PROSPERITY TOSS

 - a toss for luck, good health, happiness, success, great business deals, good future husbands/wives, excellent exam results on the 7th day of the Lunar New Year. It's today (18th Feb) and the 7th day is also celebrated as EVERYONE'S BIRTHDAY.

Did I miss any wishes out?

"Yusheng"  is a dish of vegetables and minute seafood slices. In a play of mandarin pronounciation which the Chinese adore, "Yu" is a homonym for fish or abundance and "sheng" translates to raw or life. Thus, tossing "Yusheng" brings abundance of good fortune and life in the New Year.

 It consists of extremely fine slices of raw seafood (any fish, salmon, tuna or jelly fish, abalone or prawns) 

mixed with finely shredded raw carrots (luck), green radish (eternal youth), white radish (good business), pickle cucumber, papaya, ginger, garlic, pomelo (smooth sailing) and dried winter melon. 

It is topped with crushed peanuts (household filled with valuable possessions), sesame seeds (flourishing business), golden crackers (floor filled with gold), pepper (wealth), vegetable oil (money flows in) and thick plum sauce (strong ties with those at table).

Thus, every  ingredient bears symbolism for a prosperous year.

     For the uninitiated who are squeamish with raw seafood (although the pieces are so fine, they cannot be seen or tasted), “yusheng” now also comes with cooked seafood or fully vegetarian. 

 All at the table takes a a pair of chopsticks   lifts up the ingredients     and let them drop back into the dish again

 while shouting "lou hei, lou hei" (lift up prosperity and fortune). This tossing and dropping goes on for a few rounds.

     The believers will of course lift the ingredients higher. We keep tossing till the ingredients are well mixed 

and probably all over the table! It is exactly the same as tossing a salad except that in "yusheng," as many as 10 people or more toss the same salad together. 

The higher the toss, the more prosperity for the New Year.

The prosperity toss has been now accepted by other ethnic groups in Malaysia. 

Why not, good fortune should be shared by everyone.

Toss it, raise it high, drop it and let's toss again.

Here are my crazy Mandarin class mates having a "wild" Chinese New Year 2020. 

This is as wild as we 60-plus gals will get! 

It was just luck that Chinese New Year 2020 fell on 25th January - 49 days before lock down and the pandemic.  

Classes have been suspended since and I wonder when we will meet again.

STAY SAFE, STAY WELL "tong xue men" (class mates).

Acknowledgements to CIMB Malaysia for five pictures used in this post.