loh bok go or woo go, savory steamed turnip or taro cakes filled with diced meat, sausage, mushrooms, green onion and peanuts.

The main family feast was on New Year’s Eve, also known as tuen nien, a day of togetherness. We were enticed with a delicious banquet, including a special soup, chicken, duck, fish, my mother’s specialty dish of pungent black Chinese mushrooms, and a dish called jai, a Buddhist monk stew.

Another highly memorable gathering day during the new year fell on the seventh day, called yun yut, “people’s day” or “everybody’s birthday.” On this day, the meal consisted of Grandfather’s special raw fish salad and congee, a thick rice porridge. Guests participated in making the fish salad or yu saang, using chopsticks to communally toss the salad. Fish represents abundance, and tossing the salad ingredients signified each guest creating wealth. Because this meal was lighter and everyone seemed to have more time, Grandfather had time to play with his grandchildren. He would give a big group squeeze and make us squeal with laughter. He would tease us in Cantonese and English, often using the same recycled Chinese-English pun: Knowing that Grandmother had plied us with an ample supply of tangerines or gut in Cantonese, he would ask, “Do you guys have any guts? Who has guts?” And, if we were especially well-behaved, Grandfather would take us to the basement room of the flat, where we could play with old furs that he had kept after he retired and closed down his shop.

I will be a first-time aunt in this Year of the Ram. Baby Soo won’t be born in San Francisco but in Honolulu. Nonetheless, I hope to share the rich memories of growing up Chinese in America and carry on the family traditions imparted by Gung Gung and Po Po to the fifth generation Chinese American.