Gung Hay Fat Choy! – I’m sure that’s not how it should
really be said, but that’s what I’ve known from hearing it around San
Francisco. It’s Chinese New Year today
as we begin the year of the horse.
Lucy’s class is actually doing a nod to the holiday and her
classroom is decorated, a story will be read, red envelopes passed around and
my kids are dressed up in their Chinese clothes. Lucy is so excited, and has been looking
forward to this day and to wearing her favorite Chinese dress. I’m also sensing a nervousness. “I’m shy,” she also said. And then explained that everyone would be
looking at her. Perhaps, in a gesture of
self-consciousness, she is more fully realizing that she is the only full-blooded
Chinese kid in the class. There are two
other half-Chinese children in the class, but what does this mean to Lucy?
There is a pride in China and a sense that today is about
her more than about the rest of her family.
I applaud the pride and hope that it can reside next to her sense of
belonging to a family that both deeply appreciates China, and is mostly
learning about this important holiday from the internet.
This afternoon our friend and Mandarin teacher, Tra-Ling,
will facilitate our party with crafts, story-telling and fireworks. There will also be a large feast and I made
sure to get Lucy’s favorite cookies.
Lucy remembers the cookies and remembers leaving the orphanage to see
the dragon dances in the town of Maoming.
(The only other memories she talks about regularly is getting a bee
sting and how yucky her toothpaste was.)
These cookies have just about every toxic ingredient that
one could put into a cookie and the layers of plastic wrap push my
environmental boundary. But as I saw her
face notice those cookies this morning, she was almost as excited as the night
before Christmas. When we first met Lucy
at the government office of Guangzhou, she was clutching the plastic wrapping
of said cookie with white knuckles.
Aside from the clothes on her body (no underpants), it was the only
tangible object she brought with her from her old world to her new one.
Perhaps today is mostly, for Lucy, “the day of the cookie” -
the day that links her first three years to the rest of her life. At six years old, this makes her shy, but
proud and confident that this day is mostly about her. As long she is willing, I will continue to
ask for the aid of Chinese friends, study up from the internet and buy emotionally
healthy cookies!
