Every Chinese New Year, I watch my friend Wei slide into a version of herself that sits just slightly wrong—like she’s wearing clothes tailored for someone three inches taller—and I’ve started to wonder if the real performance isn’t what happens at the dinner table, but the fact that we all pretend we don’t notice it happening.
I’m not Chinese. I didn’t grow up with this tradition, don’t have parents and grandparents waiting at home with expectations wound tight as red string. But I live in Singapore, and through a decade of friendships and dinners and overheard conversations, I’ve become a student of the ritual—not as a participant, but as someone who sits at the edge of it, watching people I care about transform themselves in real time.
Wei’s the most obvious about it. She’s a graphic designer, sharp and irreverent, the kind of person who laughs loudly at dark jokes and doesn’t apologize for her opinions. Then January rolls around, and her mother’s voice appears on her phone screen three times a week. By the time CNY dinner arrives, Wei has become someone softer, more deferential. Her mother asks about her job—the same job Wei was complaining about brilliantly just weeks earlier—and Wei nods and says it’s “going well, very stable.” It’s like watching someone turn the contrast down on their own life.
I asked her about it once, after dinner, when we were helping clear plates. “Do you realize you change?” I said it gently, but even so, she tensed. “It’s just how it is,” she said. “My mom needs me to be a certain way. We all kind of… hold it together for a few hours.”
That phrase stuck with me: hold it together for a few hours. As if the real version of Wei—the one who exists the other 364 days—is something that needs to be contained, stored away in a box marked “too much, too complicated, too disappointing.”
I started paying closer attention. At Marcus and his wife Mei’s place—they hosted the big CNY dinner I attended last year—I noticed the same pattern repeating itself like a structural flaw in a building. Marcus, who spends most of his time as a confident corporate lawyer, became almost deferential with his father. He laughed at jokes he didn’t find funny. He steered conversations away from his daughter’s decision to study fine art. Mei, normally direct and opinionated about almost everything, became ornamental—smiling, serving, asking questions that centered everyone else’s experience rather than offering her own.
What I was watching, I realized, was what I call the performance of continuity. It’s not exactly lying, but it’s not exactly truth either. It’s the collective agreement that certain versions of ourselves—versions we’ve grown into, versions that reflect who we’ve actually become—need to be sacrificed on the altar of family stability. The idea is that if everyone holds still long enough, if everyone plays the role they were cast in ten or twenty years ago, then nothing will crack.
The psychological research on this is fairly clear. There’s something called identity accommodation—the extent to which we modify our behavior and beliefs in response to intimate relationships. Family relationships, particularly intergenerational ones, create what psychologists call “relational roles” that can be deeply rigid. We step into the son, the daughter, the dutiful child—and stepping out feels not just like disappointing people, but like betraying a sacred agreement.
What makes it harder still is that the people we’re performing for aren’t necessarily demanding the performance. My sense, watching from the outside, is that Wei’s mother doesn’t actually need Wei to be smaller. Marcus’s father probably doesn’t actually need Marcus to laugh at jokes he doesn’t find funny. But there’s this elaborate dance where everyone is performing what they think the other person needs them to be, and nobody stops to ask if that’s actually true.
There’s research from family psychology that touches on this—the gap between what family members think they’re supposed to do and what they actually want from each other. Often they’re not even close. Parents say they want their adult children to be happy and authentic; adult children spend the holiday weekend performing competence and contentment. Everyone leaves exhausted, feeling misunderstood, even though in many cases, what was missing wasn’t effort—it was honesty.
But here’s what makes it especially strange: I think the people performing these versions of themselves know exactly what they’re doing. Wei knows. Marcus knows. Mei knows. And I think, somewhere in the fractal complexity of how family dynamics work, their parents know too. They’re all performing, all holding still, all agreeing not to name what’s happening.
I asked Wei about this directly, maybe six months after that CNY dinner. “Do you think your mom knows you’re performing?” She looked genuinely startled by the question. “I think… maybe she is too,” Wei said slowly. “I think she becomes a certain version of herself with her mother. And her mother probably becomes a certain version with her mother. It’s like we’re all just—” she made a gesture like a series of Russian dolls disappearing into themselves, “—trying not to let the inside ones show.”
That’s the thing that got me. The performance isn’t unilateral. It’s not children pretending for disapproving parents. It’s everyone pretending for everyone, in this intricate choreography where the real cost isn’t the performance itself, but the collective lie that the performance is necessary.
I think about this in relation to something I’ve noticed more broadly: we live in an age of enormous cultural conversation about authenticity. Everyone’s talking about being “real,” about dropping masks, about vulnerability and genuine connection. But then the holidays come, and families gather, and we all suit up in our old costumes without comment. As if the performances we learned in childhood—the ones that kept us safe, that proved we were “good”—have some claim on us that’s deeper than any later philosophy.
The most striking part, though, is that nobody seems to actually enjoy the performance. Wei doesn’t look happy when she’s being the dutiful daughter. Marcus doesn’t seem relieved when he’s playing the son who has it all figured out. And their parents—from what I can observe—don’t seem to enjoy being the authority figures who need these performances. Everyone’s suffering, but suffering in perfect synchronization, like an elaborate dance nobody’s having fun at but nobody knows how to stop.
I think about what I’ve written about long-term relationships—about the way we learn to tolerate disappointment in people we love. But what struck me is that family gatherings are often the opposite problem. We don’t tolerate reality; we perform ideality. And maybe that’s a kind of defense mechanism: if everyone’s playing along, no one can be disappointed, because no one’s being asked to accept anyone as they actually are.
The thing I’ve come to believe, watching all this from the outside, is that the real truth nobody wants to speak at Chinese New Year isn’t that family dynamics are complex or that parents and children have different values. It’s something simpler and more devastating: we’ve learned to love versions of each other that don’t actually exist. Wei’s mother loves the dutiful daughter. Marcus’s father loves the son who’s certain of his path. And Wei, Marcus, Mei—they love the versions of their parents that they construct in their minds, the ones who need the performance.
The performances continue because honesty would break that implicit contract. If Wei showed up fully as herself—uncertain, irreverent, real—it would force her mother to either adjust her love or admit that her love was conditional on the performance. That’s the moment everyone’s avoiding. That’s the moment that feels too dangerous to approach.
So everyone performs. Everyone holds still. Everyone agrees to keep pretending, because the alternative—actually being known and accepted exactly as we are—feels riskier than anything.
I think about this when I read about how much time we spend afraid of things that never come to pass. Because that’s what I see at these dinners—people afraid that if they stop performing, they’ll lose the relationship. But the relationship they’re protecting by staying small is already a kind of loss.
There’s also this: I suspect the reason I notice it so clearly is because I’m not embedded in it. I don’t have my own performance running in the background, my own version of myself that I have to maintain. I can see the architecture of it because I’m not living inside the walls. And from this vantage point, what’s most striking isn’t the performance itself—that’s deeply human, deeply understandable. What’s striking is the silence around it. The fact that Wei and Marcus and Mei and everyone else I’ve watched go through this all seem to believe they’re alone in it.
They’re not. The performance is almost universal at family gatherings, especially in cultures where family obligation carries the weight it does in Chinese tradition. But because no one names it, everyone thinks they’re the only one doing it. Everyone thinks everyone else is being authentic.
This is maybe the most honest thing I can say, from my position as an observer: If everyone at the table is performing, then authenticity at family gatherings might not be the goal. Connection might be. Or acceptance. Or simply the courage to show up, year after year, knowing that the real version of yourself won’t quite fit into the shape that’s been carved out for you.
That’s not a solution. It’s not even advice. But it might be recognition, which is sometimes what we need most. To know that we’re not alone in our contradictions. To understand that the people we love are also trying to squeeze themselves into spaces that were never quite the right size.
I think that’s what I’ve learned, watching Wei and Marcus and Mei and countless others navigate Chinese New Year: the real tradition isn’t the food or the red envelopes or the specific words we say. The real tradition is the collective agreement to perform, and the collective silence about that agreement. And maybe—just maybe—the first step toward change isn’t dropping the performance altogether. It’s naming what’s happening. Being honest enough to say, “I’m doing it too.”
Because someone has to break the silence first. Someone has to say it out loud. And maybe when enough people do, the performance will become less necessary. Or maybe we’ll just become kinder to ourselves and each other for attempting it—for trying, even in impossible circumstances, to hold things together.
That might be the real gift.
