Long ago, the Jade Emperor hosted a great race to heaven. The rat and the cat persuaded the ox to give them a ride across the river. Perched on the ox’s back, the rat and the cat promised to watch for their rivals sneaking up from behind: the tiger struggling to swim, the rabbit hopping from boulder to boulder, the dog stopping to splash, and the pig napping in the shade.

Within sight of shore, the rat shoved the cat into the water. Then, over the finish line, ahead of the ox, who lost by less than a whisker length.

The rat won, but forever had the enmity of the ox and the cat.

This year, the rat’s reign will begin again on Saturday, Jan. 25, the first day of the Asian Lunar New Year. There are 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac, their order determined by the race, rotating in a cycle every dozen years.

As the circle comes around, I’ve been reflecting upon the passage of time, and the role of tradition and ritual. I spoke with several Bay Area Asian American authors who considered — on the occasion of this holiday — what has been lost to assimilation and what has since been reclaimed, and how food can connect past to present.

In the 1960s, when A.H. Kim’s family immigrated to the United States, there weren’t many Koreans in the suburbs of Cleveland and Buffalo, N.Y.

“Concerned about racial discrimination, my parents encouraged my siblings and me to assimilate, speak perfect English and excel in school,” said Kim, author of the forthcoming “A Good Family.” “Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising we didn’t celebrate Korean holidays in my childhood home.”

Her family adapted one tradition though: On Jan. 1 — rather than on Seollal, the lunar calendar equivalent — she’d wake up to a steaming bowl of tteok mandu-guk, “a deeply comforting” soup of sliced rice ovals and homemade pork dumplings in a broth, garnished with strips of yellow and white egg and shreds of tender beef brisket.

“To me, it’s the flavor of Korea, the taste of my forgotten homeland,” she said.

Food figures into Nancy Jooyoun Kim’s plans for the holidays, too. She’ll make the traditional rice cake soup as well — “white and calming but adorned with chopped scallions and shreds of fried egg and toasted seaweed,” which “represents a kind of blank slate, or another beginning.”

Growing up, though, she rarely celebrated any holidays. Her mother, who owned a clothing store in a swap meet, worked on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“We worked every day in December, a grinding month, which stretched mercilessly into the new year,” said the author of the forthcoming debut novel, “The Last Story of Mina Lee.”

By Lunar New Year, they were exhausted and burnt out.

“Since most of my family lived abroad in Korea or Canada, we were never held accountable toward anyone else or anything cultural — except for our survival,” she said. “Today, even as an adult with much more time on my hands than my mother ever had, I still often forget of the ways that holidays remind us to celebrate life, that it is fleeting, and that we each deserve not only our own versions of family, but rest and respite.

“This year I want to commit to having more of this in my life. I find it now important to believe that every year, we can do or be something a little different, if we have the fortitude to look at time for what it is — immensely fixed yet with enough intention also mutable and stretched the more attention we give.”

For Nancy Au, this time of year marks a tradition of feasting. Her family used to celebrate the holiday with a hot pot dinner at her grandparents’ house in the Richmond District of San Francisco — “paper-thin slices of beef and lamb encircling plates like open flowers, opaque fish balls, brittle tangles of cabbage, sprouts, tofu, shrimp, clams, medallions of scallops,” said Au, author of “Spider Love Song and Other Stories.”

“My parents and grandparents rarely said, ‘I love you.’ Instead, they’d say with a cheerful smile near the end of dinner when our eating slowed, ‘Did you eat enough? Don’t stop.’ ”

The hot pot tradition ended with the passing of her parents and grandparents. But she and her siblings still express their heritage and love through food.

For their get-togethers, her sister-in-law brings Chinese dishes, while Au cooks her mother’s recipe for pesto pasta along with mashed potatoes, Chinese stir-fried noodles, homemade egg rolls, kimchi fried rice, Korean and Japanese ramen, and other savory foods.

“When we gather at each other’s homes, our tables are covered in more dishes than we could possibly consume in one night,” Au said, “we are speaking our love.”