Chinese New Year and the Annual Family Report Card: Navigating Relatives' Questions About Grades

Every year, around two weeks before Lunar New Year, I notice a specific anxiety settle over certain families in my school. Children who are usually fairly calm become tense in ways that don't match the approaching holiday. They're not worried about the holiday itself — the lai see, the new clothes, the extended time off. They're worried about the family gatherings, and specifically about the questions.

"How are you doing in school?" "What are your marks like?" "Which schools are you applying to?" "Is your English better than your Mandarin now?" These questions, delivered by aunties and uncles and grandparents who haven't seen the child since last New Year, are not malicious. They are, in the logic of Chinese family culture, expressions of interest, of investment, of care. You ask about school because school is what matters, and asking about what matters is how you show you care.

But for the child standing in a living room holding a mandarin, wearing new shoes that pinch, about to receive a lai see envelope from someone who will immediately ask them to justify their report card, the experience is something quite different.

I grew up with this dynamic. My Lunar New Year gatherings in Chengdu involved my parents' generation conducting informal assessments of all the children present: who was at which school, what marks they'd received, what plans they had for university. My grandmother could rank every grandchild academically by the end of the first day. I learned to give brief, acceptable answers and then excuse myself. Many children do.

The cross-cultural dimension I find most interesting is the difference between how mainland and Hong Kong families experience this ritual. In my mainland family background, the New Year assessment had a particular quality of collective project: the family's success was being measured collectively, and a child's academic achievement contributed to shared family pride in a way that was explicit and socially shared. Nobody pretended the comparison wasn't happening.

In many Hong Kong families I observe, there is more ambivalence. Parents who have absorbed more individualistic Western values about their children's privacy, about the inappropriateness of public comparison, about protecting their children from external pressure, find themselves in family gatherings where none of those values operate. The Hong Kong-born parent who has decided not to make school marks a central topic at home finds, at their own parents' New Year dinner, that this decision is immediately overridden. The aunties ask. The children answer. The comparison happens.

The children who seem most resilient in these contexts are those who have been explicitly prepared. Not rehearsed with false answers, but genuinely prepared: who know, because their parents have told them directly, that the relatives' questions come from a kind of love that expresses itself through inquiry into achievement, that this love is real even when the questions are uncomfortable, and that they don't have to perform a specific outcome to deserve the lai see.

There is also something to be said for parents modelling appropriate engagement. A parent who, when asked about their child's marks by their own parents or siblings, answers briefly and then redirects — "she's working hard, thanks for asking, how are your grandchildren doing?" — is demonstrating a way of inhabiting the family gathering that doesn't participate in the ranking game while also not making the gathering uncomfortable.

I've been at family gatherings in Hong Kong where one parent tried to deflect comparative questions and another engaged with them enthusiastically, effectively having a marital disagreement about family values in real-time at someone's dining table, while the child in question sat silently between them, eating shrimp crackers and absorbing it all.

The New Year gathering is, in a sense, a stress test for how a family has integrated two things: genuine pride in their children and genuine protection of their children from instrumentalisation. These two things are compatible but require conscious navigation. You can be proud of your child's achievements without making those achievements the currency of family belonging.

One practice I've seen work well is the "before the gathering" conversation. Some parents take a few minutes with their children before arriving at a family New Year event to say: "Some of the relatives will ask about your marks. Here's what I'd suggest you say. And remember, whatever they ask and whatever you answer, your dad and I think you're doing well, and we're proud of you for reasons that have nothing to do with your report card." This doesn't eliminate the questions, but it changes what they feel like. The child arrives at the gathering held by a secure base rather than already anxious.

Lunar New Year, at its best, is about renewal and connection — about the family as a living system that continues across time and change. The academic tribunal version of it is a distortion of something that began as care. Naming that distortion, gently and without hostility, is available to any parent who decides that their child's New Year should be about mandarin oranges and red envelopes rather than report card rankings.

The relatives will still ask. But a child who knows they don't have to answer alone is in a very different position.