Lunar New Year: Emery Fung's Experience

Written by Emery Fung, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Consultant, for Lunar New Year

Lunar New Year is often an exciting time of the year, especially for children & young adults. You get extra school holidays, ‘Lai See’ (Red Envelopes) and lots of food!

For myself, as a Trans person and someone who consistently missed Lunar New Year celebrations for 13 years because I studied abroad (which is also a common experience for kids from Hong Kong), it brings up very complex feelings.

For one, for every year I miss, I feel I am less & less attached to my Hong Kong roots. This echoes further when Christmas is generally perceived as the ‘biggest holiday period’, even though over 2 billion people celebrate Lunar New Year. Some countries have public holidays such as Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, The Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, North Korea, Singapore, and Brunei.

Christmas takes the main stage for festive holidays across the year, but I would question the message is sending to people who don’t celebrate Christmas.

Lunar New Year is often described as the ‘Chinese Christmas’ in terms of family time. Back in December, I wrote a post on LinkedIn about Christmas & the festive period.

I wrote: