By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 29, 2006

Emily Yee-Mei Lee remembers that as a child in Taiwan, she longed for the next Chinese New Year, that fabulous day when she would receive neon-red envelopes with $100 bills and gorge on scrumptious pork dumplings.

But in the United States, Lee usually confronts the festival with angst and guilt: Instead of spending the whole day celebrating, she trudges to her job as a computer programmer and ships her 15-year-old son off to school.

"It makes me feel like it's impossible to be a good Chinese and a good American," said Lee, 47, of Ellicott City. "It's just so hard to properly celebrate the holiday in this country."

The Lunar New Year -- which is celebrated today by more than a billion Asians around the world -- presents a troubling annual dilemma for many of the country's 12 million Asian Americans: honor your millennia-old traditions by taking the day off, or bow to the pressures of Western society by going about business as usual?

Asian Americans such as Lee say they shouldn't have to make that choice. In a sign of their increasing political power, Asian American groups in the Washington region and across the nation are pushing measures that they hope will eventually result in a federal holiday, with public schools closing and employees staying home from work.

"This is about respect for our culture," said Henry Lau, a co-founder of the Maryland Coalition for Recognition of the Asian Lunar New Year. "The New Year is the most important festival in our culture, and that needs to be acknowledged."

The Howard County Council passed a measure this month to prohibit public meetings on the holiday. The Maryland General Assembly is considering a bill to officially recognize the day, and activists in Virginia are lobbying for a similar measure. Groups in the District are proposing to close school on the Lunar New Year.

The growing movement echoes efforts by earlier immigrant and minority groups that fought for recognition of holidays that honor them, Lau said.

"The Italian Americans have Columbus Day, the Irish have St. Patrick's Day and African Americans have Martin Luther King Jr. Day," said Lau, 60, a manager at the Environmental Protection Agency who lives in Columbia. "But the Asian American community has nothing. It's like we're not real Americans."

The movement's first major success came in 1994 when San Francisco agreed to close its schools on the Lunar New Year. Lorna Ho, a school system spokeswoman, said the city had little choice because so much of the staff and student body, which is now 39 percent Chinese American, took the day off. "It just wasn't cost effective for us to run school when half the population wasn't teaching and so many students were missing," she said.

Momentum picked up in the Washington region after New York City in 2002 declared the Asian Lunar New Year a holidayon which street parking regulations are relaxed. Lau, who is also president of the Coordination Council of Chinese-American Associations, a group with members throughout the Washington region, began about a year ago to organize an effort to replicate the city's approach throughout Maryland.

Activists from the Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese communities have collected more than 6,000 signatures in Maryland for a petition to recognize the Lunar New Year. And they continue to explain the importance of the holiday -- which is observed by many Asian communities, including the Vietnamese (who call it Tet) and Koreans (who call it Sol Nal) -- to elected officials and the public.

"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.