When The New Year Comes at Noon

Reflecting on the loss of celebrating the Lunar New Year at home as an international student and the challenge of preserving identity in a foreign country.

Illustrated by: David Yang

On Tuesday January 28th at exactly 12 p.m., I pulled out my phone coming out of history class and typed, “Happy New Year.” A few seconds later, messages flooded in—photos of my house decked out in red lanterns and Chinese couplets, fireworks blooming outside on the streets, my cousins and friends posing with their red envelopes. 

I read their messages quietly and then put my phone away. In China it was the most important day of the year, but here in Middlesex, I was stuck in the long lunch queue for Taco Tuesdays. The students around me chattered casually. For them, it was just an ordinary Tuesday. For me, it was the moment I realized that I would never be able to truly celebrate the Lunar New Year again. 

Back home, this holiday was the highlight of my year. I remember the hum of anticipation as everyone gathered in front of the TV for the annual Spring Festival Gala. A New Year’s Eve reunion dinner of dumplings, chicken, fish, spring rolls, sticky rice, and much more would be laid out on the table, all carefully curated by hand. Firecrackers cracked late into the night so that in the morning, the streets would be covered in red debris. The neighborhood looked and smelled like belonging. 

Things started to change after I came to the U.S. At first, I thought I could recreate this holiday here by holding onto the rituals in small ways, like calling my family and going out to get authentic Chinese food. And for a while I convinced myself that was enough, but Lunar New Year is never just about the customs.

Indeed, Middlesex made an effort to recognize the holiday. Flik served a themed lunch in the cafeteria and AZN, the Asian student affinity group, organized both a New Year celebration with cultural workshops for the entire school and an AZN-exclusive New Year dinner. It was a genuinely thoughtful gesture to spread awareness of different cultures and help Asian students like me feel at home. I truly appreciated it. But celebrations outside of their original context always feel different. Holidays are more than decorations and special meals, but rather about the people and the memories you’ve built with your loved ones over the years. Sitting in the dining hall, surrounded by friends who didn’t grow up with this tradition, I felt a distance between me and the version of the holiday I used to know.

This is a reality for many international students, immigrants and third culture kids—or anyone who has ever left home and tried to hold onto a piece of it somewhere else. We live in between worlds, constantly trying to reconcile conflicting lives at a balance point between where we come from and where we are now. We measure time in two places at once and clumsily learn to exist in spaces where people recognize our culture but never fully understand it, and those well-meaning efforts to include you only remind you of what you’ve lost. Culture is not just about what we celebrate—it’s about how, where, and with whom. When you leave, even if you bring the traditions with you, they take on a different shape. 

For those of us who grew up in one place but now live in another, there is a quiet, ongoing grief that comes with realizing you are slowly becoming disconnected from your own past. It starts with little things so you might not even notice at first, like forgetting certain words in your native language, getting used to the weird taste of Americanized Chinese food, adapting to different social norms—and then, one day, you realize that you are watching your own culture from the outside rather than fully inhabiting it.

For me, Lunar New Year is a reminder of that. The longer I stay abroad, the more I understand that I will never fully return to the version of myself who once took this holiday for granted. Even if I go back home one day, it will feel different, because I have changed. My childhood memories of the holiday exist in a world I no longer live in. I will no longer be able to recreate that world again.

And yet, I realize that this experience is not just about loss. While I will never celebrate the Lunar New Year the way I did as a child, I will find new ways to make it meaningful. I will still call my family at midnight, even if it’s noon for me. I will still make dumplings, even if they taste nothing like my grandma’s. I will still carry my traditions with me, even if they have to adapt to a different setting.

Perhaps that’s what it means to grow up and move away. Identity is not something we can freeze in time. It moves with us, and the challenge is learning how to carry it forward in a way that helps us stay true to ourselves.

So what happens next? Should we keep trying to hold onto the past, or should we let it evolve into something new? Maybe years from now I will still feel the ache of celebrating my most important holidays away from home. Maybe I will always feel a little out of sync with the places I inhabit. But maybe, at the same time, I will find a way to create new traditions that exist in between places, just like I do.

Jessica Wu