Happy Lunar New Year
新年快乐, chúc mừng năm mới, and 새해 복 많이 받으세요: Happy East Asian Lunar New Year. Per tradition, I’m posting the nengajō (new year’s card) I made for the Japanese New Year, which also follows the twelve-animal cycle but on the schedule of the Gregorian calendar.
It’s a sober year this year, not just with the continued death and destruction of the pandemic, but with certain issues finally getting attention even though they’ve been going on for months: racist attacks against Asian-American seniors. This new year’s card tradition of mine exists because I grew up with Chinese-American, Japanese-American, Vietnamese-American, Korean-American friends and because I was able to take Japanese in high school. For those of you like me in privileged positions, make sure you’re listening to Asian-American activists, Black activists, Native activists, on how we can make things better. Call it a new year’s resolution.
The design comes from my girlfriend, who’s brought out more of my cynical side. 2021 isn’t going to automatically going to fix the problems of 2020—that’s the whole point of the links above—but it’s okay to take a moment to be glad to see it go.