Lunar New Year

Started: 2023-02-14 21:33:23

Submitted: 2023-02-15 20:58:12

Visibility: World-readable

Celebrating the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit

This year, for the first time since moving back to California, I got to attend the Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco.

Two years ago the parade was canceled because of a certain global pandemic. Last year (once the vaccine and booster had been rolled out to those willing to take it, and the Omicron Surge was abating) the parade took place, but I spent the weekend in Sacramento. This year I took my family to Chinatown on Saturday afternoon, the 4th of February.

We took the new Central Subway into the new Chinatown station (the first time I rode the Central Subway during regular revenue service; on our last visit the fare gates were open for the "soft opening") and walked around the corner to the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum. The small museum had its ground-floor gallery set up with a small exhibit on Bruce Lee, focusing on his career in film and television, with photographs and artifacts from his life. It was an interesting exhibit, but I felt like I didn't know enough about Bruce Lee in advance to get as much as I should have from the exhibit.

At the far end of the exhibit room was another room with an interesting multimedia mural. The room had a mural of Bruce Lee surrounded by pictures of other people in his life (people who were were mentioned in the exhibits) with a projector showing animations on top of the mural. The animation changed: at various points it highlighted the people connected to Bruce Lee, then animated the connections between them; then the animation rained over the entire mural. I wasn't quite sure what to make of the multimedia display but I did find it fascinating.

In the basement of the museum were tiny dioramas of life in Chinatown, showing apartments and shoe-shine stands and shops and single-room occupancy residential hotels. (Many of the dioramas had tiny Sees Candies boxes on display.)

Then we had seen all of the exhibits in the tiny museum (though we skipped the museum shop, which was down the street in a separate storefront) because the museum was about to close at 16:00.

We walked back through Chinatown, past streets crowded with people; I passed a group of lion dancers preparing for their part in the parade later in the evening. I couldn't help but notice the displays of Chinese flags; many buildings were covered in dozens of flags, most of them from Taiwan, though I did see flags from the People's Republic of China as well. Grant Ave was closed to traffic and crowded with pop-up booths selling snacks and trinkets. People crowded the street and sidewalks, visiting the tiny shops selling souvenirs and restaurants selling boba tea and dim sum.

We turned off Grant Ave and turned down a little alley to find a long line in front of the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. (We visited the fortune cookie factory once before, at the end of 2013.) After waiting in line we stepped into the tiny shop where workers were making fortune cookies by baking discs of batter in a special oven then folding the warm dough on a mold to get the distinctive fortune cookie shape, then setting the warm cookies in a frame to cool.

The shop was packed with fortune cookies for sale in various sizes and with different selections of fortunes, including cookies with fortunes rated for adults only. I bought a box of chocolate-covered fortune cookies and got a bonus handful of unfolded fortune cookies as a bonus.

We still had time before the vegetarian restaurant I had selected would open for dinner, so we wandered past the bleachers set up for the parade on Kearny Street into Portsmouth Square. We ate a fortune cookie each and Julian played in the playground for a few minutes until it started to rain.

We ate supper at Enjoy Vegetarian on Kearny Street, hidden behind the bleachers set up at the very end of the parade route. The place was recommended to me by my colleague Rahul, who gave the recommendation when I posted on Twitter that I still missed The Lotus Garden, a vegetarian restaurant in Chinatown that my father took us to in the 1980s and 1990s. It closed (in 1999, according to the Google search results) but it and its sign live on in Google Maps. Enjoy Vegetarian may never replace The Lotus Garden in my heart, but I did enjoy our vegetarian dinner for Chinese New Year.

We were located at the very end of the 1.3-mile parade route, and I hoped that we would be able to finish eating before the parade reached us, but the parade arrived while we were wrapping up the meal. We emerged onto the sidewalk, behind the bleachers for people who wanted to pay extra for a reserved seat, and started walking up the parade route in hopes of finding somewhere to watch the parade. Every inch of barricade was occupied, some with multiple layers of people. We walked a couple of blocks to Sacramento Street, where the cross street descended a hill down to the parade on Kearny Street. We tried standing on the cross street to look over the heads of the people at the edge of the parade, but this we could only see a small fraction of the parade. Kiesa and I traded holding Julian so he could get a better view, but the experience was marginal at best. We were near the end of the parade route, so I didn't think we could beat the crowds by heading up the route, skirting the edges of Chinatown heading closer to Market Street.

Eventually I gave up on the hill and joined the crowd at the edge of the barricade. I got an ok view of the parade through the crowd; it was somewhat better than standing up the hill. Many of the pictures I took are objectively terrible, but they accurately reflect the experience of trying to watch the parade through the phones and heads of the people ahead of me.

I texted Kiesa, still standing on the hill behind me, and got her to send Julian down so I could pick him up and give him a better view of the parade. This mostly worked, except that Julian is too heavy to hold very well, and holding him kept me from being able to try to take any awkward pictures of the parade between the heads of the people in front of me.

The sky had threatened rain all evening, and had rained on and off as we made our way around the parade route, but presently it started to rain in earnest. Umbrellas came up around me, partially obscuring my view of the parade in front of me, as people who were shorter than me held them right above their own heads. Occasionally an umbrella banged me in the head and I had to move it out of the way. Sometimes the umbrellas were big enough to protect me from the rain, and sometimes they were just big enough to divert rain from their holder onto my own head.

With some effort I was able to process the photos I took so they look like a deliberate artistic choice showing the parade float trundling by in the heavy rain, rather than an objectively terrible picture.

Every time someone around me left the barricade I jostled into their spot, gradually getting closer to the front and the better view. Eventually a group moved away right in front of me right at the barricade, and I dropped Julian into the open space, right in front of a pair of adults who were heading for the spot. "Oh," one of them said, "The kid should have the spot, that makes sense."

I was fascinated to see how many SFUSD elementary schools have lion dance teams in the parade. We also saw a bunch of high school and college marching bands, and a random assortment of floats and entries from random companies, most of them dressing up the Year of the Rabbit in some way.

After watching the parade for an hour I decided it was time to go. (Kiesa and Calvin had already departed, leaving Julian and I at the front row of the parade.) It was still raining, and the forecast suggested it would probably keep raining for the remainder of the parade and then stop. We headed up the parade route on Kearny Street, crossed the parade route at Pine Street, and kept walking towards Market Street. After a couple of blocks the crowds had thinned noticeably; everyone else must have done the same thing we did: take MUNI to Chinatown and then crowd the end of the parade route without realizing we could backtrack four blocks and get a better view.

We left the parade route when the route turned onto Kearny from Post, having looped around Union Square. By this point the rain had picked up even more, and the few people who were standing on the sidewalk looked almost as forlorn as the people who were marching in the parade. Down the street from the parade route I saw a vehicle labeled San Francisco Fire Department mass casualty transport, which looked like a bus filled with stretchers, which is one of those things that I guess I'm glad exists but I hope I never have to use one.

We reached Market Street just as the tail end of the parade was starting on the parade route: the final lion dance, followed by a massive string of firecrackers, and an ambulance for good measure. By this point we were feeling sufficiently bedraggled that Julian gave only a cursory effort at protecting his ears against the noise of the firecrackers.

We ended up taking a different route back to Market Street than Kiesa and Calvin, and we were right on top of Montgomery Station while they were closer to Powell. Julian and I caught BART one stop outbound, then waited on the platform for Kiesa and Calvin to arrive, and then for the next train to Daly City for our drive the rest of the way home.