Year of the Ox

This month, I get to celebrate the start of two new years. Lunar New Year is fast approaching, ushering in the Year of the Ox. Based on the lunar calendar, there are 12 animals to represent the different cycles of the Chinese zodiac. This year happens to be my third cycle since I was born in a Year of the Ox and will be turning 36 years old in June. The Vietnamese call this celebration 'Tet'.

On the Western calendar, the start of the New Year falls on Monday, January 26, 2009 — The Year of the Ox. (If you were born in 1913, 1925, 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985 or 1997 - you were born under the sign of the Ox like me.) Oxen folks are known for their patience and hard work, but we are also known for our stubbornness and our proneness to anger and passionate emotions. From a general description, "The Ox is one of the most patient signs in the Chinese zodiac, but when opposed your fierce temper comes to the fore — and woe to anyone who crosses you!" That fairly describes my personality and low tolerance for toxic people, so I have to accept the good with the bad.

On Tuesday, my dad, stepmom Co Nga, half-sister Diane, the twins and I all went to a Buddhist temple in Seattle as part of our preparations for Tet. This temple happens to house the photos of my deceased mother, aunt, and Co Nga's mother, all of which were brought there for the sake of prayer. It has been just over 12 years since my mom passed, and I realize that we lost her in 1996 right before the last cycle of the Ox in 1997. My aunt passed away from liver cancer a year after. Here we are in 2009, and I myself just lived through the second worst experience of my life (after losing my mom to her own battle with colon cancer). It has been said that when your zodiac cycle approaches, you are expected to have a very bad year, filled with misfortune. It seems counter-intuitive since one would think that your zodiac cycle should bring blessings and good luck. It seems to me that all the bad luck happens in the year before the cycle actually starts. I try not to be superstitious in all things, but my own history provides me with enough evidence to support this theory.

It has been many years since I've been to this temple. I was not exactly brought up as a practicing Buddhist, since my father grew up under the teachings of Buddhism and my mother was raised as a Catholic. The result was that my siblings and I were exposed to some of both, but not well-schooled in either. Therefore, visits to Buddhist temples or Roman Catholic churches never failed to inspire both awe and fascination. Buddhist temples, like churches, are solemn and quiet places of worship, yet unlike churches, your senses are overcome by the bright colors, shining gold sheen of statues, proffered fruit and foods, and intense aroma of burning incense upon entering a temple. We quietly took off our shoes and padded along the hardwood floors toward the altar, on which sat a magnificent golden statue of Buddha. The twins, not knowing anything, spun on their socks on the slippery floor and ran around the altar picking up items of interest like birds after shiny objects. Mortified, we all ran after them to ensure that things were put back in their proper places and that they didn't put anything in their mouths. It's hard to teach 2 year olds about the sanctity of a house of worship.

After lighting our own incense and offering prayers to Buddha, we proceeded to the prayer room where the photos of the dead were displayed. Two full walls lined with wallet-sized photos of many who have passed, about 20 cases of clementine oranges, and a donation box crowded the small anteroom. The twins copied our motions of bowing and praying, thinking it was a game of sorts. We were glad that they were at least behaving appropriately, even if they were just mimicking our movements. I gave them each a dollar to stuff into the donation box, which they did with surprising dutifulness. We then continued downstairs where several Buddhist nuns with shaved heads, dressed in drab grey garments and thin slippers, were busy cooking and wrapping traditional Tet foodstuffs for sale in fragrant banana leaves, plastic wrap and red twine. Although some of the scenes and scents were familiar to me, a part of me felt awkward since all this was not part of recent memory but of remembrances from childhood. A kindly nun approached us to take our order, and Spencer immediately hid behind my legs and said, "Mommy, I scared!" I think a bald head on a feminine figure confused him. Rowan, meantime, managed to get into their kitchen and almost knocked over a well-stacked pyramid of the wrapped cakes. The smells were aromatic and heady, and I suddenly felt a suffusion of cultural pride and belonging, and I was suddenly happy that my twins were here with me, even though they wreaked minor havoc in the temple.

On our way out with our bags of cakes, my stepmom and I stopped to get our fortunes. There was a bamboo canister filled with many thin sticks of bamboo, each of them numbered. One had to pray and then repeatedly shake the canister gently until a single bamboo stick fell out onto the floor. You then pick up the stick, read the number, and proceed to a shelf lined with fortune papers corresponding to your number. All the fortunes were in Vietnamese, some of it archaic, so I had my dad translate mine for me. Eerily, the fortune echoed many of my recent misfortunes but foretold of a better year to come if I was prepared to earn it. It essentially said that the past year has been a bad one and that I must accept the losses and move on. The new year will bring me good fortune in fall and winter, but I must endure some minor difficulties in spring and summer before any gains are realized. Financially and professionally, I will find benefit through hard work. If I have any legal proceedings, I am expected to have a good outcome. It also said that love may find me again, if I choose to embrace it. It said that I must ignore gossip and negative white noise from people who don't matter. Most importantly, it said that if I am suffering from ill health, I will experience a quick and full recovery. But I must exercise patience and extreme magnanimity for these good things to come to pass.

After the bad year last year, I am prepared to be more than patient and magnanimous in order to enjoy the blessings offered to me in the Year of the Ox!