Cho loves the Lunar New Year. It’s her favourite holiday, more than Christmas, more than Hallo

Cho loves the Lunar New Year. It’s her favourite holiday, more than Christmas, more than Hallowe'en, even more than her beloved Valentine’s Day. Growing up, the Spring Festival meant lanterns hanging in the front porch and rice cakes and everyone they knew in Tollcross coming over for dinner and going to the temple and lighting incense for the ancestors at the family altar. Cho was devastated when, in her first year, she learned that her parents were unable to secure her a special dispensation to come home for the New Year and she and Anthony Goldstein bonded over their shared experiences - he told her about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and how he wasn’t allowed to take time off classes for it.  They agreed that it was wicked unfair - even Cho’s father, Julian Chang, was able to get time off from Edinburgh University (where he was a lecturer on History) to celebrate the holiday, and people for blocks around would make time to come and enjoy her mother Sayaka’s extravagant New Year’s feasts, prepared in the most lavish manner Japanese cuisine could manage.Cho kept the festival as well as she could. Every Lunar New Year, she would put on the brand-new robes her parents sent her the week before. She wasn’t allowed to have an altar in the dormitory, and the small white tablet with her ancestors’ names carved on it was a poor substitute, but she would light a tea-light in front of it and remember that at home, miles and miles away, her family would be lighting candles in front of photographs on the high altar and making offerings of flowering branches and bowls of the most perfect pick of the first fruits of the season. For the first three days of the New Year, she would try to do good deeds and not lose her temper or break things, and she would divide up the New Year’s money her parents sent her among the first year Ravenclaw girls for luck.When she was grown and the prophecy of her name had come true - she’d always spoken better Japanese than Chinese, much to her mother’s smug triumph and her father’s annoyance, and hadn’t known until she was in her twenties that chō chang meant “melancholy” in Chinese - she kept the festival every year, but there was a drop of bitterness in all the lantern-lit joy and festivity.  With the way Hogwarts and its people had treated her - not cruelly, but dismissively, with kindly scorn - and the war in which she had fought and all that had passed for her there, the stones of the wizarding world scorched her feet and celebrating the Lunar New Year in her home with her fiancé and later husband and their daughter became an act of defiance against it.And when little Sayaka McLaughlin began making her stuffed toys dance without touching them, Cho swore that her little girl would never go to school in a castle, or spend the Spring Festival away from her family or live in a world where you could be killed by a flash of green light.(image is magical-flying-moron’s. Story is written and submitted by magical-flying-moron as well. This works perfectly in terms of making me feel for Cho, and giving me a sense of her as a full-fledged person with her own dreams and values. I already loved her; now magical-flying-moron makes sure I’m firmly in her corner, makes sure I understand what the stakes were for her, and the unfairness she might have felt at Hogwarts. This makes me fall in love with her all over again. It’s a wonderful character-driven piece.) -- source link

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