Far East Plaza

Chinese New Year celebrations in Los Angeles draw 50,000 spectators each year along North Broadway for the Golden Dragon Parade. The first local public celebration dated to the 1894 La Fiesta de Los Angeles parade, which featured a dragon procession nearly a block long, and after its success the Fiesta committee asked the Chinese community to return the following year. La Fiesta, also known as the Fiesta de las Flores, later became LA Fiesta Broadway to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, while Chinatown's New Year festivities continued to grow and evolve. In 1956, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce began sponsoring the selection of Miss Chinatown and her court, new dragonheads were imported from Hong Kong, and local family association members were hired to perform cultural dances. In the early 1960s, lion and dragon dancers visited every Chinese business along the parade route as shopkeepers dangled oranges, lisee, and lettuce leaves for them to snap at. With new immigrants from Southeast Asia arriving in the 1970s, the parade became a focal point for community participation and celebration, with floats, marching bands, and cultural groups, and grand marshals including Bruce Lee, David Carradine, Keye Luke, Hugh Hefner, Lindsay Wagner, Dr. Haing Ngor, and Kieu Chinh. At its heart, Chinese New Year is a time for family and traditions, with weeks of preparation that include paying debts, discarding old clothes, and cleaning houses. A week before the final festivities, firecrackers mark the kitchen god's return to Heaven to report on the family's activities, and families set out sticky rice cakes to help ensure a favorable report to the Jade Emperor. The kitchen god returns in time for the New Year's Eve banquet, but first the meal is offered to ancestral spirits with incense and red candles, while oranges symbolize future wealth and luck, tangerines good fortune, apples peace, and flowers prosperity. Special foods also carry meanings through wordplay, as lettuce suggests prosperity, dried oysters good moments, sticky rice cakes getting higher, and seaweed echoes the final words of Gung Hay Fat Choy, meaning Happy New Year and Future Prosperity.

Los Angeles, California · United States