Photo of the Day: Happy New Year from Wǒ Men Podcast

Our photo theme during the Spring Festival holiday is Enter the Dog: the funniest, cutest, weirdest, or otherwise most noteworthy images of our canine companions circulating around Chinese popular culture as we christen the Lunar New Year.

Today’s image is a studio shot submitted by Yajun and Jingjing, hosts of Radii’s Wǒ Men Podcast. Their latest episode discusses changing traditions associated with the Lunar New Year:

When our parents were children in the 1960s, their pleasure at this time of year was being able to finally enjoy vegetable balls fried with the oil that the whole family had been saving for the entire year. By contrast, when we were kids in the 1980s, meat dishes, sweets, new clothes and endless playtime with our cousins made the Chinese New Year the happiest time of the whole year.

Today, we can purchase imported food and new clothes on e-commerce platforms every day. Material pleasure doesn’t thrill us anymore. Instead, the New Year has become an obligatory time to face relatives’ constant questions about why we don’t have boyfriends/girlfriends, or if we do, why we don’t have babies yet.

Times have changed.

As a bonus shot, here’s another intense Spring Festival-related dog image, also spotted by Yajun:

And here’s Yajun with her own dog, who got a free ride on a 12km hike: