TADIOTO

I wrote the following last year – and I hope it’s still able to stand up.  More soon though, for this year.

Hello, Happy New Year.
Happy year of the Pig indeed.
We colonized peoples of Asia have been using the Western Christian calendar for a long time–but what with globalization, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, diversity celebrations… let’s turn the table around and have the non-Asians among you enjoy our new year.
Call it lunar, call it pig or boar, it’s really no different from the western new year.
Yes, shopping malls here have been busy, and things went on sale a few months back. Here in Hanoi, the new year is called Tet, and it’s been driving me crazy.  Every morning, 400 buses, 800 taxis, and about a million twelve hundred and 65 people on motorcycles have been trying to cut me off, run me over, collide with me, kill me with fumes, and burst my ears open.  And that’s before 8 am.  Everybody’s gotta get out, shop, see people, make money.
I tried to stay away from it all, but after more than 30 years of living abroad, I’ve just moved back to Viet Nam—why not get into the spirit?  So I broke down and spent twelve dollars–or 350 thousand Vietnamese “dong,” for a branch of peach blossom, some green bananas and joss sticks, and two traditional rice cakes.
I also bought a miniature orange tree, or kum quat, for four dollars, and paid the guy three times the normal rate to bring it home for me on his motorcycle.
I actually forgot to buy anything for the ceremony last week when we were supposed to feed the Kitchen God before he went to heaven to report on what happened last year, the year of the dog.  Feeding him would’ve ensured he’d tell Heaven good stuff about our family–but that’s like a bribe, and that’s illegal here.  The government tells me I could go to jail for doing that, although I do it all the time.
In three months here, the traffic cops have caught me speeding or running the red lights a few times.  Each time, we go through the rigamarole of them writing me a ticket, and me handing them three bucks, and I still don’t have a driver’s license.  The woman who sold me my motorcycle told me I didn’t need one. The bike’s still not registered.  That’s another bribe.  
I really should have made an offering to the Kitchen God.  It wouldn’t do for Heaven to hear about these things.  Me, bad.  But this year, I’ve an excuse.  Kitchen Gods apparently like to chow down a boiled chicken before heading off to Heaven.  But thousands of birds have been sick and thousands more have died here.  Bird flu. The government tells me the epidemic is contained.  I believe the government.  I’ve been eating chicken. No one I know here has been afraid.  Kitchen Gods though, may not like to eat a sick bird.
So I’ve left America and moved back to Asia, and now I behave just like a local dude.  I run red lights and eat chicken, and I bribe people.  Ah, when in Rome…  Next, I’ll start to believe in fortune tellers. 
Last year was supposed to be a bad year for me: I was born in the year of the dog.

All kinds of stuff are supposed to happen to you when your year comes around.  But it hasn’t been too bad.  Maybe stuff will happen in the year of the boar.  But I don’t need to be in Asia to know that.  I don’t need fortune tellers to tell me in advance.  Earthquakes will happen, in Taiwan, or in Indonesia.  Presidential campaigns will happen in America and be full of empty rhetoric and fighting words.  Congress will keep arguing about a million things and solve nothing much.  Cops will take bribe here where I live, and the government will say there’s freedom of religion, and no press censorship.  The prime minister will travel to the Vatican while monks will stay in jail, Aung San Suu Ky will still be under house arrest in Burma, and the Dalai Lama will go to Atlanta instead of Tibet.  Call it the new Christian year, or the lunar new year, call it the year of the pig or the year of the boar, wars will go on in Africa, and in the Middle East.  And people will die.