Why mum's Lunar New Year banquet is a part of who we are

I didn't understand my family's Lunar New Year dinner growing up, but now I see how it connects me to my roots.

Lunar New Year banquets are a connection to culture for Victor Liong. Source: Frank Yang

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"No fighting today, it's the new year tomorrow," my weary mum would plead with me and my brother and two sisters on the eve of almost every Lunar New Year during our school days.

My mum's only wish for the new year was harmony. However, it should come as no surprise that four young siblings would often butt heads, especially during this occasion. New Year celebrations almost always happened at the end of what felt like a never-ending school holiday. The combination of no air-conditioning and being in each other's faces at the peak of summer in suburban Sydney meant we always had something snarky to say or a petty score to settle.

Victor Liong at Lee Ho Fook Source: Frank Yang

We would curmudgeonly sit at the table waiting for my father to finish work so we could eat together, not quite understanding the significance of the occasion or why the date changed from year to year. Little did we recognise the effort my mum put into Lunar New Year celebrations to preserve tradition and the life we had in Asia before migrating to Australia.

Cooking this dish connected mum to her culture.

Mum made sure we brought in the new year with culturally symbolic and auspicious dishes. She made our favourites, like Peking duck (she made the steamed pancakes in the morning, long before frozen duck pancakes were around) and sweet-and-sour sauce (dad's favourite type was pineapple-based). We slathered the sauce on a crispy fried whole fish or had it on the side of marinated fried pork (making crunchy pork is one of mum's power moves). We also had braised king prawns with vermicelli, a throwback to the Cantonese cuisine my dad adores.

Yee sang (prosperity toss) is a popular Lunar New Year dish Source: Frank Yang

Some dishes were more challenging for our Westernising palates, for example, a traditional braised pork hock with dried scallops, sea cucumber and hair moss (also called black moss). This is a Hakka banquet classic and it's labour-intensive, to say the least. The sea cucumber needs three days of careful rehydration. This involves changing the water daily and slowly simmering it for hours with the pork until tender.

Mum's heritage is Hakka, so she held on to this traditional preparation. Now I'm a chef, I understand how cooking this dish connected mum to her culture. The dish was a symbol of where she was from and a part of who we are.

These days, the family get-together is a rare occasion, given we now live in different cities with families of our own.

This Lunar New Year, we will celebrate in our own way, bringing families and friends together with the dishes my mum cooked for us, the way we remember them. We tweak the ingredients of some, but we keep others, like the traditional pork hock, the same.

Now, it's my nieces who think the occasion is a bit strange. But one day, they too may bring their own families and friends together with the dishes we passed on to them.