Some Notes on a Chinese New Year’s Festival in Miami
Chinese New Year’s festivals never seem to be on the actual weekend of the Lunar New Year, and I just assume that it’s because it’s supposed to be spent with family. It’s probably the reason why I’ve always been all “whatever” about the holiday.
I mean, it’s not like I ever got the day off from school. It usually meant a dinner when my mom would make a big plate of food and put out a bowl full of tangerines,because they were lucky or something, and then my parents would start screaming at each other, for whatever reason. That would be the cue for my sister and I to drive to San Francisco to watch the annual Chinese New Year’s parade. Februarys in San Francisco meant that it would be a cold, drizzly night, and the smoke from the firecrackers would rise from the ground like steam.
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself jumping in a car and traveling about forty minutes to West Kendall for Miami’s 25th Annual Chinese New Years Celebration, held on the courtyard of a junior college.Maybe it was the need to feel something familiar, having previously been from a city where one out of every five people was Asian.
Anyway, here are my observations.
On the welcoming inflatable dragons
I knew we were at the right place because of the giant inflatable gate wishing me a happy Chinese New Year. I’m pretty sure this is the same material they use to make bouncy houses and the wacky wavy arm men they use to promote used car sales. (There actually was a bouncy house inside, so maybe it was a two-for-one at the inflatable rental company.)
On the entertainment
The entertainment line-up featured a series of performances that started off with the one wushu group in Miami giving the world’s most awkward dragon dance: a bunch of Cubans running in a circle off-stage, the dragon looking more like a sluggish, ethnic camel with twenty humps. This was immediately followed by a seven year old Chinese girl, running around the stage, kicking and flailing her aluminum foil sword.
“Tiger mother wouldn’t approve of this,” I whispered to my boyfriend.
“Shut up,” he muttered to his teeth. “Do you want us kicked out of here?”
There were Chinese jar jugglers and plate spinners and Mongolian contortion artists. (I really wanted to correct the emcee when she remarked that she was from Mongolia, “a small province in China,” but then I would have been that guy, so I just bit my lower lip really hard.) They had an Asian student group from FIU do a hip-hop routine, with the prerequisite nod to Gangnam Style, followed by the Taiko drummers that perform daily at the Japanese pavilion at Epcot.
The final presentation ended with a showcase of ethnic Chinese minorities from the Confucius Society, where ten foreign exchange students marched on stage and formed little formations to the patriotic song “Ai wo zhong hua,” or “Love My Motherland China.” It’s the equivalent to a class of fifth graders dressing up to extinct Native American tribes doing a choreographed dance to “God Bless the USA,” and the costumes were constructed from actual US flags. Everyone clapped politely after the eight minute performance and wondered if they would hand out pamphlets about how awful the Falun Gong was immediately, or on their way to the exits.
On the Confucius Institute
It turns out that the Confucius Institute is also co-sponsor for the event, which is essentially an organization that sends educators from mainland China to set up clubs at learning institutions around the world to “promote Chinese culture,” which according to the institute consists of simplified Chinese and music and movies that don’t contain the search terms “Tibet,” “Taiwan,” or “democracy.” Given that it’s Miami, I’m surprised that there wasn’t a line of elderly Cubans sitting on the ground linking arms in protest. But when I walked by the booth, the man was nice and said hello, and I felt a little bad because he was in more of a foreigner in a foreign land than I was.
On the food
There were two food vendors booths from Taiwan, and I was initially totally stocked about this because it’s been forever and a day that I got some legit red-cooked pork belly or some deep fried fish balls or octopus. Until I realized it was a Taiwanese Buddhist organization, which meant that all the food was vegetarian and they asked my boyfriend if he would like some onion pancakes, and he laughed in their non-meat eating faces. There were also booths for cinnamon owners and Argentinian food, which I only assumed existed as stand-bys, in case everyone attending couldn’t handle Asians and had culinary freak-outs. It turns out the folks at the Jamaica Kitchen food booth are Chinese-Jamaican, and that’s what we ended up with, and it turns out that their pork and ham choy dish is actually really good. I wonder if Mom considers eating curry oxtail lucky.
On Chinese Jamaicans
Actually, there were a lot of Chinese Jamaicans at the event, and I think we accidentally stumbled on the events where all the Chinese Jamaicans see each other, socialize, do what Chinese Jamaicans do like, uh, excel in math or smoke marijuana or pirate Cool Runnings DVDs.
Admittedly, I am ignorant of many things about Chinese Jamaicans.
But cut me some slack, because there are not a lot of Chinese Jamaicans in California, so it throws me off to see someone that looks like my elderly widowed next door neighbor in San Francisco, Mrs. Chen, except then, she turns to me and calls me a bumbaclot, and you think to yourself, “oh, that’s nice of her. I should go home and Google that term to find out what that means.”
As I was buying my curry goat, another woman - Chinese looking, just like me - ran up to one of the woman serving food at the booth.
“Where is the roti?” The Chinese woman asked in an Caribbean accent.
“What are you talking about,” the other Chinese woman replied, in a Jamaican accent.
“I am from Trinidad,” she said. “There is not a goddamned place to have roti around here.”
And as the two Chinese women - and yes, they did look alike, because fuck it, stereotypes for everyone - got into a heated argument about why a Chinese New Years event would or would not have roti, I asked my boyfriend if my Scottish accent was any good, because then I could go up to the both of them, flip over their table, and demand haggis. It would be like Braveheart, or at least, what I would assume Braveheart would be like since I’ve never actually seen the movie. But he said my Scot accent sounds like my Filipino accent, and my German accent, and my Chinese accent and, seriously Ernie, don’t even bother.
On being a hater
On the one hand,I feel bad being a hater, but I get it now. Walking around the booths beforehand we found a table from the U.S. Census, where a giant infographic told us that Miami-Dade county might be the most populated area in Florida, but there are twice as many Asians twenty minutes north, in Fort Lauderdale and the surrounding areas. Person for person, there were more Asians in Orlando, Broward County, in Tampa & St. Petersburg, than Miami. It’s why there’s no Chinatown here, it’s why I walk on Washington Avenue, two blocks away, and shopkeepers still hand me pamphlets on day trips to Disneyworld, even though I’ve lived here for a year already. There it was, all in tabular data staring back at me.
And we jumped in a car and traveled 45 minutes because I was looking for something familiar, but instead, I was surrounded by sights and sounds even more foreign. But you work with what you’re dealt with, and you either work to change a situation or you accept it for what it is - a smaller community with good intentions. And at least the experiences aren’t boring.
All of this said: did that girl in the back of a dragon dance eat a fucking Snickers bar? Someone really needs to tell the sifu.
