Happy Chinese New Year!! The Year of the Rat

Today is the start of the Chinese New Year which is the Year of the Rat. We just left the Year of the Pig.

It reminds me of several years ago on Chinese New Years we read a newspaper advertisement of a Chinese restaurant in a shopping, at the corner of Highway 92 and Bells Ferry Road*.

The ad said come and celebrate our New Year With Us! What really got our attention was the “buy one dinner and get the other dinner equal or lesser value free” coupon imbedded in the ad.

I imagined us sitting in the Chinese restaurant with China people dancing and blowing streamers and plastic horns, with confetti and merriment all around us with maybe strings of fire crackers exploding at our feet and a three men dragon costume floating around the restaurant – much like a Chinese celebration we stumbled upon in Toronto one time.

We were the only customers there except one unsavory character who came in and had a Coke at the booth and left.

The only merriment was a little Asian kid, just above toddler age who kept silently peeking at us from the door to the kitchen then he ran screaming.

The food was good, for the price… the free one was the best.

A couple of weeks later I read in the paper at the same Chinese restaurant a drug deal went bad and somebody was shot and killed. I wondered if it was the same guy who came in and had a Coke and left.

Recently, we were in that same shopping center looking for a barbecue restaurant we heard about and saw that the Chinese restaurant is still there. They got alone fine without us.

HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR!!!!



*From about 1834 to the early 1900s the corner of Bells Ferry Road and Hwy 92 was infested by my Tyson, Huey, and Hunter kin and Anna’s Tyson and Kuykendall kin.