Every Lunar New Year across Southeast Asia arrives with the same quiet instruction manual for women: look new, work faster, smile wider. Whether it’s called Chinese New Year in Singapore and Malaysia, Tết in Vietnam, or simply CNY in the regional shorthand of malls and Instagram captions, the holiday compresses femininity into a single performance window. It is the moment when beauty standards, domestic labour, and family surveillance collide — politely, joyfully, and with remarkable efficiency.
In the weeks leading up to CNY, the pressure begins with appearance. New clothes are not optional. A fresh dress, a coordinated outfit, visible effort — these are read as moral signals, proof that one respects tradition and welcomes prosperity. In Singapore, Malaysia, and urban Indonesia, this now extends seamlessly to makeup tutorials, salon visits, and carefully curated social media aesthetics. Looking “put together” is framed not as vanity, but as duty: a woman reflects her family’s fortune, harmony, and face. Sloppiness is read as carelessness; carelessness as a bad omen.
Yet this insistence on beauty unfolds alongside an entirely different expectation. The same women, dressed for photos and greetings, are also expected to run the holiday itself. Cooking begins early and ends late. The kitchen becomes the real centre of the celebration, and it is overwhelmingly feminised. Women chop, boil, stir, fold, taste, clean, and serve, often in tight spaces and under time pressure. The symbolic weight of the food — fish for abundance, dumplings for wealth, sweet soups for harmony — adds intensity. These are not just dishes; they are moral tests.
The contradiction is obvious to anyone who has lived it. New dresses hover dangerously close to oil splashes. Fresh makeup melts under steam. Burn marks appear on wrists and forearms like unwanted souvenirs of devotion. And still, women are expected to look cheerful, efficient, and grateful. This is not multitasking; it is ornamental labour. You must be decorative and operational at the same time.
Around the kitchen orbit the aunties, grandmothers, and older female relatives who enforce the rules with practiced casualness. Their comments arrive wrapped in humour, concern, or nostalgia, but they land with precision. Why so slow? You’re still not married? When will you give your parents a grandchild? Your cousin manages children and still finds time to cook properly. These remarks are rarely shouted; they do not need to be. They rely on familiarity and hierarchy, on the assumption that women will absorb them quietly and keep moving.
This is where emotional labour peaks. Lunar New Year demands not just physical work, but emotional regulation at scale. Women are expected to deflect invasive questions without creating discomfort, to laugh at comments that sting, to manage family tension without appearing difficult. Refusing to answer is rude. Answering honestly is rude. Setting boundaries is read as disrespect. So women perform a careful dance of polite evasion, self-deprecation, and strategic silence — a skill honed over years and activated annually.
In Southeast Asia’s rapidly modernising cities, the performance has gained a new layer. Instagram and messaging apps have not softened these expectations; they have aestheticised them. The public version of CNY is all coordinated outfits, smiling group photos, red and gold colour palettes, and captions about gratitude and togetherness. The private version, rarely documented, includes exhaustion, resentment, and moments of quiet rage in bathrooms and bedrooms. Social media rewards the image of harmony, not the labour behind it.
What makes this particularly fraught is the generational tension running through many households. Younger women across Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand are more educated, more financially independent, and more aware of gender inequality than previous generations. Many articulate feminist ideas fluently in everyday life. Yet during CNY, these same women often find themselves pulled back into rigid roles they otherwise resist. The holiday functions like a social reset button, temporarily suspending progress in favour of tradition.
Older women often act as gatekeepers of these expectations, not necessarily out of cruelty, but out of inheritance. They endured the same pressures and learned that compliance ensured social survival. In enforcing the rules, they reproduce a system they did not design but know intimately. “This is just how it is” becomes both explanation and warning.
Across Southeast Asia, cultural details differ, but the pattern remains strikingly consistent. In Singapore’s HDB flats, Malaysian terrace houses, Vietnamese family homes, and Chinese-Indonesian compounds, femininity during Lunar New Year is defined by service, restraint, and presentation. Men participate symbolically — greeting guests, drinking, handing out red envelopes — while women handle the logistics that make celebration possible. The more “modern” the family appears, the more subtle the expectations become, but they rarely disappear.
What is often framed as tradition is, on closer inspection, a highly efficient gendered system. It allocates labour, polices bodies, and reinforces hierarchy, all under the banner of joy and prosperity. The insistence on women looking beautiful while working relentlessly is not accidental. It teaches that a good woman absorbs pressure gracefully, that competence should never eclipse pleasantness, and that silence is part of the aesthetic.
Lunar New Year is often described as a time of renewal. For many women in Southeast Asia, it is also a reminder of how much remains stubbornly unchanged. Each year brings new dresses, new filters, new language about empowerment. And each year, the same hands are burned, the same smiles rehearsed, the same questions asked. The holiday where luck is welcomed with open arms continues to rely on women who make it happen — prettily, quietly, and very fast.
I grew up inside the Chinese New Year kitchen. Not visiting it. Not “helping a bit.” Inside it. As a child, I stood next to my mother while she chopped, stirred, tasted, cleaned, smiled. I passed plates. I washed vegetables. I learned early that celebration was something women manufactured with tired hands and controlled faces. The men appeared when it was time to eat.
Back then, I thought I was being useful. A good daughter. A modern girl who understood tradition. What I didn’t understand yet was that I was being trained. Trained to absorb pressure quietly. Trained to anticipate needs before they were spoken. Trained to look busy, agreeable, and grateful while my body learned the choreography of unpaid labour.
Then one year, without any formal announcement, the baton was passed. My mother slowed down. I sped up. I took over the stove, the planning, the timing, the anxiety. And with the kitchen came the aunties. The commentary committee. The ones who don’t lift a finger but never miss a detail. Too slow. Too thin. Too loud. Still not married? Still no child? Your cousin manages better. Your generation is selfish. Smile more. Stir faster.
I wore the new dress, of course. Lipstick carefully applied at 6 a.m., before the first pot boiled over. By noon, it was smeared, my wrists stung, my back hurt, and my patience was gone. I looked around and realised something simple and brutal: this wasn’t love. It was rehearsal. Rehearsal for a lifetime of being useful before being human.
So I stopped.
Not dramatically. I didn’t throw a ladle or start a family war. I just… stopped stepping forward automatically. I cooked one dish instead of ten. I sat down before being told to. I answered questions with silence. When the comments came, I let them land and slide off. When someone said, “That’s just how it’s done,” I said, “Not by me.”
The world did not end. The food was still edible. The ancestors survived. Some aunties were offended. Good.
Now, Chinese New Year looks different to me. I still love parts of it — the colours, the rituals, the memory of my mother’s hands. But I refuse the lie that tradition requires my exhaustion. I refuse the fantasy that a woman’s worth is proven by how prettily she suffers.
Enough is not rebellion. Enough is adulthood.