Lunar New Year is for losers like me
How I used to tag my new year clip art in order to be successful!
Stacy’s note: This essay is adapted from a piece I wrote in 2017 for Northwest Asian Weekly. Listen to the audio version of this updated version here.
Let’s see, back in 2017, I was recently laid off, under-employed, mildly depressed, and frantically making copious amounts of clip art to sell on Etsy because maybe I can make a living being a clip art artist?
I’ve since given up on that dream, but at that time, I’d churn out stock clip art for pennies on the hour. (Fun fact: I think my clip art stint earned me $600 dollars over the course of four years.)
I was drawing a lot of soulless clip art for the sake of sales. I was creating things that potentially had widespread (aka white women) popularity. I’m pretty sure I illustrated empowering memes that said, “Reach for the stars!” and “Live, Love, Laugh!”
That’s why I’m not sharing a link with you. I’m too embarrassed to.
When I was more active on my shitty Etsy store, I would make Lunar New Year-themed clip art in anticipation of Tết, which, similar to other countries’ lunar new year traditions, is a holiday that ushers in the arrival of spring.
Back then, I anticipated that my Lunar New Year clipart wasn’t going to be a real hot item (and I was right, it totally wasn’t), but I made it anyway, for the love of the holiday and also to rep Asian people like me/you/us in the super white-centered clip art world.
When I went to tag my clip art though — in order for the clip art to be easily findable in the Etsy search engine — I realized quickly that if I wanted anyone to see my clip art, I was going to have to tag the thing under ‘Chinese New Year.’ (Etsy allows you a pretty finite amount of tags, so each tag was super precious.) Not only that, I would have to title it some variation of, ‘Chinese New Year clip art.’
Here’s some backstory
When I started school at the age of 5, I couldn’t speak English, and I went to an elementary school of predominantly kids from low-income families like mine — and it was pretty ethnically and racially diverse. I didn’t really get it back then, being 5, so I wasn’t like, “Oh, diversity is so cool.” I was still only one of a handful of Asian kids and one of two Vietnamese kids in kindergarten, though.
I experienced my first nuanced bit of racial microaggression when a non-white Latinx girl came up to me and blindsided me with, “Hey, are you Chinese?”
Even though I was 5 years old, I distinctly remember being really offended by that. I was like, what the hell? No! I’m not Chinese! How dare you!
Except I didn’t say any of that out loud, since I was prone to being paralyzed by shyness.
Even at age 5, though, I was raised by my parents to have extreme pride in being Vietnamese. We are a unique, hearty stock of scrappy survivors. We have this tragic history. We have very specific nostalgia. There are so many idiosyncratic things we do and believe in, because of where we come from.
At that age, it was not really an aversion to all things Chinese that caused the offense. It was the sense of being told that my actual ethnic identity doesn’t fucking matter to other people — they just wanted a way to easily (and incorrectly) categorize me, using a racist reference point that is easy for them to understand. In those days, ‘Chinese’ was default for anybody who looked vaguely East Asian. It flattened all of us into homogeneous sameness.
Looking back on this as an adult, the interesting thing is my aversion to being called Chinese and assumed to be Chinese by others has only grown. I kind of marvel at how much my young self intuited, without fully understanding.
Because now, I know about Chinese imperialism. Now, I know that China colonized Vietnam and took some of the land (parts of lower China used to be Vietnam). Now, I know that the reason many aspects of Vietnamese culture have similarities to Chinese culture — in particular, the legacy of Confucianism — is because China forced the Vietnamese to assimilate. When the Vietnamese were conquered during the Han Dynasty, we lost our language, our art, our culture, and our identity for a long time. There are still aspects of us that will be forever lost.
And this is why I want to punch anybody who dares wishes me a happy Chinese New Year in the fucking face.
Opening a Pandora’s box via Google
When I Google “Chinese New Year vs Lunar New Year,” you know, because it’s a fight, the first results that come up are these defensive article titles about how it’s not just new year for Chinese people.
I love it!
It goes to show that there’s a whole community of us who are just sick of this happy Chinese New Year shit.
As a Vietnamese person, I can admit that a number of elements from our Tết holiday overlaps with Chinese traditions (because of imperialism and colonization).
And at the same time, there still manages to be a lot of deviations, too. There are things Chinese people practice that Vietnamese do not practice. There’s this thickass rice cake I always see Chinese people cart out this time of year, and I’m always like, “What is that?” and they’re always telling me it’s such-and-such (in Cantonese). And I’m like, “Oh, okay,” about it.
Conversely, there are a lot of things Vietnamese people do — like make bánh chưng — that Chinese do not.
The unspoken assumption that Lunar New Year is basically a “politically correct” term for Chinese New Year is really Sinocentric. It’s also a construct that caters to non-Asian English speakers — mostly white people.
While a lot of cultures with proximity and historical dealings with China have adopted elements of the Chinese version of the Lunar New Year (Japanese [pre 1873], Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Vietnamese), there are also a lot of Southeast Asian and South Asian cultures (Burmese, Cambodian, Lao, Nepalese, Thai, Tamil, Sinhala, Vishu, and many, many others) that have lunisolar celebrations that pull from Indic traditions.
But most of us aren’t going around calling these celebrations ‘Indian New Year.’
Like, think about why we default to ‘Chinese New Year.’
An imperfect name
So, I checked with my Mandarin-speaking Chinese friend from Taiwan, Tiffany Ran, about Chinese New Year as a term — because at some point, it hit me like a freight train.
Chinese people can’t possibly be calling this holiday Chinese New Year! That would be like an American calling Jan. 1 “American New Year”!
Tiffany told me that Chinese people call the holiday a few different things, with the Spring Festival translation being the most formal. In-language, Chinese tend to simply refer to the holiday as the new year.
Totally makes sense.
And I totally know how ‘Chinese New Year,’ the term, came about.
It goes something like this:
Some years ago, a bunch of Chinese immigrants in the United States were lighting firecrackers and partying too hard like a bunch of BAMFs. Some non-Chinese Americans (definitely white) ambled by and were like, “Yo, what are you guys doing?”
The Chinese immigrants were like, “Dude, we’re ushering in the new year, man!”
And the Americans were like, “No, bro. You’re like, a month too late. New year already happened.”
The Chinese immigrants then said, “Oh, no, dude. We do something different. This is the new year for us, bros.”
And the Americans were like, “Oh, so you’re saying that you’re celebrating Chinese people new year?”
The Chinese immigrants said, “Uh, sort of? I mean, it’s a little bit more complicated than that? We call it the Spring Festival.”
Then the Americans were like, “Nah! Let’s call it Chinese people new year! Wait! No! Chinese New Year! It’s snappier!”
True story.
The cold, hard numbers
You can tell how much of a sore subject this is for me, based on how much time I spent scrolling through Shutterstock, a popular stock photo and illustration website, just counting pictures like a mad woman. On Shutterstock, there are more than 100,000 illustrations similar to mine tagged with the keywords “Chinese New Year.” In contrast, there are only about 36,000 illustrations tagged with “Lunar New Year.”
Furthermore, many of those Lunar New Year tags were basically pity tags. Of the first 100 illustrations under this tag — basically the most popular posts — 82 percent of them had “Happy Chinese New Year” or Chinese characters actually written somewhere prominently on the art. Only 18 of those 100 pictures were general enough to truly be Lunar New Year illustrations.
I used the Moz SEO tool to do a keyword search and analysis. Moz’s metrics are volume, difficulty, opportunity, and potential.
(Credit: Moz)
Volume is the average number of searches performed on the keyword — basically how in demand the keyword is.
Difficulty indicates the strength of the top 10 organic links for the keyword — the higher the number, the more difficult it is to break into the top 10.
Opportunity is an estimate of click-through-rate for organic web results for the keyword.
Potential is the culmination of the other metrics, basically showing return on investment on using a particular keyword.
To paint with a really broad brush, from Moz results, I learned what I already suspected — that Chinese New Year is a bazillion times SEO-awesomer than Lunar New Year.
I’m a sellout. Or I was a sellout.
So back in 2017, of course I tagged and titled my clip art by writing “Happy Chinese New Year” and “Gung Hay Fat Choy” all the fuck over it. I wasn’t stupid. I wanted to be successful at the clip art game!
Though I did feel dirty doing it.
Fast forward to 2021, on the almost eve of Tết. I’ve illustrated a shit-ton of Tết art this year. I have tagged none of it ‘Happy Chinese New Year.’
You don’t need to call me a hero. I already know I am one.