keywords: turkey, Thanksgiving,Chinese-American, traditional Chinese holidays
There was no turkey on Zheng Huang's Thanksgiving dinner table this year. Instead, the Chinese-American family had a roast duck for dinner. Huang, a Chinese immigrant living in a $350,000 newly-built, four-bedroom house in Zionsville, Indiana, with his wife and two children, has spent eight Thanksgivings in the United States without a turkey. He is not the only Chinese-American who doesn't have turkey at Thanksgiving.
“I've never heard of any of Chinese colleagues roasting turkeys themselves at Thanksgiving,” said Huang's wife Wang. The two Peking University graduates moved to the United States to pursue a master's degree in 1995. Now both of them work for Eli Lilly, an Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company, one of largest pharmaceutical companies in the United States, with about 500 Chinese employees. “I know many Chinese people might have tried a turkey when they first came to America, but very few really like it,” Wang said. To many new Chinese immigrants, holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas are less meaningful than they are to Americans. They don't care if they don't have turkey for their Thanksgiving dinner. They would rather eat a Beijing roast duck, although a three-pound duck costs about $10, much more than a turkey.
Huang also doesn't feel the need to buy a real pine tree every year for Christmas. Instead, his family decorates a small plastic Christmas tree that he bought two years ago, which they keep stored in their basement.
Huang regards American holidays as nothing special, just time off work. Unfortunately, on traditional Chinese holidays, such as the Spring Festival and Chinese National Day, he has to work. “I feel like I don't have a holiday to celebrate,” Huang said, “I cannot really get into the spirit of American holidays, and I've lost the enjoyment I used to have in celebrating Chinese holidays.”
When Huang first came to the United States, he tried to keep all the Chinese holiday traditions. He would call his parents in China in the early morning of the Spring Festival to express holiday greetings. He would watch the China Central Television's Spring Festival Eve Gala. But now Huang feels the Chinese holidays are more and more remote from his life. He doesn't even know the date of this year's Spring Festival, because he doesn't have a Chinese lunar calendar.
Like Huang, many Chinese immigrants aren't so worried about their loss of holiday spirit, as they are about their America-born children's lack of understanding of Chinese culture.Huang's seven-year-old son David doesn't like Chinese food. He will only eat dumplings with egg and cheese filling, but he loves McDonald's. He is a fan of the Indianapolis Colts, the local professional football team. For Halloween, he wore a Superman costume.
Zhang took David to watch a fireworks display in downtown Indianapolis at Thanksgiving. She told her son fireworks were first invented by the Chinese and that the fireworks they saw that night might have come from China. But David wasn't really interested in what his mother told him about how ancient Chinese lit fireworks to frighten away monsters during the Spring Festival. “We have lost our country's holidays, but our children may lose their native culture,” Huang said as he brushed honey on the skin of the roast duck, “That will be a sad thing.”
