The reunion dinner: what is on the table and why
Dishes chosen for meaning as much as taste, which is why the menu barely changes and substitution is not really an option.
The reunion dinner happens on the eve of Chinese New Year, and it is the meal of the year that people travel furthest for. Flights fill, the North-South Expressway becomes a car park, and everyone gets to the table.
What is on that table is chosen for meaning as much as for taste, which is why the menu barely changes and why substituting things is not really an option.
The dishes and what they carry
A whole fish
The central one. The Mandarin for fish, yu, sounds like the word for surplus, and the phrase that goes with it wishes for surplus year after year. The fish is served whole, head and tail intact, because wholeness is the point: a beginning and an end to the year.
Convention in many families is to leave some uneaten, so that the surplus carries into next year.
A whole chicken
Also served entire, for the same reason. It represents family completeness, everybody present and nobody missing, which given the effort people make to attend is not merely symbolic.
Noodles
Longevity noodles, served long and uncut, and eaten without biting through them where possible. Cutting them is bad form. The length is the wish.
Dumplings
Shaped like old ingots, so they signify wealth. More a northern Chinese tradition than a southern one, and correspondingly less universal in Malaysia, where most Chinese families trace to the south.
Abalone, sea cucumber, dried oyster, fat choy
The expensive items, present because they are expensive and because their names sound like auspicious phrases. Fat choy in particular sounds like prosperity, which is why it turns up despite tasting of very little.
Yee sang is ours
The one dish worth knowing the history of, because it is not from China.
Yee sang, the raw fish salad tossed communally with chopsticks, was developed in Malaysia and Singapore. The version everyone now eats took its modern form here in the mid twentieth century, and both countries claim it with some vigour.
The ritual matters more than the salad. Ingredients go in one at a time, each with a spoken auspicious phrase. Then everyone stands, and tosses the whole thing as high as they can while saying lou hei. Higher toss, better fortune. The table gets messy, and the mess is expected.
Taken purely as food it is a shredded vegetable salad with sweet plum sauce and crackers. Taken as what it is, it is the loudest and most enjoyable part of the meal, and one of the few genuinely Malaysian contributions to a very old festival.
Why the menu does not change
Most family cooking evolves. This meal deliberately does not, because the dishes are carrying messages rather than simply feeding people.
You can cook the fish differently, steam it or fry it, season it however your family does. What you do not do is replace it with something else, because then the wish is missing.
How it actually runs
Timing varies by family. Some eat early in the evening, some wait for a specific auspicious hour. Either way the cooking starts in the morning and often the day before.
The work is distributed and the distribution is usually unspoken and long-settled: the same aunt makes the same dish every year, and offering to change that is not always welcomed.
Portions are excessive on purpose. Leftovers are a good sign, being surplus made physical, and the fish in particular is expected to survive into the next day.
Malaysian particulars
Most Chinese Malaysians trace to southern China, so the menu leans Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew and Hakka rather than northern. Dumplings feature less; braises, steamed fish and soups feature more.
Local ingredients have long since worked their way in. Nobody thinks it odd for a reunion table to include a dish built on belacan or a curry, and the boundary between festival food and everyday Malaysian Chinese cooking is soft.
Yee sang aside, the other clear local marker is the sheer number of oranges. They arrive with every visitor for the following fifteen days, in pairs, and by the end of the festival every household has more than it can eat.
Being invited
If you are asked to a reunion dinner as a guest, it is a genuine invitation rather than politeness, since it is a family meal and the table is finite.
Bring oranges, in an even number. Take part in the yee sang toss with more enthusiasm than dignity. Do not turn the fish over on the plate, which is considered unlucky in some families, particularly those with fishing roots. And expect to eat considerably more than you planned.