The Year of the Horse and the Day of the Cookie

1/31/14

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!