year of the cock

It is snowing here this afternoon and Jimbo is trying to navigate his girlfriend home through the snow by long distance, so I am cooking a chicken pot pie from scratch and watching the Weather Channel to keep track of the storm. The guy on the Weather Channel just said that in China they are celebrating the New Year, and he said it was the year of the rooster. The placemat at our favorite local Chinese restaurant says that it is the year of the cock. Since the people that run the place, wait on you and clean up after you are all obviously Asian, I am going to make the leap of the imagination that the place is authentic, so I am going with their translation. By the way, the beef with green peppers there is excellent as is the egg drop soup. Jimbo’s girlfriend, however, swears by the hot and sour soup. When you get the hot tea, they serve it in cups about the volume of a shot glass. It make drinking tea seem really exotic, even though it is only a couple of miles from home.

Kung hei fat choi. Xīnián kuàilè.

Those are two traditional Chinese salutations for the New Year. The former means congratulations and be prosperous. The latter means happy New Year. I remember the first time I ever heard of the Chinese New Year was when I was a child and a local radio station was having a promotion based on the occasion. They used the phrase gung ho fat hoi as their New Year’s greeting. You are probably aware that we have modified the way we pronounce Chinese words over the last couple of decades, for example, Peking has become Beijing and we have started putting a lot of the letter X into Chinese words. Therefore, it is not surprising that we have done a better job of translating this expression.

Years ago I was dating a woman and we had our own favorite Chinese restaurant that also had those placemats that have the signs of the Chinese animal zodiac on them. I remember the placemats because it was the year of the rat or the monkey and I always joked that I wished it was the year of the cock. Like those who know me well, she learned to ignore me, so she wasn’t aware that I was a human laugh factory, pushing the humor out the door in assembly line fashion. She asked me the year of my birth and told me I was a tiger. She said I was assertive, I knew what I wanted and I usually got what I wanted. I never gave much thought to the zodiac before, but it had me pegged and so I started thinking there was something to it.

Later it dawned on me that approximately 8 percent of the people on the earth were tigers and that it was probably a statistical fluke that it had me right. On the other hand, a billion Chinese couldn’t be wrong. Well, I guess they could. They are celebrating New Year’s in the middle of February, after all.

I don’t think I’ll make any new resolutions; I’ll just try to find the ones I made six weeks ago and maybe I’ll actually try to keep them.

Xīnián kuàilè.

Kung hei fat choi.

Remember, this year half of the Chinese New Year falls on Fat Tuesday and half falls on Ash Wednesday. What’s the statistical probability of that? I think we should ask the Chinese to change New Years on their calendar so they won’t fall on any of our holidays. That way we will have more reasons to celebrate. Anyway, Happy New Year.

Because in Jimbo’s world we can always use another reason to celebrate.