My sister says it’s tomorrow, but I say it’s today.

What is?

The Chinese Winter Solstice festival.

I think she’s right, altho her household seems to be celebrating it today cuz there was tong yuen for dessert this evening. Or maybe they made it one day early to coincide with my nephew’s return from Melbourne this morning.

These glutinuous rice balls in syrup are very much a part of my childhood. I remember helping to make them on the day of the festival each year. Someone (I think it was my nanny, the old lady who took care of us – brought us up – while mother went to work) would make the dough, divide it into a couple of batches or more, leave one white and add colour (red was definitely one of them) to the others, and then have the children help shape the rice balls that would later be put in boiling water to cook before being added to the syrup.

Looking at this year’s batch of tong yuen at my sister’s just now, I was vividly reminded of those days:

The whites and the reds were there, but the greens and the yellows a little unfamiliar. Still, they made a pretty picture so I decided to do a Marita Paige (pale, pale imitation, tho – sorry, Marita). As I was aiming my camera at the bowl, my nephew walked in, saw what I was trying to do and burst out laughing. He asked if I was going to show the picture to mother. Well, no – it’s for my overseas friends, lah!

There is another tong yuen memory somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

During my first winter in England, there was a small winter solstice gathering, and a friend and I decided to contribute some tong yuen. We went to the one Chinese shop in Norwich to get the flour. According to my friend who was from Hong Kong, we needed two types of rice flour – lor mei fun (glutinuous rice) and something called jeem mei fun (I don’t know the English name for this). The shop proprietor’s wife looked at us blankly when we asked for the second. She’d never heard of it. Altho she was Chinese, she was originally from Guyana and was not familiar with the Chinese language.

I think we managed to find both types of flour and went back to the dorm kitchen to make the tong yuen. We also bought some red bean paste which my Hong Kong friend said was needed to fill the inside of the tong yuen. It was my turn to look blankly at her. The tong yuen of my childhood were 100% flour with no filling whatsoever inside. I acceded to her wish for some red bean paste tong yuen and we proceeded to make the dough. The first round of dough broke into pieces when we tried to wrap it around the bean paste. After some trial and error, we eventually found the right combination of lor mei fun jeem mei fun for the dough. And then came the next surprise.

I wanted to put the cooked tong yuen into some syrup we’d made. My friend said no, the syrup would be poured over the tong yuen only when we were ready to eat. And then not a lot, but just enough. That was not how I remember eating tong yuen as a child – drenched in syrup (the tong yuen, not me).

These days, you can buy frozen tong yuen in supermarkets. They come with fillings, either red bean or lotus paste. As for the ones I ate earlier this evening, they were 100% glutinuous rice. Same as the ones eaten in my childhood. Drenched in syrup.