財 - Cai2 - Money, Wealth

新年快樂 - Xin1 Nian2 Kuai4 Le4 - Happy New Year!

恭喜發財 - Gong1 Xi3 Fa1 Cai2 - May you get rich!

Today we celebrated Chinese New Year with Jenny’s family and played the 紅包 - Hong2 Bao1 - Red Envelope game. In this game, you give red envelopes full of money to unmarried people who are younger than you, and to people of preceeding generations. (My studies on this topic have shown that the red envelope game is like Monopoly: Every family may have different rules.) This game has historically been a net win for Jenny and I. Jenny’s family had relatively few kids, so we only had to give out to her parents and grandmother and a few random tiny children, but got red envelopes from everybody and their uncle (literally). This year the realization that we’re at long last married has finally sunk in to her entire family and we got nothing! And the proliferation of kids meant that we were handing them out left and right. A crushing defeat.

I’m sure ‘red envelope strategy’ is a well studied subject and factors in to many family planning decisions among Chinese people. But I’m just a novice.