Good luck with that

Just in time for Year of the Rat?(Image:TImberland)

In the USA,  you are really accepted – have become truly part of a place – when your cultural celebrations become another reason for a sale and fodder for marketing plans.

With luck, and some effort from adults with memories of homelands, traditions meanings will be retained while merging into the adopted life in a new home and contemporary society.

(Although, once there were Presidents’ birthdays, and holidays like Memorial Day and July 4th that have been pretty much obscured by all the red, white, and blue sales promotions and retail ads on TV. We know what’s important. We won’t even bring up Easter or that holiday most battered by marketing, but surviving, Christmas.)

Oh, stop. This isn’t “cultural appropriation” – it’s timely fashion and relevant marketing. Just like Nike does.(Image: Timberland)

Anyway, Happy Lunar New Year to all. May the Year of the Rat run with luck for you.

Just as a precaution, even for those who aren’t really celebrating, but just hedging their luck, some reminders:

• Wear red for good fortune
• Take the time to arrange your shoes in the closet so they are all facing the same direction (In order to keep you going forward and not getting pulling this way and that in different directions)
• Arrange to have a wealthy friend be the first one in your front door on Lunar New Year’s Day (Encouraging money and fortune to come your way all year. Wonder if that works with a wise person’s entrance, too? Wisdom is certainly wealth.)
• If your house has a bathroom right near the front door, for goodness sakes, close that door! (You don’t want wealth and fortune to go down the drain with the water.)

There’s other traditions to remember – like firecrackers to scare away evil spirits, but that one’s getting more difficult with local ordinances. Then there’s the red lanterns for good luck, and the dragons, not to mention the lion dancers…

Do you think Game of Thrones wardrobe has any loaners? (Lunar New Years festival 2019,MFAH)

Worried you’ll get it wrong or forget something really critical? Chill. 

The Museum of fine Arts Houston has done it all for you: Everything from Pad Thai, martial arts, traditional lion dance, drumming, calligraphy, complementary hot green tea, or “Art of the Spirits” Bar. Everyone is invited. Everyone. That’s what we do here, invite all, the more the merrier.

Happy Year of the Rat and may your weekend be filled with much fun and good fortune.

Phil, the Philosopher Mouse of the Hedge.

Read more?

• “Understanding Houston. Rice professor chronicles the oral history of city’s Asian Community” (2020. Rice University/Kinder Institute) Browse those oral histories in the Houston Asian American Archives here.
• “Asian population growth spurs suburban Chinatown in Katy” (Houston Chronicle, 2018)
• “Asian Population is Houston’s Fastest Growing Group” (Rice University/Kinder Institute, 2016)
• “History of the Asian Americans in Houston” (WIKI) Chinese immigrants started arriving in 1870 at the Galveston Port of Entry, then moved inland. Other ethnic groups from Asia followed. The city has the largest Vietnamese population in the state and the third largest in the U.S.

I think this is Lee’s Golden Dragon traditional lion dance, but there are several local troupes around. (MFAH Lunar New Years celebration image)

 

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