Growing up, Chinese New Year was the big holiday in my family. We’d wear red, pay respects to our loved ones who had passed on, receive red envelopes, and gather for an enormous family meal of foods with special meaning, like dumplings for luck because their shape resembles gold ingots, or whole steamed fish for wealth because the Mandarin word for “fish” is a homophone for the word for “surplus.” (And when I say enormous, I’m referring first to the amount of food, then the number of guests second.)
When I was younger, we’d make red paper lanterns and write riddles on them—“deng mi.” Because Mandarin is full of homophones and written characters are often a sum of parts, there are an endless number of fun riddles to choose from. My favorite as a child was: What’s one plus one? Because “one” is a straight horizontal line in Mandarin and you…
