Maria Arozamena
Following a dual-calendar system means celebrating two beginnings each year — hence double the resolutions, promise and inevitably, Sisyphean disillusionment.
On a day-to-day basis, I live according to the Gregorian calendar. Spiritually, I live according to whichever calendar favors me more at the moment. So when the Lunar Calendar declares that spring has arrived in late January, I cycle scarfless down Prospect Street and end up with a cold and a frozen brake cable. So when I fail to reinvent my life between the first of January and the 18-hour flight from Changi to Newark, I tell myself to try again in a couple of weeks when fireworks blossom, calligraphed couplets are plastered on doors, and families put on chunwan — China’s annual variety TV livestream — just to complain about how the show gets worse every year.
But on this new moon, the Year of the Snake began not with a mutter about some chunwan celebrity’s bad lip-syncing nor a child’s grievance about their parents taking red envelopes away for “safekeeping,” but with a Nike ad for Kobe 5s: “the Year of the Mamba. Have a hard year.” When this rebranded snake zodiac asks if I “am a different animal and still the same beast,” I tell it that I just want to go home.
For now, all I can do is FaceTime my family and utter a half-blessing, half-prayer — sent off with three kow-tows. As a child, I rehearsed my greetings and kow-tows in my room, nervous to tarnish the ancient ritual; as a teenager, I scraped by with half-bows, rebelling against the cultural symbol of inequality. Now, kneeling and rambling in front of a pixelated phone screen, I hold onto the last of tradition more desperately than the ones I inherited it from: “This is awkward,” my grandma says, her grimace frozen on the WeChat video call.
On Lunar New Year’s eve, the new moon stalks me back to my dorm. I draw the curtains upon it — I am not ready to spend my first Lunar New Year away from home. At times the very act of living instills impostor syndrome. My mere presence amid the gothic spires of Yale feels transgressive, like a kiss in a cemetery, like flowers blooming from the flared bell of a saxophone, like dumplings eaten with a fork and knife. I am convinced that this was a rupture in the multiverse; I was a unit of moss in my past life and will be plankton in the next.
I embark on a treasure hunt for home — playing Mahjong with strangers, reading DeepSeek’s definition of a life well-lived, grabbing a handful of White Rabbit candy at Prof T’s open-house dinner and saving the wrappers for sentimental value. In the depths of PubMed, I learn that even the act of recalling a memory creates a new one, so now I miss a place that exists solely in my mind. Yet, despite — or perhaps because of — this cultural and temporal dissonance, I feel my past begin to rhyme softly with the present.
This Lunar New Year, I celebrate the confluence of contradictions, change and tradition: laughing at my friends’ silly superstitions before following them religiously; perfecting LeBron’s chalk toss with leftover flour from dumpling-making; declaring “new moon, new me” while trying to “新年快乐” my way back into his life. This Lunar New Year, I build my home out of worn-out words: when the English name for a vegetable dissipates on the tip of my tongue because I never needed translate it; when I warm my hands in my pockets and find a leftover hawthorn roll my mom snuck into the theater over winter break; when I instinctively split my tangerine wedges at the dinner table; when the same 1500-character story that made me cry in class at 9-years-old still does at 19; when I call my middle school friends and am reminded that I may have lost all sense of grammar, syntax and stroke order but not — never — my humor… Chinese becomes barely a language but a frequency of love.
Yet when people ask me what language I dream in, I tell them neither. In my dreams I am mute — communicating through telepathic thought, in streams of consciousness—and it always ends in nightmares. In a seminar on Bilingual Imaginaries — three weeks in and I have yet to find out what that means — I think: How lucky am I to be confined to semantics, to watch my words mutate in strangers’ minds, to speak and be misunderstood. How lucky am I to embody the snake zodiac with my forked tongue, to admit that it has always been easy to cry in Chinese and to curse in English. How lucky am I to be lost in translation between your mind and mine.