SEVENTH DAY OF CHINESE NEW YEAR

The 7th day is the day of celebration of men's birthday, which is known as 人日 (human day if translated directly). The Chinese believes that it is the day humans were created. The legend says that the goddess created many different animals on different days. The chicken was created on the first day, the dog was created on the second day, the boar was created on the third day, the sheep was created on the fourth day, the cow was created on the fifth day, the horse on the sixth day and the human on the seventh day.

In Malaysia and Singapore, this is the day the chinese toss the colourful raw fish salad called Yusheng (鱼生) and make wishes for blessings of wisdom, heath, wealth and prosperity. Yesterday, we decided to celebrate the 7th day because we enjoy eating some ingredients in the yusheng. I don't really like yusheng that much but tossing it once a year is fine. I find the dish generally too sweet for my liking and eating too much of it can really make me sick.

For more info, read Yusheng.

We went to buy a ready made Yusheng dish from a restaurant. It costs us RM37 (there must be a 7 in the price!). You can find them in department stores nowadays but they normally taste bad. Lee Ling loves the crackers and the pamelo so they are the compulsory ingredients for the yusheng we will eat. Since we are poor, we cannot afford salmon fish.



The have a special plastic dish made just for yusheng, with a custom-made plastic bag to wrap it. Talk about commercialization!





Here's how it looked after unwrapping the packaging.



In the good old days as a poor student, I remember we used sea asparagus instead of expensive raw fish so I decided to add them in since we do love it.



Get them boiled.



They are ready to be mixed.



We brought back some traditional Chinese dumplings, shaomai ( 烧卖) made by grandmother so we defrosted them as well.



The yusheng dish with all the ingredients.



Added the crackers.



The raw fish that comes with the whole package with the green and red packets filled with spices.





Parsley. Some people may not like this so you can get rid of them if you don't want them.



Some jellyfish.







Of course, it comes with a packet of angpau. Inside it we find a Big Sweep Jackpot ticket. Well, I wonder people ever win anything from these draws. It is literally humanly impossible to win the grand prize if you do some simple probability calculations. Too many zeros. Wait.....look at the previous records. The biggest winner was recorded on 22 December 2002 with the number 0+55-6670 with a win of RM16,500,000 from Cheras, Kuala Lumpur. Whichever super lucky dude or duddete who won this amount should be enjoying his/her life away everyday like a king/queen while I work my ass off with my lousy salary. Some people just have all the luck in the world. Imagine what you can do with RM16.5 million.



We added in the sea asparagus.



Cut them into small pieces for easy consumption.



Tossed them like no tomorrow and shout all the lucky 4 characters chengyu (成语) phrases we can think of along the way. Chengyu are chinese idioms or proverbs. Of course with my high skill level of chinese command, the words I shouted out are so simplistic even kids understand them. This dish of yusheng plus the chinese dumplings are enough to fill us overloaded for the 7th day dinner.