02.02 | happy year of the tiger
万事开头难 wàn shì kāi tóu nán.
Everything is difficult in the beginning.
– Chinese Proverb
✉️ letter #26
There might be some Chinese saying about how it's bad juju to complain at the start of the New Year but, fam, I am t-i-r-e-d. Turns out trying to supercharge apartment hunting across three very separate areas in a major cosmopolitan city by fitting all of them into three days actually takes a lot out of you.
My step count is pretty nice though. And I've made an offer on a place I actually could see myself living in comfortably, so hopefully that pans out and I don't have to do this all over again later this week.
Anyway, I'm going to jump on the excuse that holidays (even ones not observed by the general public in the USA) are meant for rest, and therefore I should shorten this special New Years version of the newsletter. No linksies or song of the week because between holding down my job and my apartment hunt and trying to be emotionally/physically present for an older relative the last 8 days straight, I have had NO TIME AT ALL to discover & digest new things.
Instead here is some pictures of the New Year's food I treated my aunt to. We'd invited other people to share in the festivities, but there was a major bomb cyclone and they all couldn't make the trek to downtown NYC.
And I explain what these dishes are in this new one where I tried utilizing one of the meme formats that have been floating around Reels:
NGL, scrolling through these short videos makes me feel so old.
By the way, yes that's a still from this video in the New Year's greeting card in the header. It also features a beautiful "tiger in water" image created by one of SupChina's talented illustration people, Alex Santafe.
If you've read the SupChina Red Paper (no time like the present!), you'll notice that tiger as the header image. It's ggrrrrr-eat!
✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun
I low key love the Spring Festival Gala. The most watched TV program in the world (1.3 billion people allegedly watched this time), it's a variety show put on by CCTV each year that features dance, comedy, dramatic skits and kung fu. You can always count on one hilarious-because-it's-so-earnest moment, one WTF controversy, and one bizarre cameo by an unexpected celebrity.
I didn't get a chance to catch it this year, but encouraged my parents to, and the thing they were most impressed with was this:
Painted by a "young genius" in the reign of the last Song Dynasty Emperor Huizhong (1082–1135), it depicts the vastness of a peaceful & prosperous country, an "ideal world with perfect order and harmony according to the Emperor’s will."
Emperor Huizhong was known for being a poet and artist rather than a politician or general. His dynasty was torn apart by the Jin of the North, and his entire harem was captured in 1126. One of his sons managed to escape and later founded the Southern Song Dynasty from Hangzhou, but Huizhong died a captive of the Jin.
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