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Nikada/iStockphoto, Jimmy Wang/NYTimes.com, Fan Kuan

As a Chinese and Japanese language teacher, I’ve always had a secret antipathy for sushi and dumplings. It’s not that I don’t like to eat them. It’s just that, in my first experiences teaching these languages, I was often confronted by skeptical colleagues or parents wondering why these weren’t core parts of my curriculum. I dreaded the annual approach of Lunar New Year, when everyone would expect to see red lanterns outside my classroom and students performing lion dances.

I was once asked to show students a video of Chinese New Year customs that focused on a small rural village in central China. Toward the end of the video, a student recently arrived from Shanghai wandered into my classroom and sat in the back. At the end of the video, I asked him to tell the class what he thought, and he remarked with great surprise that he had never seen anything like those customs before and that young people in Shanghai just played video games during their New Year holidays!

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