When I was a little girl in Nanjing, 元宵节, the Lantern Festival, was loud, crowded, and bright enough to make the sky feel alive.

My parents would take my brother and me to the riverside, where vendors sold steaming bowls of 汤圆 and children ran around with paper lanterns shaped like rabbits, fish, and dragons. Someone always lost a mitten. Someone always cried. Someone always laughed so hard they almost dropped their bowl.

Back then, I never thought about the meaning of the holiday. It was just… fun. Sweet rice balls, red envelopes, firecrackers, and the feeling that the whole city was awake with us.

Decades later, on the other side of the world, 元宵节 looked very different.

In Vancouver, there were no crowded riverbanks, no relatives squeezing into a small apartment, no aunties arguing over whose recipe for 汤圆 was the most authentic. Just our small family: my husband, myself, and our daughter, Lily.

Lily was born here, more comfortable in English than Mandarin. Her Chinese name is 李悦. I chose 悦 because it means joy. But on most days, she just goes by Lily.

When she was younger, I tried to recreate the Lantern Festival at home. One year, I bought a plastic lantern from the Asian supermarket. It played a tinny song when you pressed a button. The light was too bright, too cold, nothing like the soft candle glow of my childhood.

Lily held it for five minutes and then asked if she could go back to watching cartoons.

I remember feeling a small, ridiculous sadness. Was this the end of 元宵节 for our family?

But last year, when Lily was a high school senior, something changed.

A few days before the Lantern Festival, she came into the kitchen and said, in slightly awkward Mandarin:

“妈，这个周末是…那个汤圆节，对不对？”

I froze, then laughed. “对，元宵节。”

She nodded. “Let’s do something. I want to… celebrate properly this time.”

So we went to the Asian market together. She pushed the cart while I compared brands of frozen 汤圆. She insisted on buying both black sesame and peanut filling “for scientific comparison.”

At home, she helped me boil the water, gently swirling the pot so the rice balls wouldn’t stick.

“Tell me again what this holiday is for,” she asked.

I told her: it marks the first full moon of the Lunar New Year. It’s about reunion, light, and the hope that the year ahead will be bright and whole.

“So… kind of like a family reset button?” she said.

I smiled. “Yes. That’s a good way to put it.”

After dinner, we turned off all the lights and lit a few small candles. We didn’t have real lanterns, so Lily found a lantern filter on her phone and projected it on the wall. It was a little silly, a little modern, and completely ours.

We ate 汤圆 together at the dining table, just the three of us, the room quiet except for the sound of spoons tapping porcelain.

Lily took a photo of her bowl and posted it with the caption: “Lantern Festival with my parents. Learning where this joy comes from.”

I pretended not to care, but my heart felt so full it hurt.

Later that night, as we washed dishes side by side, she said softly:

“Mom… I used to think these holidays were just your thing. But now I feel like… they’re mine too.”

In that moment, I realized something:

Our children may not grow up with the same streets, the same crowds, the same lantern-lit skies. But they can grow up with the same warmth.

Traditions don’t have to look the same to mean the same.

Sometimes, a small bowl of 汤圆 in a quiet Canadian kitchen can hold just as much reunion, just as much light, as the noisiest festival back home.

And as I watched my daughter rinse the bowls, humming to herself under the soft glow of our fake lantern, I thought:

The sky may be different.
But the light is still here.