Cua, C, Nai, B u, g, T m.
A dozen people sitting around a game board, all dressed in different outfits, yell about shrimp, crab, fish, gourds, deer, and chicken.
A child hopes the dice will display an outline of her pick and award her with a reward when she places a dollar on an image of a shrimp while watching a Thuy Nga singing TV show.
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On the final rainy Sunday of the Year of the Dragon, this American family stacks their crumpled banknotes in a Lunar New Year game of b u cua c c p, while other American families could wager their money on a Texans victory on a Sunday.
My Van stated in Vietnamese that when T t arrives, family members get together at home and wrap the cakes. Compared to American New Year’s, ours is a more joyous occasion, complete with flowers, fruits, and traditional sweets.
For many Asian populations, like the Vietnamese, who have established a strong community in Houston over the past 50 years, Lunar New Year, also known as T t or Chinese New Year, signifies the beginning of the Year of the Snake. With 143,000 people of Vietnamese descent living in the Greater Houston area, Houston is home to the second-largest Vietnamese community in the nation.
Major free celebrations are held around the city, including a Downtown festival and night market on February 1st, as well as lion dances at places like Asia Society Texas, Teen How Taoist Temple, Vien Thong Buddhist Temple, and others. Nevertheless, a lot of families begin their festivities at home in anticipation of a prosperous new year.
Perfectly propitious fruit baskets
Rows and rows of fruits, yellow flowers, and crimson lanterns adorn the shelves of Linda’s Tropical Fruit store in Bellaire. Customers scuttle past one another, toppling over with the weight of the mangos, pomelos, and dragon fruits in their baskets.
With a radiant smile and a bright pink jacket, owner Linda Nguyen navigates through the crowd, pointing to the rows of fruit she arranges for a traditional Lunar New Year’s fruit basket. The fruit includes half a dozen different types of mangos, kumquats, dragon fruit, oranges the size of fists, and more, all wrapped in red and gold stickers that wish the customer a happy new year.
As they depart with a full bag and a sugar cane juice in one hand, she says “Happy New Year” to one of the regulars.
A mainstay of Bellaire’s Asiatown, Nguyen’s Fruit Store has been providing the locals with nostalgic fruits and beverages including the popular sugar cane juice and the Asian fruit chikoo since 2017. When she and her friend were guessing what kind of mango was in her sticky rice at a Thai restaurant downtown, the proprietor overheard and said, “Of course you know the fruit, you’re Linda!” She has become such a constant force in Houston.
She developed regulars in just eight years, some of them were Viet, but she also served as a source of homecoming memories for other diasporas, such as South and East Asians. Linda’s uses a hundred bunches of sugar cane every week at the busiest time of year. She shares her customs with her non-Vietnamese clients and community members at the store’s yearly lion dancing celebration.
Many of my non-Vietnamese friends come to appreciate the performances and truly learn what these red lanterns mean. What does it signify? What is it that you should avoid doing at the start of the year? Nguyen stated.
Nguyen purchases her fruits directly from Vietnam, as well as from local growers in Texas, Mexico, California, and Florida. In order to meet demand, Nguyen, a wholesale fruit buyer, collects extra inventory before Lunar New Year. However, because the festival falls during the winter and there are significant weather changes brought on by climate change, it is challenging to provide everything a traditional Viet family would want for their basket.
Due to the strong demand for the season, Nguyen’s supply of vegetables is more expensive because some of her suppliers grow on farmland that was burned by the Eaton and Hughes wildfires in California. She didn’t purchase anything from Grenada this year because Hurricane Beryl destroyed a significant amount of their export inventory. Because of an unusual winter, cherimoya, or sweet apples, cost up to 20 percent more per pound in her store this year.
To complete their baskets, auspice-seeking customers purchase Linda’s cherimoyas, known in Vietnamese as m ng c u, where c u means to pray.
It doesn’t matter since they must have it, Nguyen stated. As a result, people purchase a smaller fruit to display in their basket or on their tray rather than a larger one.
Facebook finds and family feasts
Every surface of the kitchen of Trang Ha’s house in Southwest Houston is covered with trays of fried rice, noodles, wings, and Thai mango. Families dressed in crimson, magenta, and yellow are seen moving through the room in bursts of color as they purchase traditional attire from Vietnam in bulk on Facebook Marketplace. Groups go to wholesale buyers’ homes in the days before Lunar New Year in an attempt to locate the ideal fit.
Ng i Vi t Houston, which translates to “Vietnamese People in Houston,” is a Facebook community with over 143,000 members where people promote local companies or sell food or clothing in the run-up to important occasions like Lunar New Year.
B nh t t, a classic sticky rice cake from Vietnam that is consumed during the Lunar New Year, is sold by many. The delicious cake, which is made with sticky rice, mung beans, and pork, requires expert hands to wrap in banana leaves and simmer for up to 12 hours.
Women are sitting on a blue tarp on the floor of the living room, holding bowls of ingredients and using steady hands to wrap B nh t t. My Van takes a kid’s pink plastic bowl that is adorned with Disney princesses and scoops out a cup of rice. The next batch is mixed in a wok over the heat by a friend in the kitchen.
Van stated, “It brings back memories of my hometown and how my mother and grandmother used to prepare it for us to eat, and I love holding the b nh t t I made myself.” I can’t get that memory out of my head.
F
amily, food and faith
Members of the Vietnamese Catholic Church Our Lady of Lavang Church in Houston start preparing for Lunar New Year three months in advance to ensure they make enough b nh t t in time, said church chairman Tuyen Ngo.
This year marks the church’s 40th year of serving Vietnamese Catholics, and Ngo stated such grand events serve as an example of cultural preservation. The church was established in 1985.
We make an effort to teach the second generation of Vietnamese American youth about all the customs, even though they may not know as much as we do.
Lavang Church serves three Sunday services and has more than 3,000 families. However, on the Sunday before Lunar New Year, the church sold out of hundreds of b nh t t following the 7 a.m. first service.
As soon as families leave the last service of the day around 12 p.m., members pick through tables of food outside, stepping through puddles of rain to find the perfect pot of chrysanthemums with a lucky number of eight or nine flowers. Vietnamese homes are usually decorated with yellow marigolds, but most Houston families now choose the more dependable Texas-native chrysanthemums to bring good fortune into their homes.
According to Ngo, some superstitious folks avoid sweeping their homes on Lunar New Year’s Day in order to avoid wiping out their good fortune. Others refrain from cutting their hair out of concern that it would cut their luck. To mark the beginning of a welcoming year, they advise bringing a special someone to their house as their first visitor.
On the last night of the year and the first Saturday of the new year, Lavang Church holds a special service, where after traditional mass, trays line the front altar with finger-sized rolled paper, each one with a Bible verse. At the altar, families are given a verse that, according to Ngo, reflects God’s instructions for each individual throughout the year.
To urge kids to pay attention to what the Bible says, people tape them over the fireplace or something similar. According to Ngo, God commands you to show kindness to the elderly or perform good deeds for others.
The church s celebrations largely revolve around gratitude for their ancestors and elders. For Lunar New Year s mass, the church builds a secondary altar to burn incense for ancestors, and the pastor gives out gifts to church elders who range from 80 to 100 years old.
While the Vietnamese community s religious affiliations can range from non-religious to Buddhist to Christian, many share a love for the Lunar New Year game of b u cua c c p, which Lavang Church hosts after their mass.
For Vietnamese people, or for Ng i Vi t, we come here as the first generation, and we love our tradition, our rich food and traditions, and we would like that our young people continue to have that tradition and keep on to move on, because it s a good tradition, Ngo said. To help people be close to their family and help them to help out each other.
Hillary Ma contributed to this story with translations and reporting.
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