Year of the Ram: Chinese New Year Feature
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Venturing Out for New Year’s

New Yorker Shirley Lin checks out the festivities

By Shirley Lin | Special to AsianWeek

There was a time when my family welcomed the Lunar New Year by staying indoors, sitting with longtime friends and whipping up five-course dinners. But with nostalgia and the mercury running somewhat higher this weekend, my mother and I agreed to see what the fuss in Chinatown was all about. She said she hadn’t attended a New Year’s parade in 25 years. Her first was a few months after arriving on the East Coast.

Ma rang up a friend who knew someone whose window had a good view of some Chinatown thoroughfare. He told us to hold off until Sunday. Too cloudy. Plus, the hoopla was halfway over, but there was really no telling.

A curmudgeonly welcome to the Year of the Ram.

On the way over, along Canal Street, I pointed out some changes to my mother: a sparkling new clinic (closed today, of course); a chain coffee shop popular with the dyed-hair crowd; fewer garment factories down the quieter streets. We headed for Columbus Park, where the Museum of the Chinese in Americas promised to open its doors all weekend, but never made it. A crush of residents and tourists had already descended upon Mulberry and Mott Streets. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association pulled out all the stops this year.

A junior ROTC volunteer pressed some red and white brochures into our hands. “Chinatown is alive and getting stronger!” it read, next to a calendar stretching the Lunar New Year celebration into March, full of weekly dragon dances and lucky $8.88 lunch specials.

Even without firecrackers, Sunday’s festival had plenty of din and color: a flotilla of local merchants, civic associations, labor unions and even the Chinese-language dailies’ platforms drawn by red SUVs. There were performances by military veterans, a Korean drum and dance troupe, and a kilted bagpipe squadron from out of town and even a United Chinese World Peace float, which mysteriously came and went. An emigrant bank doled out free bundles of hung bao envelopes.

A pair of yellow bunny ears whizzed overhead, then another, bringing momentary confusion to the crowd. Health and prosperity got a head start this year — the pastel New York Family Health Plus van couldn’t resist a captive audience.

We ducked out of the crowd before the day was over, but not without making the rounds to neighborhood mainstays: grocers for greens, and china shops for new dinnerware. I hoped the weekend’s visitors bought their fill too. Once underground, our daily diaspora resumed. Parents toting kids with Sing Tao Daily balloons on board the Main Street, Flushing-bound 7 train. A grandmother sprinting for the Brooklyn-bound F train, two tomato-red bags as ballasts.

My mother and I said goodbye at Queensboro Plaza.

I think we missed little by keeping our exuberance indoors all those years. Beef vegetable noodles, stuffed lobster, garlic chicken and lien go pudding always tasted better from my father’s pot.

These are the rare times in the year when all is forgiven, though you don’t know if you can ever name the culprit. When for as long as you remember, your dad had cooked for everyone in the Northeast and all you could count on were long-distance phone bills. Shouting down the receiver to your grandmother in California, “May this year be better than the last!” A gourmet feast at home, elbow-knocking and all, then the bewildering hung bao gifts from your siblings, now married. A feast to celebrate that which we had in abundance.

Apartment by apartment, Chinese New Year again tipped the scales in some homes, if only for a couple of days at a time.