GREG GUO AND Nancy Zhang, the husband-and-wife team behind Evergreen in Ann Arbor, grew up celebrating Lunar New Year in China by gathering around tables full of food with all of their extended family for the entire month. No matter how poor the family was, they’d figure out a way to get good food for the celebrations. Since families lived near each other, it was easy to get everyone together, especially to spend hours together making dumplings from scratch.

It’s been over 30 years since Greg and Nancy opened their modern Chinese restaurant after graduating from the University of Michigan. Their Lunar New Years look much different from the ones during their childhood in China. Foods like fish and pork belly have become more abundant and Lunar New Year rituals have become smaller because families are now spread out around the world. People find themselves too busy to put time and energy into the same rituals, and it feels less special.

For Guo and Zhang, like many chefs and cooks who have settled in Southeast Michigan, despite being far from family they’ve found ways to continue celebrating Lunar New Year and honor those traditions, even though a lot has changed. At the same time, local food content creators who grew up as third-culture kids have also found ways to honor their heritage and culture. But one thing is constant: dumplings, specifically handmade.

Evergreen has continued to stay close to the tradition of handmaking dumplings. All the dough is made in-house and dumplings are typically prepared twice a week by one cook. Two weeks ahead of Lunar New Year, production ramps up.

The team has found themselves busier on Lunar New Year. A holiday traditionally meant for family gatherings has transformed into a community gathering of longtime guests, Chinese international students and non-Asian groups wanting to be a part of the celebrations. While it means their culture has gained more recognition, it also means that Lunar New Year brings a different feeling to the team.

Lin Zhu, Evergreen’s creative marketing and events manager, came through a similar path as the rest of the team—immigrating to the United States for university and working at Evergreen ever since graduating from Eastern Michigan University. When asked how they feel about spending her holiday at work instead of home with family, Zhu says, “It’s natural to feel a little sad that you’re not physically with your family.” But there’s also the reality that nowadays, with greater globalization, families and friends don’t live as close to each other. Still, the Evergreen team has found ways to spend time with their family during the holidays through video chat.

Many other customs came along with the traditional holidays. Red envelopes (红包, hóngbāo) were handed out by elder family members as fortune money. In Southern China red envelopes were given out in high volumes of small quantities while in Northern China they were given out in small volumes of high quantities. Fireworks were set off to scare away evil spirits and to ring in the new year. Homes were deep-cleaned to sweep away bad luck and make room for good fortunes in the new year.

In the midst of the holiday bustle, Evergreen has found a way to twist traditions, including the red envelopes. In China, they’re normally given to children, but “our business will send out red envelopes to all employees as well. So we are trying to make it a little special from our end because we know that everyone chose to come to work today. They could make a different decision, but they chose to come celebrate with us,” says Zhu.

For many employees, their families are still in China and spending the New Year at the restaurant, eating handmade dumplings, receiving red envelopes as adults and spending time together has brought them a “special feeling.”

Kelly Chang, chef and owner of China Cafe in Novi, grew up in a strong Chinese community in Busan, Korea. Each Lunar New Year tradition came with a superstition—new clothing was worn to symbolize a new start, houses were cleaned, and dumplings were shaped like ingots (元宝, yuánbǎo) to symbolize prosperity in the new year.

Now he travels across the country from Michigan to California to visit his parents. For many years, Chang or his wife have had to stay behind all of November and December due to the busy holiday work. But he continues to visit his parents once a month and for the past 20 years he hasn’t skipped a single Lunar New Year with them.

Chang says he feels fortunate he’s still able to see his parents once a month when recalling the Chinese tradition of paying visits to parents (拜访, bàifǎng), because a lot of restaurant owners can’t take breaks from work often.

While Chang doesn’t receive new clothing for a new start or red envelopes for good fortune anymore, the spirit of superstition still remains in him and his parents. Each time Kelly visits them they make noodles from scratch for him, as a symbol of wanting him to stay as long as possible; and the day before he leaves they always make him dumplings, representing boats floating away. While they aren’t verbal about their love, Chang says “you can [still] tell that they’re really happy [to see him] … And that’s just priceless.” Even though he’s told his parents they can just buy dumplings at the local grocery store, he still finds three fridges full of homemade dumplings in his parents’ home each time he visits.

Over at Q Bakehouse & Market in Ann Arbor, the menu is mostly pastries-centric, but a limited number of frozen dumplings are sold each week for those who look towards the freezer. One team member hand-pleats them every Wednesday and Thursday morning to be frozen and sold in limited bags of 12 along with boiling instructions.

The recipe is owner Rachel Liu Martindale’s own that she’s developed over time, along with a homemade dipping sauce. “It’s the culmination of all of my favorite flavors and things that I would even make growing up at home. I feel like mine is just like an extension of what my parents would make,” says Liu Martindale.

Liu Martindale didn’t originally like dumplings because of the embarrassment she felt about foods her parents cooked growing up. Then when she was finally living on her own in college she realized she had taken her parents’ cooking for granted. After tweaking her parents’ dumpling recipe—and realizing her mom’s filling-to-dough ratio made dumplings lean too far towards the “gigantic meatball” side of the spectrum—they’re now her favorite thing to cook and a labor of love worth making space for in her shop.

Liu Martindale chose to include handmade dumplings at Q Bakehouse & Marketplace largely because of how significantly more flavorful and fresh they are. “I wanted to be able to offer that because it’s just really hard to find, and a lot of people don’t have time to make dumplings these days.”

MyThy Huynh (@ MightyInTheMitten), who taught dumpling-making classes at Marrow in Detroit’s West Village, has also emphasized the process and fun of making dumplings from scratch, but didn’t actually grow up making them.

Being part Vietnamese from her mom’s side and part Chinese from her dad’s side, her experiences were already a melding of traditions during her childhood in California.

“You can see the similarities of where they overlap in just Asian culture,” Huynh says, reflecting on her early experiences before learning how to make dumplings. Growing up in California, spring rolls, egg rolls and sesame mochi balls were the foods Huynh made with her family.

Huynh originally moved to Michigan for nursing school and when she started working, she realized she had a lot of free time to try new recipes. Her mom had learned how to cook many Chinese dishes after marrying her dad, and after observing many parallel dishes between the two cuisines, even the Vietnamese version of dumplings, Huynh decided to dip her hands into the world of dumpling making.

Similarly for Jon Kung (@JonKung), who began cooking as a creative outlet after moving to Michigan for law school, cooking has always been “third culture”—blending cultural traditions, flavors and ingredients from their parents’ culture, where they grew up, and the relational culture shaped by their experiences in between.

“The diversity of food [in Detroit] is very different from what someone like me usually gets to experience,” Kung says. “I’m really lucky to have been exposed to soul food and Arabic food as my neighborhood staples and being informed by those tastes really gave me a unique take on how I enjoy my food.”

Growing up, Kung would celebrate Lunar New Year in Hong Kong by eating at a hot pot restaurant, “making the rounds” visiting family and friends and enjoying candy from special trays. Each family would creatively assemble candy trays with special candies and dishes such as candied lotus root to represent interconnectedness of families, pumpkin seeds for the accumulation of wealth and homemade turnip cakes.

Now in Detroit, Kung has combined the traditions they grew up with and ones based in their new home, to create their own. The candies in their trays may not be the same as the ones from Hong Kong, but symbolisms are maintained through new American candies.

“I fill my candy tray with Tony’s Chocolonely Minis, Ferrero Rocher, traditional Chinese lucky candy… Ferrero Rocher are pretty much just gold nuggets so those can count for wealth… and the Tony’s… well, those come in red wrappers and red is good luck so that’s good enough. We also keep our Christmas tree up and replace all the Christmas decorations with red lanterns and red packets to make it a Chinese New Year tree. Mostly because I don’t want to put the tree away yet, but also for good luck or something like that.”

For Kung, it’s the traditional Chinese values tied to Lunar New Years that have resonated and stuck with them into adulthood. “Family, togetherness, the sharing of prosperity, luck and wealth … I mean, those are values that I feel should be universal.”

For Huynh, third culture cooking is about her family’s recipes and how they’re passed on through the generations: “How would I make it and still observe the tradition and the reverence of it the way my parents learned it, and by the way my grandparents taught it to them?”

Intertwined with this is filial piety (孝, xiào)—the Confucian virtue of caring for and loving one’s parents. It’s a value that Kelly lives by and is demonstrated by his time with family during Lunar New Year.

“When I go visit my parents, I miss having meals at home with them. Every time I go, [I’m] just, like, can we just eat at home? [They’re, like] ‘You cook and you run the restaurant every day, all the time, and I don’t want you to work anymore.’ They want to go out, we do, but I’ll try to eat at home as much as I can.”

No matter how Lunar Near Year celebrations may evolve and how embedded dumplings become a part of everyday lives, the heart of it all— family and superstition— stays.

Serena Fan is a product manager in tech and freelance writer based in Chicago. She is energized by the relationship between food, culture and hospitality.