Neigh a New Year

Four steps on how to be Chinese.

By Willow Bradford

Illustration by Lilah Chen

The elevator is broken and my room is four flights up. Among many white canvases, a flimsy red and gold piece of paper is hastily taped across the elevator buttons on the ground floor of Sulzberger. An outstretched index finger reaches, through papers upon papers, to press up and down buttons, regardless of the cuts and scratches in between. Despite being covered by a poster for a Columbia business summit, that red and gold paper reminds me of the LUNAR frat party x Chinese New Year collab I missed in favor of Times Square ramen. Perhaps the frat party held a laser show of horses dancing across the walls, oblivious to the people trickling in and then quickly out. I push open the stairwell door and begin the four story ascent. Let this be my ode to that beautiful Brooklyn club, abandoned before midnight.

The first flight of stairs: The overlay of indignant voices dims with the close of the stairwell door. The new year feels quiet, too. Despite the Lunar New Year events taking place on campus, from the Student Government Association of Barnard College’s Lunar New Year dinner to Columbia Lion Dance performances, ushering in the new year was a whispered shush from the Butler stacks unfamiliar to the unapologetic exclamations of faith and good luck I grew up with; from snake to horse, no galloping hooves could be heard. 

The overhead light flickers.

The second flight of stairs: Poetry creeps into my mind. A horse neighs. In an excerpt from the poetry anthology What the Rivers Remember, author Harman Kaur pens “they want pieces of my culture in their country but not me.” You grab a dull knife and stab the side of an unripe lemon. The electric kettle by your Green Sale fridge is whistling. You force the knife through the vesicles and against the grain to the opposite side. Tossing the serrated fragment of lemon to the bottom of an old mug, you become Chinese. “They love our culture in fragments, but not the people who carry it every single day.” Trader Joes’ overnight oats are now overhyped so you opt for their soup dumplings instead. “They savor our spices, but what of the hands that carry their scent.” You buy slippers to wear around the dorm because it’s good for the feng shui. You are at such a Chinese time in your life.

I can’t help but wonder what is mine? I know it is not the lemons which have disappeared from every Asian market. What can I put in my tea for me to be Chinese?

The first thing to go were the lemons.

The second thing to go was the people.

The third flight of stairs: If being Chinese went from being so easily associated with the detested origins of COVID to what everyone desperately wanted to be, then could it just as easily go back? Or forward? 

As the floors spiral around me, I imagine a world where everything is Chinese. Beginning in a Connecticut public elementary school, I’d sit down at the peanut-free table at lunch with my best friend and she’d take out chopsticks for her homemade gyoza and no lunch lady would come over from the other side of the room and begin a conversation with her about how interesting her utensils are and how she only uses chopsticks for her cheetos so that the dust doesn’t make her fingers orange. You turn around, and surely enough everyone in the room is using chopsticks too, but there’s a flurry of orange dust in the air as people frantically stab at cheetos, trying in vain to keep their fingers clean from its offensive dust. 

The fourth flight of stairs: I remembered a Chinese New Year celebrated by wearing red and waking up to find hongbao on the counter. The occasion was punctuated by fish, the fish bones I disliked, hand-pulling noodles that cramped my hands, and the most Chinese I had to speak in the whole year. Yet to be disliked is better than to be ignored. Regardless of the traditions we may enjoy or endure, they keep culture alive. By bringing together family and friends to create the longest hand-pulled noodle, you are one step closer to truly becoming Chinese.

Cheeto dust lingers on the tips of your fingers as you reach the landing of the fifth floor. You hear the soft plod of hooves in the distance. You think of missing bags of lemons and orange coated chopsticks and laser light shows. You open the stairwell door and are met by a humongous horse that bites your head off.