- New Year in China actually lasts 23 days, starting a week before Jan 1 on the lunar calendar. On Jan 15 of the Lunar calendar, there's a celebration of the first full moon of the year, and nowadays it's known as the lantern festival. You make 汤圆 (tangyuan), which is as described (I usually eat the ones with sesame filling, other people prefer red bean filling. Using walnuts is if you can't get enough sesame.) Anyway, if you have it normally, it's called Tangyuan as above, but for Jan 15, it's called 元宵 (Yuanxiao). It is super yummy. Here's the wikipedia entry on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangyuan_(food) . My guess for why Tangyuan would be called dumplings in the book is because it's closest in form factor to American dumplings.
- There's actually no good way to say "dumpling" as a category in Chinese, since each thing is its own distinct (and often regional) dish, and serves different purposes. Cantonese style dim sum is very different from what I call dianxin (same word) -- for me, dianxin is sweet, whereas if you go to a Dim sum restaurant, there's a lot of not sweet things there. Some are for snacking purposes, some are the main meal. Usually people think of jiaozi as the standard dumpling, but my family mostly makes wontons. But my wontons from Shanghai are different from traditional Cantonese wontons. And then there's baozi, which is literally "wraplings", but those are the buns.
- Stuff like "dot heart" and "mountain rarities and sea flavors" are direct translations for Chinese phrases -- 点心 and 山珍海味. 山珍海味 is a standard phrase to describe bountiful, high rarity food, but is kind of ... well, it's a set phrase that has lost the feeling of beauty in Chinese. It's like if I'm like "wow, 'rolling thunder' is so evocative!" and everyone is like "um, that's what you call the thunder if you're out of words for it." Of course, usually in historical texts when 山珍海味 is specified, they mean things like bear paw or geoducks so ... please keep the adventurous Chinese palette in mind when you're imagining these things.
- Lastly, I'm glad that they weren't in China during that time period! Although I'm also curious how they managed to get around the Exclusion Act.
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Date: 2021-12-16 04:08 pm (UTC)- New Year in China actually lasts 23 days, starting a week before Jan 1 on the lunar calendar. On Jan 15 of the Lunar calendar, there's a celebration of the first full moon of the year, and nowadays it's known as the lantern festival. You make 汤圆 (tangyuan), which is as described (I usually eat the ones with sesame filling, other people prefer red bean filling. Using walnuts is if you can't get enough sesame.) Anyway, if you have it normally, it's called Tangyuan as above, but for Jan 15, it's called 元宵 (Yuanxiao). It is super yummy. Here's the wikipedia entry on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangyuan_(food) . My guess for why Tangyuan would be called dumplings in the book is because it's closest in form factor to American dumplings.
- There's actually no good way to say "dumpling" as a category in Chinese, since each thing is its own distinct (and often regional) dish, and serves different purposes. Cantonese style dim sum is very different from what I call dianxin (same word) -- for me, dianxin is sweet, whereas if you go to a Dim sum restaurant, there's a lot of not sweet things there. Some are for snacking purposes, some are the main meal. Usually people think of jiaozi as the standard dumpling, but my family mostly makes wontons. But my wontons from Shanghai are different from traditional Cantonese wontons. And then there's baozi, which is literally "wraplings", but those are the buns.
- Stuff like "dot heart" and "mountain rarities and sea flavors" are direct translations for Chinese phrases -- 点心 and 山珍海味. 山珍海味 is a standard phrase to describe bountiful, high rarity food, but is kind of ... well, it's a set phrase that has lost the feeling of beauty in Chinese. It's like if I'm like "wow, 'rolling thunder' is so evocative!" and everyone is like "um, that's what you call the thunder if you're out of words for it." Of course, usually in historical texts when 山珍海味 is specified, they mean things like bear paw or geoducks so ... please keep the adventurous Chinese palette in mind when you're imagining these things.
- Lastly, I'm glad that they weren't in China during that time period! Although I'm also curious how they managed to get around the Exclusion Act.