it's been one year

Can't believe a whole year has passed since I started this blog. My life seems very different today than it did a year ago. These changes are apparent when I compare how I spent the Gregorian and Lunar New Years "celebrations" last year with this year.

I was more jet-lagged than giddy when 2005 started. I spent that New Years sitting in a Japanese suburban hotel room with only an airline-prepared ham sandwich and Japanese TV shows for company. This New Years Eve found me having dinner with my siblings and their significant others. My sister's boyfriend (a part-time chef) prepared coconut-crusted hake with peanut sauce, garlic couscous, and a mixed greens salad. After dinner was time for watching the ball drop on ABC. It may be debatable whether the sight of Mariah Carey singing is more surreal than Japanese wrestling, but there's no debate on which New Years Eve was more enjoyable to me.

Comparing the past two Lunar New Years for me is even a bigger contrast. It's impossible not to notice the start of Chinese New Year in Hong Kong: the pre-holiday shopping, the family visits, and so on. That's not the case in rural upstate New York. There are perhaps 5,000 Chinese-Americans in the Rochester area: a large enough community to have a few grocery stores, but not large enough to support a full range of Chinese goods and services. Since there are no Cantonese butcher shops here, the grocery stores make Cantonese-style freshly-roasted duck available once a year at Chinese New Year. So for many Chinese here, eating roast duck becomes the highlight of the holiday.

The irony here is that, for traditionalists, it's bad luck to eat meat on Chinese New Years Day. That's because using sharp objects (um, knives) will cut off good fortune -- and since traditionalists prefer their food as fresh as possible, how do you kill your dinner without a knife? [My grandparents got around this last year by sending me to McDonalds for dinner. They figure nothing at McDonalds is 'properly' fresh, including the meat.] But this didn't matter to my mother. After going a whole year without roast duck, no 'bad luck' was standing between her and a duck for Chinese New Year dinner. And she wasn't alone: the queue for roast duck at the grocery store we went to was 90 minutes. It was only after we emerged with our roast ducks that my brother called. He had found a local Sino-Vietnamese restaurant that prepares and sells whole roast ducks (for takeaway!) throughout the year. Only after finding that my brother's duck tasted more 'authentic' than her duck did my mother then start muttering about bad luck!