Source: The Expat magazine February 2011, article by Amy de Kanter 
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This article has been edited for ExpatGoMalaysia.com 

Chinese New Year celebrations start on the first day on a new moon and end on the 15th day when the moon is full. In Malaysia, Chap Goh Meh is a celebration of both the final day of Chinese New Year and of the day of lovers, also known as “Chinese Valentine’s Day”.

This year Chap Goh Meh falls on 17 February and festivities including .oat parades, Chinese opera, orchestral and dance performances, lion and dragon dances are held across the nation. The best place to enjoy all these at their grandest is Penang, where many of Malaysia’s traditional and unique Chap Goh Meh festivities started.

The Chinese New Year marks the beginning of spring and the fifteen days used to be a farmer’s only holiday, in part because it was also the coldest time of the year and there frozen ground was too hard to work. Whatever the practical reasons, these two weeks became a time for extended family gatherings, lots of food and festivities and carefully observed rituals designed to invite in the good luck and ward o. the bad.

In Penang, young women who were often sequestered behind walls were only let out on Chap Goh Meh so they would not miss the Chinese New Year’s “grand finale”. As the one day in which these women could see and be seen by members of the opposite sex, it became known as a day for lovers, now celebrated with much of the same romance associated with Valentine’s Day.

One romantic tradition that has endured and is now synonymous with Chap Goh Meh in Malaysia is the throwing of mandarin oranges into the sea. Oranges are symbolic luck and prosperity for the New Year and on that one day in which Penang’s unmarried women were allowed to leave their homes, they would gather along the seaside and toss oranges into the sea. Their hope was that the orange would be picked up by young men who would one day become their husbands.

In modern times the tradition continues, on the final night of the New Year, single women crowd along Penang’s Esplanade and fling their oranges as far as they can into the sea. Today’s single woman hedges her bets by giving fate a hand and writes not only her handphone number but her e-mail address in waterproof ink on the oranges before throwing them in.

Today other seaside towns practice the same tradition, but even in landlocked cities like Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya, crowds surround park lakes, leaving behind a film of bobbing oranges for hopeful suitors to fish out.