02.28 | here's how i started out the year of the dragon

千军易得, 一将难求。 (qiān jūn yì dé, yī jiāng nán qiú) – “It’s easy to find a thousand troops, but hard to find a general."
– A Chinese Proverb

✉️ letter #56

The Lunar New Year festivities officially ended on February 24th, though this year we stretched it juuuust a little bit farther by having a whole parade go through Chinatown on February 25th. That morning, I hosted a dim sum lunch at House of Joy on Pell St with the Young China Watchers group as a final 新年快乐 hurrah.

The dim sum here was fantastic and I don't say that lightly. This was the true banquet hall-style type, where carts roll around loaded with an assortment of goodies, and if you have a specific dim sum staple on your mind, you need to ask when that cart might swing by your way. Standouts were the siu mai, the taro fried pastries, the zhaliang (fried dough inside rice rolls) and the golden custard buns. It's the first place in New York where as I left, I already started planning when I'd be back.

I then took the group to Chatham Square to watch the parade pass in front of the Kimlau War Memorial. Apparently it was everyone else's first time catching the parade - so hey, how fun, I got to expand some New York City horizons. My first parade experience was in 2022, when I first got here. Missing China and Chinese New Year festivities, I went alone to get anointed by confetti and hear some old energetic Cantopop classics blaring out of passing floats.

The protests against a proposed mega-jail in Chinatown back then were on a street corner, an unofficial disruptor to the main parade itself. This time around, they had their own dragon. It made me feel kind of warm and fuzzy inside.

Anyway, that was the end. Here is the beginning. I had quite the itinerary set up for the first few days of the Spring Festival, and so I decided to record it all. In case you're interested in seeing how I celebrated Lunar New Year in 2024...

Watch it here:

🎼 the soundtrack |踏雪 (Tà xuě) - 小末、Fox胡天渝、满杰Babycloth

One of the people at my parade watch party made a passing mention about how it seemed like young people in China weren't that interested in Chinese cultural history... and I responded, "I guess you haven't been back to China recently, huh?"

国风 (guó fēng national wave) as a style had been building for a while within the country in the late-2010s, but it really exploded right after China closed its borders due to the pandemic. Now you can't go on Douyin (China's TikTok) without seeing plenty of the youth reinterpreting 5000 years of culture to fit their own modern lives.

This is one of the more popular guó fēng-style songs now peppering Douyin. I'm not sure if I think it's good per se, as much as I find it interesting because it's indicative of an ongoing trend.

I won't go too deep into the lyrics since it's mostly using Chinese mythology and nature metaphors to push the idea of overcoming adversity, with a little bit of "the cold never bothered me anyway" (凌霜傲雪 língshuāng ào xuě) thrown in.

Hilariously, the song is used equally as much for videos of pretty guys and girls dancing kung fu as it is for videos of people putting out especially explosive car accidents.

🌱 the green light | an eco-focused newsreel

We have very direct evidence for the power of the woods. Following the initial loss of huge numbers of trees in the wake of European settlement in America, the 'warming hole' in the south-east has cooled significantly even as everywhere else warmed up... because it's been reforested in the past century.

Now if only we could figure out how to do that to the areas we've paved over the most and have thus warmed most significantly. [The Guardian]

After decades of improvements in air quality, the U.S. is seeing those gains reverse because of climate change. A new report finds that 1 in 4 people are being choked by wildfire smoke. [Grist]
A rare moss called Takakia has lived for 400 million years on Earth, but now it is not evolving fast enough to survive climate change. [Treehugger]
A new study finds that boiling and then filtering tap water can remove up to 90 percent of microplastics, since we've given up on just not having them in tap water in the first place. [Yale e360]

🪢assorted | food for thought from around the internet

I wanted to focus this section a little more on New York City this time around, and particularly to point out this interesting little tribute from Jacobin to the development of New York's music scene in the 1970s.

I knew that hip hop and American punk came out of New York, but I had no idea that this city was responsible for salsa too, which was birthed in the South Bronx and refined in the Loisaida.

from Time Out NY

Real estate developers and gentrification have now taken away the social conditions that made that vibrancy possible, and as the writer Kurt Hollander states, "Without its working-class neighborhoods to nurture it, New York City music culture has lost its roots in the streets and communities that gave it its rhythms, rhymes, attitude, and raw power... urban musicians must now fend for themselves in the free market of global corporate products and platforms, an increasingly soulless, cityless world where hits come and go so quickly they can barely coalesce into a new genre — let alone a tight, community-based, DIY musical counterculture."

But in a sense, that's less the workings of real estate developers (as much as I'd like to blame them for everything) than it is just how our world has developed in general. The New York Times had a recent op-ed about how all of culture has been flattened and commoditized, how there's not enough time to develop a sub-culture anymore, how teens now change their aesthetic to match a bygone ideal rather than have an ideal create an aesthetic. Did everyone, even "preps" and "old money," get gentrified (e.g. #saltburnismyromanempire)? Is there any walking back from this hyper-paced nothingness without full-scale shutting down the internet?

Yas. The Supreme Court has refused to hear challenges from Long Island City and Manhattan landlords that challenged New York's rent stabilization laws. [Gothamist]
Boo. After a federal court ruled the NYPD's stop-and-frisk practices were unconsitutional, they stopped doing it a lot. Now, the trend is appearing to reverse under Mayor Eric Adams. [Bloomberg CityLab]
Yas. 93-year-old Ruth Gottesman has given a $1 billion donation to NYC's Albert Einstein College, allowing it to go completely tuition-free. She was a former professor there. Her money comes from being the widow of the investment house First Manhattan's David Gottesman, who passed in 2022. [ABC News]
Boo. Flaco the owl, who escaped the Central Park Zoo in February after someone vandalized his cage, has now died after crashing into an apartment building window. There was a 99% Invisible podcast some time ago that went into how collisions with glass kill as many as 1 billion birds a year. This is something we could fix. I hope a celebrity bird like Flaco's death pushes us to fix it. [People]

RIP Flaco | (photographer: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty)

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

So I didn't get a picture of this, but while we were at House of Joy on Sunday, I saw one of the people I follow on TikTok trying to get a table. @ItsKingChris was in Chinatown last weekend - I'm not sure for what reason, I guess I'll find out on my FYP at some point soon.

This is super dorky - he's an anime cosplay guy. But if you didn't know I liked anime, you obviously haven't been reading this section of the newsletter.

Anyway, dude is gigantic online. He's got 19.4 million followers on TikTok and another 6 million on Youtube, and it's all from doing comedy cosplay shorts. If you like ACG and cosplay and internet meme content, and you somehow haven't heard of him, you should check him out.

It's easier for me to embed Youtube here than TikTok, so here you go:

It's not exactly the same as what I see on TikTok all the time, but it gives a good overview as to what his content looks like.

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