It’s going to be the Year of the Dragon, and the Lunar New Year is Saturday, Feb. 10.
For the Vietnamese community, Orange County is abuzz with plans for Tet, the celebration of the new year.
Enjoy a free three-day festival at Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley or the UVSA Tet Festival at the OC Fair & Event Center, which is the biggest Vietnamese Lunar New Year Festival in the United States.
Westminster will hold a parade on Saturday, and there are other festivities planned in Little Saigon. For a full list of Tet celebrations in Orange County check out enjoyorangecounty.com.
Fullerton resident Vickie Tran explained how her family celebrates the three-day holiday.
“New Year’s Eve, the family gets together, eat dinner, and around midnight we pray for health and good luck. In Vietnam many years ago we have firecracker, but here we don’t have that,” she said. “Next morning, the first day of New Year, we go to temple in Monterey Park or Westminster.
“New Year we like to wear red for good luck. We wear bright color, like spring,” she added. “We give gifts to relatives. The first day we give red envelopes with money to the kids to wish good luck and happy.”
For dinner they enjoy traditional Tet fare, Tran said. “We have fruit, rice cake, chicken and pork cooked with egg, Thit Kho.”
For this dish, pork belly is braised in a mixture of soy sauce, fish sauce, and brown sugar with boiled eggs. The rice cakes Tran referred to are filled with mung beans and pork belly wrapped and steamed in banana leaves. In the North, they are shaped in a square and called banh chưng; in the South they are round and called banh tet.
Tran told a harrowing tale of her immigration to the U.S. in 1986.
“After 1975, the North take over the South. Life was different.” she said. “I came with my younger brother by boat. I’m a boat person. I escaped my country. My parents had to pay somebody to take me, but if they saw us escape, they would take us to the…
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