New Year - The Sequel

One of the perks of being Asian-American is having two new years to celebrate. The first involves partying with friends, drinking champagne, and making a lot of noise at midnight. The second involves eating with relatives, eating with more relatives, and making a lot of noise for two weeks straight. The latter doesn’t always go over well with the crowd who celebrates only the former. Who we eat with doesn’t seem to bother anyone, but explosives in the streets tend to make folks jumpy. While the Asians run outside to see where the party is, our neighbors lock their doors, drop to the floor and take cover. It’s a weird culture clash. But we’ve been living together like this for nearly 200 years. You’d think we’d all be used to it by now.


The Chinese have so many superstitions that chances are you’ll eventually do something to ruin your life. Here are a few that relate to the New Year:


- On New Year’s Day don't sweep the floors (good luck will be swept away) or wash your hair (good luck will be washed away) or use knives (good luck will be cut away)… you get the picture. So take care of all your housecleaning, personal grooming, and food prep on New Year’s Eve, or you’ll be SOL all year.

- The color red will bring you luck. If you notice that many of your Silicon Valley colleagues are dressed in red around this time of year and you’re not, don’t worry, you didn’t miss a memo. On the other hand, white is associated with death. So with all those brides traipsing around in white wedding gowns, it's no wonder that half the marriages in this country are doomed.


- Any bad behavior you exhibit on New Year’s Day will haunt you all year long. Or until you die, whichever comes first. Chinese parents are especially fond of this one, as it gives them free license to torment their children. “Don’t eat sweets today, or you’ll eat so much all year that your teeth will fall out.” “Don’t be lazy today, or you’ll end up a helpless lump on the floor.” “Don’t talk back to me today, or I’ll wring your little neck.” Those little old ladies in Chinatown may look perfectly harmless, but they can mess with your mind like nobody’s business.


Every Lunar New Year married people give red envelopes filled with money to children and unmarried people. I don’t know who started this tradition, but he must have been a bachelor. Unmarried domestic partners have been playing the system for years. I’m pretty sure all those red envelopes are funding their retirement. I'm willing to bet that married Chinese couples retire later and in more poverty than unmarried couples. I think I’m onto something here.


2012 is the Year of the Dragon. Brace yourself for a year of excitement, intensity, and unpredictability. Not to mention the Mayan Armageddon. I’m not sure I can handle all that drama. I’ll just lay low and wear a lot of red until it all blows over.

New Year

Every New Year’s Eve we gather with friends at Sam and Laurel’s house in Point Reyes Station. D and I cram the car with a ridiculous amount of food and clothing and then toss in the dog and his bed. We spend the first two hours on monotonous multi-lane highways, but as we approach the coastline and begin cruising along winding roads through the redwoods, the weight of the harvest lifts from my shoulders. Whatever’s waiting back home at the orchard can continue to wait. The sky is clearer. The air is crisper. Radio programs are reduced to static and my cell phone signal takes a slow-motion dive. Three… two… one… and finally, No Service. This is a good thing for a change.


The car door opens and the dog explodes from the cargo compartment. This is a familiar and happy place for him, too. From the driveway we step into the backyard, where we’ve seen songbirds, quail, deer, and even a bobcat. Redtail hawks and eagles perch in the grove of trees close by. To top it off, the grounds offer a front row seat to a spectacular overlook of the marshy headwaters of Tomales Bay.

By 1:00 the table was spread with appetizers, oysters were ready for shucking, and the wine was flowing. At that rate I could slip into a food coma well before dinnertime rolled around. But with my comrades as inspiration, I carried on like a good soldier. The group is an interesting and well-traveled one, and it’s never short on good stories. We’ve heard tales of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, meeting with Manuel Noriega, building an ice rink in Washington DC, leading tours in Australia, tracking rhinos in Kenya, living in a commune, living in a kibbutz, living under Fidel Castro’s rule. Before you know it, you’ve chatted and listened and eaten your way through the afternoon, and then it’s time for another meal.

After a hearty dinner that rounded me up, literally, to 3000 calories since breakfast, we toasted each other at the stroke of midnight. Midnight in New York, that is. We wanted the option of retiring early without embarrassing anyone. But Lydia, bless her heart, pumped up the Latin dance tunes and we salsad and merengued ourselves right into 2012 Pacific Standard Time. And I'm so glad we were able to ring in another year together. 

Happy new year, everyone.

Harvest Time

Twelve harvest seasons have come and gone and every time they hit me like a 2x4. Call me a slow learner, but somehow the harvest sneaks up on me at exactly the same time every year. No amount of list-making or desk rearranging can soften that moment of terror when D walks in and proclaims, “WE’RE PICKING!”

Growing up, all I knew about mandarin oranges is that they came in a can adorned by a woman in a kimono and tasted like the corn syrup they were swimming in. Imagine my surprise when I ate a fresh mandarin for the first time. I gulped down so many my stomach burned and my teeth tingled. Now they’re everywhere: hanging from trees, carted on trailers, stacked up in crates and packed in bags and boxes. But all that’s outside where the action is. My job is in the office, answering phone calls, responding to emails, taking mail orders and preparing hundreds of shipping labels. I gaze out the window every once in a while at the bustling workers and silently mouth, Hey look! I’m farming!

It’s weird having a crop that ripens in winter. While everyone else is busy with holiday gift shopping and party planning, we get lost in the demands of the harvest. We manage to set up a Christmas tree every year, but it’s plastic and stored in a box and permanently wired with lights. All we have to do is pop it open like an umbrella and plug it in. Voila, merry merry.

Fruit and summer just seem to go together. But here we are in early December, worrying that all our eggs in one basket could freeze overnight. And no one eats frozen eggs. Our only option is to turn on the sprinklers at night to protect the trees and hope for the best. We’ve had calls from well-meaning customers suggesting that we throw a bed sheet over each tree, or we light little fires under the trees and tend them through the night. Folks, there are 1500 trees out there. There aren’t enough sheets for sale in this small town, and it would be a recruiting nightmare to round up even a handful of people willing to risk hypothermia to huddle around a campfire in 30-degree weather. For minimum wage. And the bed sheets dangling over the campfires... I don’t even want to think about it.

It’s 6:30 a.m. Time to get to work.

Chicken Nuggets

Angel was the sole survivor of the scrub jay attack. We found her the following morning running through the yard in panicky zigzags. D bent down and scooped her up in a baseball cap as she ran past, returned her to the coop and bird-proofed the fence. I ran right out and bought four more chicks to keep her company. Ruby was red, Daisy was white, and Sophie was golden and grew up to lay blue eggs. The fourth was black and beautiful, and I named her Shaniqua, a solid urban name. It was also a private joke. I couldn’t wait for one of my neighbors to ask, “What’s a Shaniqua?”

I had never felt any maternal urges before, but these chicks brought out the mother hen in me. I set them up in a big cardboard box lined with wood shavings and equipped it with a heat lamp. The musty smell of sawdust and the gentle sound of peeping soothed me. I hovered as the chicks tripped over each other to peck at the crumble in their feeder. In the evenings, I knelt on the floor beside the box and watched for long minutes as they quieted down and fell asleep. A friend who also raised chickens once told me, “Maybe I’m a simpleton, but I can sit and watch them for hours.” I understand completely. It’s pure entertainment without an ounce of intellectual effort.

A few months went by as the chicks adjusted to living in the coop. Under Angel’s tutelage they learned to return from free-ranging at sunset so we could lock them in, and every morning we let them out again. One spring day D opened the door as usual. Daisy flew down from her roost to land in the doorway, puffed up her chest and flapped her wings, and belted out a hearty “COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!” What’s a shocked parent to do? I renamed her Tyrone.

As he matured, Tyrone became more and more neurotic. Crazy amounts of chicken hormones running through your veins will do that to you. I’d look out the back window at a lovely pastoral scene of blue sky and flowers and hens serenely pecking in the grass, and suddenly a blur of white would whizz past, head down and wings straight up, madly clucking like his tail was on fire. But there was never a sign of an actual threat. After a while the hens didn’t even bother to look up from their grazing. Tyrone was predictably ridiculous.  But we stopped laughing the day he confronted 2-year-old Sofia with a belly bump that knocked her to the ground. Shortly afterward while I was away on a business trip, D called to break the news: Tyrone ran away. That was his story and he was sticking to it. Now, I’ve never heard of a rooster running away, but I simply asked D to promise that Tyrone would not appear in any of my meals. And Tyrone was never heard from again.

Old Farmer Stories

A big part of adjusting to life on the farm is adjusting to living with farmers. My first roadblock was that many of my neighbors looked interchangeable and I couldn't for the life of me tell them apart. They were all about the same age, same height, had white hair, dark glasses, short sleeved shirts, jeans and a cap. Was this some kind of joke they played on the new kid? Apparently not. Any one of them could show up at any moment and catch me off guard. It sometimes took me a few minutes to figure out who I was talking to. It didn't matter if I was about to jump into my car and rush off somewhere, these old guys had all the time in the world to chat. But one of the great things that they all have in common is their skill for storytelling.

One summer evening Lamar sat on the front porch and told stories while we sipped iced tea.

"Ellabelle was a tough old gal. She lived alone in a house down on Road 32, you know where the ferry used to run? Well, so one night Billy Ray Derryberry..."

I had to interrupt. "Wait, are you making these names up?"

Confused. "No. Why? Anyway, Billy Ray Derryberry's girlfriend used to live in that house before Ellabelle ever did. So one night Billy Ray gets good and drunk and goes to Ellabelle's house looking for his girlfriend. Well, Ellabelle has a .38, and when she sees Billy Ray climbing through her window, she grabs that gun and shoots him right here, between his nose and eye.

"He lived through it. Spent a long time in the hospital and still has that bullet lodged in his head. When the sheriff gets to Ellabelle's house she complains that her gun isn't working right, 'cause she meant to shoot him right between the eyes! In fact, she made such a fuss, what do you know if that sheriff didn't give her a brand new gun!"