How to prepare (and toss!) Yusheng (魚生)

Even our kids will learn a few Chinese phrases if it gives them license to throw food in the air with reckless abandon! This year, the Chu girls thought one of their friends back in Edinburgh might like to have a go at this local Chinese New Year tradition of preparing and tossing Yusheng / Lo Hei, so we’ve sent a kit off in the post. Since it doesn’t really come with instructions, the girls also made a video to explain how to assemble this festive raw fish salad dish, what the ingredients represent and most importantly, what auspicious phrases to say whilst presenting it! It’s not quite like a Burns Night “Address to a Haggis”, but is a similarly ceremonious start to a festive meal.

Unfortunately the popular tradition of Yusheng tossing is being rather curtailed by Covid restrictions this year. With strict limits on the number of people who can gather round a table, mandatory mask wearing and a ban on shouting out the usual phrases during the toss, Yusheng might be a rather muted affair. Rather amusingly, someone recently came up with an app which you can use to play the recorded phrases in turn during the tossing, as a safer alternative to speaking out loud.

Even though we eat this dish multiple times every Chinese New Year in Singapore, as we set up for the video I realized that I’ve never had to personally assemble Yusheng myself from scratch – usually my parents or in-laws will do it, or we’ll be eating it in a restaurant where well-versed servers conduct the ceremony. So apologies if we got anything incorrect – our version is a mashup of past memories and desktop research! 

Yusheng is so-called because the Chinese phrase for “raw fish” is a homophone for “rising abundance”, and therefore a symbol of future prosperity. The salad features ten or so ingredients, each of which represents specific well wishes for the year ahead as reflected in their colours, tastes and textures. Each ingredient is added ceremoniously one by one to the dish, accompanied by a lucky set phrase. Finally, everyone round the table tosses and mixes the salad together, wishing one another prosperity and good fortune. Ingredients are tossed high in the air to signify great heights of prosperity and abundance, so this is the one (and only) time in the year when Daddy Chu will turn a blind eye to the kids throwing food around. 

Here’s wishing everyone a very Happy (albeit socially distanced) Lunar New Year of the Ox! Gong Xi Fa Cai!