Bringing in the New Year by Grace Lin - review

Bringing in the New Year by Grace LinThe bright clear colors and detailed illustrations in this happy picture book for very young kids make it the best Chinese (or Lunar) New Year book I've seen yet. Love Grace Lin, love the beautiful patterned textiles, love the Chinese vocab words.

Our friend Dean, who is Japanese-American, was on some Asian-American Goodwill Committee when he lived in New York. We had made plans to meet him at the New Year's parade, but at the appointed time and place, he was nowhere to be found. We called him on his cellphone and he answered, swearing. Over the sounds of cymbals and (at the time, illegal) firecrackers, he shouted that he was in a 4-man green lion costume, and due to the green lion's low status on the Chinese lion totem pole, they had to either "fight" or pay their respects to every other lion they ran into on the streets, so he was running late. We were totally thrilled, and ran around Chinatown trying to intercept him, but Dean was not. I think those cymbals really got on his nerves.

And I took the above picture in our local Asian super-duper-market, after getting permission from the very nice manager. We bought bulgogi and haiga rice, acorn pudding, pocky, store-made rice cakes, seaweed salad, lemongrass, organic soy sauce, and black rice vinegar. We did not buy durian fruit, red bean pastries, fresh (or canned) lychees, rehydrated sea cucumber, beef tongue, or bai top shells, although we could have.