A Date With Tradition

"The Chinese New Year is like if Western people combined Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's all together," said Qingyuan Han, 50, of Columbia.

Their arguments persuaded Montgomery County Council President George L. Leventhal (D-At Large) to introduce a measure to make the Asian Lunar New Year -- and 22 other holidays, including the Jewish Purim and Muslim Eid ul-Adha -- a "day of commemoration." The legislation won't establish paid holidays or close county facilities, but it will signal to county supervisors that Asians may want to take a personal leave day on the New Year.

"It's simply a gesture of inclusion and respect," Leventhal said in a statement.

On Friday afternoon in a Senate office building filled with bright-red Chinese lions and a Korean orchestra, members of the Maryland Coalition for Recognition of the Asian Lunar New Year met with Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) and other elected officials to celebrate the holiday and fight for their cause.

The group is pushing a bill, which was introduced last week, that would make the Asian Lunar New Year a "commemorative day," a quasi-holiday distinction given to only three others in Maryland: Law Day (May 1), Poetry Day (Oct. 15) and the birthday of John Hanson (April 13), an 18th-century lawmaker. Although celebrations of the New Year last for different numbers of days in various Asian cultures, advocates want the holiday to be observed on the first day of the lunar calendar, which falls on a different day every year.

"Of course we'd like to have a real holiday, but this is the first step," said Del. Susan C. Lee (D-Montgomery), the bill's sponsor. "But remember how long it took to get a holiday for Martin Luther King?"

In the District, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association has started a petition to urge the Board of Education to close the school system on the Lunar New Year -- not by adding another vacation day, but by scheduling a teacher working day on the holiday or eliminating a PTA conference day. In Montgomery County, many Asian American parents continually ask the same question: Why is the school system open on the Asian Lunar New Year but closed on the Jewish holidays of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah?

"It would be pretty hard to keep the schools open, given the enormous number of Jewish teachers and students who take those days off," said Montgomery Council member Steven A. Silverman (D-At Large). "It just doesn't appear that many people take off Asian Lunar New Year."

But Jeanny Ho does. The District resident takes the day off from her job as an information technology manager and pulls her 11- and 17-year-old kids out of school -- unless they have a test. "It's very important for us to be together as a family," she said. "But Asians care too much about education to have their children miss an exam."

For Emily Yee-Mei Lee, though, it's hard to skip work and miss important meetings that others always seem to schedule on the Lunar New Year. "They just don't know that Chinese need the day off," she said.

In Taiwan, everyone in her family dressed in new clothes on the New Year and spent the day attending enormous parades, visiting friends and relatives and worshiping ancestors and the god of heaven in Buddhist-Taoist temples. But in Ellicott City, she is lucky to get her children to attend a dinner party at a local Chinese language school.

Lee is worried that her younger son, Brian, a 15-year-old high school freshman, is missing a part of his heritage. He insists on going to school on the holiday so that he doesn't fall behind on schoolwork. But Brian said he wouldn't mind if his mother succeeds in making the Lunar New Year an official holiday.

"Any day off from school seems like a good idea to me," he said.