Non-fiction
<i>One Chinese New Year in Boston Chinatown</i>
The old man was crossing the intersection at a point where a single shabby road jutted into a long asphalt thoroughfare, thereby making the whole configuration appear as a giant "T". He had succeeded in crossing from one side of the interloping street to the other when…well, reader, read on. The year is 1991. Boston has a fair-sized Chinatown, just as many major cities of the US do. It is not as large as the one in San Francisco or New York, but it is reasonably up there or thereabouts with them. A Chinatown seems to grow around the Chinese diaspora wherever they are in sizeable numbers, and Boston has a good-sized population of Chinese-Americans. Typically, as in the many Chinatowns I have been to in different parts of the world, the moment you set foot inside one, you are hit with the smell, flavours, and general ambience of the Chinese living in their home environment in the old country, although many of them had never been to the land which their ancestors had left behind so many years ago. But whether newly-arrived in the country, or naturalized citizens, or Americans by birth, the Chinese diaspora retains important facets of their ancient and proud culture, occasionally spicing them up with tinges of the culture of their homeland by adoption or birth. The spectacular salutation of the Chinese New Year is one of them. Some of the elaborate programmes and decorative accoutrements are thought to have either originated in the Chinese community of San Francisco, or to have been heavily influenced by Chinese diasporic inputs. Verily, they have added variety and spice to the Chinese New Year celebrations, in the process making them ever attractive to successive generations, and adding a regional flavour of the country which the diaspora has chosen to call home, while keeping intact the timeless core ingredients that make the Chinese New Year celebrations unmistakably Chinese in origin, distinctiveness, and ambiance. Of course, the festivities are not restricted to participation by just the ethnic Chinese, although, as one would expect, they constitute the bulk of the revelers. And, that is also the way it is in the Boston Chinatown chapter of New Year revelry. Boston Chinatown, as I remember it from fourteen years back, is somewhat seedy, with old buildings standing with dreary looks along comparatively narrow streets crisscrossing each other and sporting lopsidedly more pedestrians going about their business than cars weaving through them. Somehow, the entire setup seems to convey in one a feeling of being in a Chinese town, especially with the stores and supermarkets displaying a vast array of Chinese goods (often imported from China or Taiwan) with their distinctive smells wafting around, and a cacophony of spoken Chinese filling up the rooms. I have always been fascinated by the splendour, diversity, and ancient lineage of Chinese culture, and I made it a point of making it to the annual rite of calendar renewal and all the symbolism it entails. One constant outside my paying homage to the Chinese tradition of New Year has been my predilection for Chinese food, again, in keeping with the local twists given to the annual celebrations, the more local variations and additions to the food items, the better! In Boston, my craving was for that gastronomic Shangri-la, the bewildering, dizzying, magical, and esoteric concoctions going by the name of dim sum. Small portions of bite-sized (essentially) appetizers are carted around for the diner to select, and then to proceed to assuaging the palate. Actually, they are probably not carted around in every Chinatown, but they were in my restaurant of choice. And, not all the food can readily be classified as delectable, as tastes will vary, especially in the context of individual cultural experiences and mores. For instance, one of the items offered, chicken feet, for me, is an acquired taste that, after one bite at one, I never got to acquire. But the number of people who would patiently line up on any given Saturday midday at my favourite restaurant to get into the spacious dining hall that seated hundreds in one go eloquently testified to the delights of the splendid array of dim sum items on offer. That Chinese New Year's day in 1991 my friend Vicky and I decided to make my ritualistic pilgrimage to Chinatown, that day at midday for the purpose of taking in a dim sum lunch to heighten the pleasure of beholding the numerous activities of the day. We had gone to other dim sum lunches there, and so knew what to expect, but this was special. We were going to combine two delightful activities in one. The familiar sights, sounds, and smells hit us as soon as we disembarked from Vicky's car, parked a considerable distance away from the center of the activities that had begun, and were going to culminate in a crescendo of light and sound well into the night. But, even at midday, the sounds were impressive enough, the Chinese language amplified several times over that of the usual days, now intermingled with English from the considerable number of visitors who had already made their way in, and from the firecrackers exploding all around, the flashes to be visible in their spectacular display after evening had set in, but the shredded and shattered bits of paper from the burst crackers were cascading down on the roads and footpaths as fluttering graffiti. By the time we entered into the thick of things, which, incidentally, was happening just a couple of blocks away from our cherished restaurant, the ground looked like having been covered by an hour's steady snowfall. We made our way to the blessed place, and spent the better part of two hours sampling the fares from the food-laden mobile trays that the servers were regularly wheeling in, and then stopping in front of a table for the diners to select their dishes, and once that was done, moving on to the next table. Preparations of shrimp, duck, chicken, fish, scallop, and pastry went down the old hatch until the tummy had had enough and flatly refused to take in another morsel. That was the signal for paying up and taking our leave. When we came out on the street, the increase in the number of people and the volume of noise were clearly noticeable. We were going to walk around and take in whatever was happening around us well into the evening. Only then would we call it quits in Chinatown. We were strolling down the street, happy with ourselves and the day, when we reached the intersection that resembled a "T". We stopped, deciding on whether to turn right, or continue along the thoroughfare, when my eyes fell on the old man, visibly of East Asian (probably Chinese) ethnicity, crossing the short distance to the other side. He was slight, sprightly, looked at least seventy, was dressed in a somewhat disheveled gray suit, with a matching felt hat perched at an angle on his head, and was shuffling along on small feet wearing brown shoes. He had almost crossed over when my eyes' peripheral vision caught sight of the boy crouched on this side of the intersection, adjacent to where Vicky and I were standing, oblivious to anyone or anything around him. He was also ethnically East Asian (probably Chinese), around twelve, thin, in jeans and flannel shirt, bare head sporting straight black hair, and was intently focused on the elderly man who was crossing. And then I noticed the lad held an infernal rocket-shaped small firecracker in his left hand, low and parallel to the ground. And things happened in what seemed in simultaneously slow and fast motion. The malevolent one's right hand held a blazing matchstick, which he proceeded to apply to the rear end of the small rocket. And the missile whooshed towards its target. The fiend was diabolically accurate. The rocket homed in on the exact spot where the trousers bifurcated at the old man's legs. And he seemed to be involuntarily propelled forward at bewildering speed, clutching his backside, head looking up at the sky, mouth open, whether letting out a silent or piercing scream I will never know. Because the old-timer had disappeared from view at the speed of Usain Bolt down the road. And the young fiend had done an Asafa Powell, and was disappearing into a side street when I turned by attention to my right. And, then, Vicky and I burst out into uncontrollable fits of laughter, and, I noticed, so were many in our vicinity. I guess the whole episode was funny, but, to be sure, the old man who suddenly and unpleasantly found wings of Mercury did not find it amusing. But, appalling as it may sound, that incident was the culmination of a perfect day for me that Chinese New Year's day in Chinatown, Boston, USA.
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