I. The New Year Eats the Old One

Every spring, the new year came down from the mountains to eat the old one. The new year lived in a cave there, and it had round, red-rimmed eyes that rolled in their sockets when it was angry and it had a mouth full of sharp teeth that stank of rotted meat and blood and it had red scales all over its body, tough as armor. Most of the time, the new year slept in its cave. But at the beginning of spring, when the snow had all melted and the plum blossoms were beginning to bud on the branches and people were starting to feel happy again, that’s when it would wake up and come down from its cave to the little village that lay at the foot of the mountains. It would eat all of the winter crops that the villagers had painstakingly cultivated. It would sneak into the barns and eat their livestock, gobbling up whole chickens and pigs in one go, leaving nothing but feathers and bones. It would devour their stores of grain and salted meat and pickled vegetables, leaving nothing for the villagers to eat for the rest of the year. The villagers called it Nian, the new year monster.

And one especially terrible year, after the Nian had eaten everything that was possible to eat in the village, it ate a child. The child’s mother had gone into the forest to forage for wild mushrooms and herbs, leaving it in the care of its grandfather who, distracted by the loss of his crops, had allowed it to wander outside right into the path of the Nian. By the time the child’s mother returned, the Nian had come and gone and all that the regretful villagers had to offer her was a scrap of bloodstained cotton from her child’s jacket.

That night, the villagers gathered in the house of the village headman. Now that it has tasted human flesh we must kill the beast, one of them said. We have no choice. But how, another spoke up, its scales are impenetrable to blades and arrows. And we cannot even draw close enough to kill it, said another. What about when it is hibernating, said one. It is perhaps vulnerable then. No, replied the first man. One of the men from the next village over tried that. He said the Nian awoke as soon as he stepped into its cave. It has a keen sense of smell.

The village headman spoke, finally. We cannot kill it, but perhaps we can find a way to scare it off. Perhaps we can teach it a lesson.

But how do you scare a monster? The villagers all thought about this long and hard, until one woman, looking around the hut, spied a small doll in the corner, where the daughter of the village head had left it. The little girl had taken strands from her own braid to make a tiny hairdo for her doll, and she had embroidered small black eyes like her own on the doll’s face and given the beloved toy rosy, wind-chapped cheeks just like she had.

We could make another monster, the woman said slowly, an idea forming in her mind. A monster that would look just like the Nian, only bigger and more frightening. She picked up the little doll and smoothed back its hair, remembering the child who had been eaten. The woman was also a mother, although her children were grown now. But once upon a time, like the village headman’s child, and the dead child, they too had made little dolls in their own likenesses. If we cannot kill the monster, we will make one in its own image to frighten it off, she said.

And so the next day, the villagers got to work. They cut down slim branches of bamboo and split them to make the frame of the monster’s head. They covered the frame with red cloth cut in the shape of the creature’s scales. Using paper scraps, they created the beast’s huge, rolling eyes. They coated triangular pieces of rough cloth with white starch to mimic its sharp teeth. They covered the massive frame of its body with yards of fringe made of goat fur dyed black and hung it all over with brass bells that shone golden in the sunlight. They attached a long, sharp horn to the front of its face, just like the real Nian.

When it was almost complete, the villagers stood back and surveyed their work. The beast that lay on the floor of the barn was somehow bigger than they expected it to be. It looked very much like the Nian and for a moment the villagers wondered if they had made a mistake. They circled it warily. In trying to create the monster’s enemy, had they instead made another monster?

None of them noticed when a woman slipped quietly into the barn and went up to the puppet-beast. Only when she reached out to stroke the black fur did they startle. It was the mother of the slain child. The villagers looked uneasily at each other. They did not know how the woman would react or how she would interpret what they had done. And so they each held their breath and waited.

The woman ran her hands over the red scales, lacquered with starch so that they were hard and shimmering. She stroked the fur and touched one of the golden bells and it tinkled gently. Then she lifted one of the puppet’s heavy, fringed eyelids. The white eyeball within was blank and still. She turned around and quietly asked for some paint. Then, brush in hand, she gathered her strength and painted in the beast’s eyes, first one, then the other.

The creature staggered slowly to its feet. It shook its shaggy head from side to side as if it were waking from a dream. It fluttered its eyelids several times and dipped its heavy head in a cat-like manner. The villagers gasped in fear but the woman who had lost her child only stood silently in front of the beast, waiting. It turned to her, a creature of red and gold, and regarded her for a long moment. Then, finally, it sank on its front legs to its knees, in a long and deep bow. The woman nodded and held out her hand. The beast stood and came forward and nudged her fingers with its enormous head. Yes, it seemed to say. I will do it for you. No longer will the new year monster torment you with its hunger and its anger, for I will be the new year for you. And I will laugh and play and bring you prosperity and scare away all your demons, yours and your children’s. I will dance into the future for you, for you have made me in the likeness of your hope.

II. What Ah Kui Saw

In his letters home, Ah Kui does not tell his wife how cold the nights are or how dank the cramped stone hut becomes with the nighttime exhalations of so many men. He does not tell her how frightened he is of the white men, how he is frightened even of their women and their children. He does not tell her that he has cut his hair off because when one of the other men in the hut died, he laid claim to the man’s bedroll and caught head lice. In this rough land, with its freezing water and so little time that is not spent laboring, it is difficult to keep clean. He does not tell her that for months on end he has had nothing to eat but rice and salted vegetables and that he misses her cooking more than he can say. He is no good at cooking, none of the men are. He does not tell her that the tears have settled like a tight fist in his chest that he knows will never unknot. He does not tell her: Did you know that homesickness so closely resembles fear.

Instead, he writes to her about the streams of snowmelt that come rushing down to the valley, cold and clear. He tells her about how the mountains rise up all around the settlement, jade green and white-capped, and how they remind him of the mountains back home. He tells her how in this strange land, even the seasons are reversed and when she is bringing out her winter jacket, he is shedding his. He tells her that the land seems rich and promising, that it is wild and foreign but very beautiful. He wishes she could see it but would rather return to her than have her come to him. It is true that he and the other men are only picking up after the white men, working land that has already been mined, but there is gold still left for them. There were people here before the white men, he tells his wife. They called the land the long white cloud.

He writes to her about a vision that he has had, a waking dream. He knows she is the kind of woman who can interpret such things, who believes in signs and portents, but this one he could interpret even for himself. It had happened in the spring, on the second or third day of the lunar new year. He had been washing himself beside the stream that ran next to their camp. It was a strange thing, he tells his wife, but in his dream he had still worn his queue and it hung heavy down his back, straightening his spine and lifting his head.

Across the stream, the brush was dense, uncleared. As he sluiced the freezing water down his arms, washing off the sweat and grime, he thought he saw a glimpse of something big moving through the low trees. He froze instinctively, although he knew that this wild land harbored no large predators. And then—he could hardly believe—a lion stepped out of the bush. It stood at the height of a tall man and had crimson scales all over its body. It fluttered its long eyelashes at him, almost flirtatiously, dropping them over its rolling eyeballs. The lion kicked its massive feet out and then sat down by the creek and dipped its head. Ah Kui saw its pink tongue unfurling from its mouth of sharp teeth and the big cat lapped thirstily at the cold, rushing water. He sat there by the banks of the creek, across from the lion, for how long he could not say, perhaps moments, perhaps hours. The lion stood up, finally, then dipped its head at Ah Kui, acknowledging his presence. Ah Kui sank to his knees and bowed deeply. When he looked up again, the lion had vanished and there was nothing left of its presence but a shiver in the bushes.

Ah Kui never tells anyone but his wife about the lion. He thinks he knows what it means. His fortunes, good and bad, will be bound to this soil. For him, there will be no return to the warmth and sticky humidity, to village and hearth and home and his people. The red and gold lion had come to tell him that the land of the long white cloud would be his burial place and whatever descendants he might have would also live and die away from home. He had changed the destiny of his entire line.

III. The Head of the Lion Is My Cousin

Brenda Chan had two dimples that flashed in the corners of her cheeks when she laughed and her hands were hot and soft, almost meltingly so, when I held them as I often did that winter and spring of 1951, when we were both sophomores in high school and secretly dating. Our parents knew each other from church and would not have approved.

We ran lightly down the street, her hand in mine, the sounds of drums and cymbals filling the chilly air. Above us, the second- and third-floor balconies of the shop buildings were lined with elderly people and young children, too frail or too small to brave the crowds thronging the streets. Everywhere we looked we saw red paper wall hangings and decorations, paper lanterns. Pink confetti littered the ground—the detritus of spent firecrackers, long ropes of which still hung in many shop entrances, waiting to be lit. There was a smell of gunpowder and smoke.

“Are we late?” Brenda asked. We had stopped running because the crowd had thickened to a standstill.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “The head of the lion is my cousin. He promised he wouldn’t start until we got here.” I spied an opening amongst the people and pushed through the sea of heavy padded jackets and wool overcoats. I pulled Brenda with me, still holding her hand.

Finally, we burst through, laughing and gasping a little in the cold. I spotted my cousin and waved. He came over, smiling. “You finally made it!”

“Aren’t you freezing?” I asked him. Gus was wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt and thin cotton shoes. His loose red trousers were trimmed with black fur. He was my mother’s brother’s son and had started college last year. He was my favourite cousin.

“Nah, the lion doesn’t get cold,” he said, striking a Popeye pose and laughing. He was taller than I was by half a head and well-built from all the hours of practice. He dropped the pose and glanced at Brenda. I saw his eyes widen a little as he did a subtle double take.

“Gus, this is Brenda. Brenda, this is my cousin.” Brenda smiled at him, dimples flashing. Gus laughed again and clutched his heart in mock pain. “That’s a lethal smile you got there, Brenda.” Then he turned to me, suddenly serious. “We’re starting here at Wing Hong Market and then moving down the street. There’ll be six stops in all. Sifu says to make sure you get at least five shots in each place.”

I held up my camera, the reason we were there. “Sure thing,” I said. I was the photographer for my school paper and Gus had asked me to come today to take photos of the lion dance. The master of the association was apparently pushing for some sort of big campaign and wanted some photos to jazz up his promotional materials.

“Brenda, it was great to finally meet you,” Gus said. The words were ordinary but he held her gaze for a moment. He just looked at her. Brenda dropped my hand and reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears and fiddle with her earring, something she did when she felt nervous.

Something passed in the air then, between the three of us. I suddenly thought that Brenda had not taken her eyes off Gus, not for a single minute since we had gotten there. Her eyes trailed him still when he turned and shouldered his way back into the crowd.

She didn’t take my hand again like I thought she would, so I didn’t either. We stood side by side, buffeted by the people, until we heard the drums begin, reverberating from the ground up, and above the tide of the crowd the lion rose, its head proud and defiant, ready to harvest the riches of the day.

Years later, I would bump into Brenda at a conference in Montreal. By then, Gus would be dead, fallen somewhere in Vietnam, and I would have long forgiven him for what transpired that spring and summer between him and Brenda. Over drinks that night, I would look across the table at those dimples, familiar even after all these years, and ask her, do you remember that day we went to the city? It was Lunar New Year and I took you to see my cousin perform the lion dance. Brenda would lift her wine glass, gold wedding band glimmering on her hand, and take a thoughtful sip. She would take her time in replying. Yes, she would say, finally. Did you see it, I would say and she would know instantly what I was referring to. She would lift her eyes to me and I would think about how the sadness of former lovers is not that they become strangers again to you but that they will always be people you used to know.

Had she seen it? She didn’t know. But it had been there, the red and gold lion with the trim of black fur, that had come dancing in between the parade floats and the lion dance troupes, gamboling as playfully as any kitten. It had rolled its enormous eyes and fluttered its eyelashes and frowned a little at the papier-mâché and silk iterations of itself. Who are these upstarts, it seemed to say, kicking its legs and shaking its head.

For a moment it had turned to me and before I could lift the camera and click the shutter, it leaped in the air, over all of New York City’s Chinatown. Here I am, it seemed to say. I am real.

IV. Vast Sky and Boundless Sea

He sits in a bright classroom and sees only a dark day. All around him are the strangers that are his classmates. At the front of the room, the teacher is explaining something but he is distracted, unable to pay attention, aware of a pair of eyes observing him from across the desks. Under his own desk, his hands fidget with a small envelope made of shiny red and gold paper. It is an ang pow, for good luck in the new year, his mother said as she pressed it into his hands this morning before he left for school. She gives him one every year. This morning it contained a single twenty-dollar note. The note is gone now.

A red packet given to him on the first day of Chinese New Year—it is nothing new to him, a tradition he has already, at eight, begun to take for granted as part of his life’s background, one made up of his culture, his history and his family. His mother begins collecting them in the weeks leading up to the festival, getting them for free from banks or grocery stores eager for a bit of cheap advertising. And then a few days before the big day, she will beckon to him. “Come, help Mummy stuff ang pow.” And, dutifully, he will clamber up her bed and perch on the soft blanket and one by one they will open up the little red envelopes and slip a paper note of money inside. Two ringgit, five ringgit, ten ringgit—the amounts vary. One did not give one’s nephew the same ang pow one gave one’s son. Early on, he learned that there was a secret hierarchy in that stack of ang pow nestled in his mother’s handbag every Chinese New Year. And at the very top of the hierarchy was him. His was the biggest packet, figuratively, in the yearly stack she put together. Well—his and his older brother’s.

Money is not love, he knows. And every year, he opens the packet, slips out the fifty ringgit note and hands it back to his mother without a thought. She puts it in a special bank account for him. He doesn’t mind. The money is not the point of the ang pow. The point of the ang pow is the clean, dry, soft feel of his mother’s hair as she hugs him close on the first day, when she wishes him “Gong Xi Fa Cai, son” and presses the red packet into his hand. It is the way his father’s eyes light up at the sight of his two sons dressed head to toe in new clothes. The point of the red packets is all the goodwill his parents put into them every year. At eight, he understands already that goodwill is precious. Love is a given—parents loved you, that was their job. Even grandparents, you had the right to expect love from. But goodwill—someone wishing you to have all that was good in the world—that was not a given.

He finally lifts his eyes to meet the cold blue ones three desks over. The owner of the eyes is a boy named Luke, leader of a group of boys who are the reason all his days in school are dark. They are both eight years old. They have both only vague ideas of what racism means but someday they will know only too well. Someday, both of them will feel shame, but each for very different reasons. Luke glances at the teacher, who is writing something on the board. After making sure the teacher is occupied, he turns back to the boy and holds up a twenty-dollar note, the owlish face of Mary Reibey a tiny oval in an orange-red field. Luke waves it at the boy like a red flag, except that the boy is no bull. Luke grins a mocking grin, one he learned somewhere, from some adult. This is, after all, the Australia of Pauline Hanson.

Twenty Australian dollars is not the same as fifty Malaysian ringgit, the boy knows now. He has yet to grasp the idea of conversion rates but this morning he learned that even though twenty dollars is less than fifty ringgit, it costs more. His older brother, only fifteen, but already with a smouldering rage curled inside him, drew out the note this morning at breakfast and smirked. Their parents had gone upstairs to get ready for work, for in this country there is no public holiday for Chinese New Year.

They have only been here for half a year and already his brother sounds like a stranger, his vowels strangely distorted, his sentences straightened out. Back home in Malaysia, they shared a room and sometimes, at night, when they were meant to be asleep, his brother would turn the radio on, the volume low, and they would listen to Cantopop, his brother explaining to him about this and that band. His brother’s favourite had been a group from Hong Kong, whose signature song spoke of a vast sky and sea, and freedom that knew no bounds.

Here in this new home, small as it is, they each have their own bedroom and, even though they share a wall, he has never heard his brother play his favourite song. His brother is learning to be a stranger—wilfully turning himself into a stranger, in fact. It is all deliberate—new hair, new clothes, new accent, new friends. New songs.

The boy tears his eyes away from Luke and glances up at the clock that hangs above the board. There are hours left in the day. He wishes he could go home right now to his grandmother, the one life raft in this new ocean. She is sick in bed with a summer cold.

He folds and unfolds the little red and gold envelope, thinking about his grandmother. He is not worried about her—she is an unusually hale old woman who is constantly reassuring him of her strength. At night, they play snakes and ladders in her room and she never lets him win unless he earns it. As they play she tells him stories of when she was a young woman and had fifteen mouths to feed, how she worked all manner of jobs. She has been a maid in a big house, a dulang washer in the tin mines, taken in people’s laundry, raised chickens and pigs on scraps of nothing to feed her children. Sometimes, she tells him stories of the old country that she herself has never seen, stories her mother told her, who in turn heard them from her own mother, of mountain villages and monster-fighting lions made of paper.

His fingers fly underneath his desk, folding and folding. The clock ticks faster and faster, counting down to the end of the day, yes, but before that there is recess to get through. There is Luke, and his group of boys, to get through. In order to go home and see his grandmother every day, he must withstand their words, their clumsy blows and attempts at punches—for they are not very skilled yet, although they will be. At eight, they are alarming. At eighteen, they will be dangerous.

He bows his head and suddenly, frighteningly, he feels like crying. He tries to will it away, blinks furiously before Luke and the rest of the boys can see. The morning comes back to him, a whispered conversation overheard when he went upstairs to retrieve his schoolbag. “How much you give the boys?” his father’s voice. “Twenty.” His mother’s voice. “Ringgit or dollars?” There is silence. “Dollars.” “Twenty dollars? Each? You siao ah?” He has never heard his father say that word to his mother. He stands stock-still at the top of the stairs, hidden from their view by the half-closed bedroom door. “Siao what siao? Don’t think I don’t know you gave your mother one hundred.” This time it is his father’s turn to fall silent. Then his mother speaks in a voice colder than any he has ever heard her use: “I want to give money to my boys, is none of your business. I took it out of the allowance you gave me anyway.”

The boy creeps silently to his room and picks up his school bag, retreating back to the kitchen as quickly as he can. Minutes later, his parents come down the stairs and act completely normal. His mother drives him and his brother to school, wishes them a good day. But the boy knows better. Calamity has fallen upon his household and he does not know what to do. It does not occur to him that it is not his job to know what to do.

Tears are blurring his eyes now and he clutches the red-gold thing he has made so tightly that the edge of it digs into his palm like a claw. He’s struggling for breath and his chest feels strange, like there’s a thick fog filling it, choking his heart. The room is going dark.

Then out of the corner of his eye, he sees it. A flash of red and gold, and then the lion is gamboling into the room, tiny bells chiming in the dark. The boy sits utterly still as the lion huffs white streams of air at the teacher, still scribbling on the board. The teacher does not notice. None of the other students seem to notice anything unusual. The lion cocks its head and shuffles its feet. It dances down the aisle towards the boy, fluttering its eyelashes, the enormous horn on its head threatening to scatter pencils from desks. But nothing falls, no one cries out at the impossible creature playing in their classroom.

For that is what it is doing. The lion dances and plays around the boy, kicking its legs in the air for the sheer joy of it. The boy feels his breath return, feels the fog retreat. The lion is happy. The boy has forgotten what that looks like, feels like. It has been a long time since the people around him were happy.

At Luke’s desk, the lion pauses. While the teacher’s back has been turned, Luke has been riffling through a stack of cash, for the boy is not his only victim. The lion huffs angrily and arches its back, every line of its armoured body speaking of disapproval. It crouches on its hind legs like a large cat and then, all of a sudden, it opens its mouth wide and springs upon Luke, swallowing him whole.

The boy startles in his seat and stares and squeezes his eyes shut in horror. He expects to hear cries of fright but when he opens them again he sees Luke sitting in his seat, unharmed but looking dazed. The cash has scattered all over the floor and the teacher is turning now, her eyes widening at the sight of the multicoloured pieces of paper at Luke’s feet, a frown forming as suspicion begins to grow, for no child of eight is sent to school with three hundred dollars in cash.

The lion dances its way out the door and the boy watches it go. He looks down at his hands and in his palm he cradles a tiny, perfect lion, made of red and gold paper.

Tonight he will tell his grandmother about what he saw. He knows she will believe him. The lion is real, he will tell her. Of course it’s real, she will say. Ah Por where got bluff you. She will praise him even as she beats him ruthlessly at snakes and ladders. You so clever hor, she will say. Here also you can see the lion.

V. Bringing the Lion Inside

Once upon a time, a woman brought her foreign husband home for Chinese New Year. Before they left, she told him: White people talk a good game about Christmas, but I would like to see any one of them beat the pomp and psychodrama that is the Malaysian Chinese New Year. What do you mean, her husband asked. He was tall and blonde and milk-fed, a stereotype she had stumbled upon in the white wastes of the Midwest and taken home with her. Oh, you’ll see, she said. But in truth, like so many things, she just couldn’t be bothered anymore to explain it to him.

There was the aunt who stole tins of festive cookies to hide in her bedroom (her husband would be puzzled—is that such a big deal, he would ask). There was the cousin who caused an uproar one year when a whole package of king tiger prawns went missing and were discovered in her purse (Midwest Husband would say that surely there was some childhood scarcity there which explained her behaviour and that we should be sympathetic to those who are still processing their trauma). There was the daughter-in-law who went around adding vinegar to other people’s dishes when there was a potluck dinner, just so her own contribution would stand out as tasting the best (Midwest Husband: Lots of people say that a splash of acid brightens up any dish), the cousin who showed up every year with a new man on her arm, the other cousin whose baby had arrived suspiciously early, yet another cousin who had been married for almost half a decade and showed no signs of producing any baby at all, thus incurring both gossip and disapproval (Midwest Husband, primly: I don’t hold much with gossip). There were all the hidden losses and tragedies, the unspoken secrets, the intricate web that held the family in place. Every family was a microcosm of history and it was all kept in check by the sacred reunion dinner. Hmmm, was all the Midwest Husband said.

Still, the woman found that she enjoyed showing her husband all the places of her childhood. They had gotten married during the pandemic and she had not been home for four years. She watched as he sat at roadside stalls and attempted to order fried noodles in atrocious Cantonese. She took him to Village Park for nasi lemak and Brickfields for banana leaf rice and Ampang for yong tau foo. Under a plastic tarp, she watched him taste his first durian and laughed at the revulsion on his face. They were expensive fruits now, durians, but she remembered still when they were kampung fruits, and for every five durians her father brought home, at least one would be infested with fat worms. Now, every single durian you paid for was guaranteed for taste and quality. Her family never ate anything lesser-grade than D24.

She took him to Batu Caves to see Murugan’s statue and she took him up the towers to see the city laid out in a heat haze. She took him to rooftop bars and upscale clubs and hipster cafes, but when he asked to see a lion dance, she paused.

When she was a girl, she told Midwest Husband, all you had to do was wake up on Chinese New Year Eve and listen. You cocked your ear and listened for the sound of rhythmic drums in the distance. Soon enough, someone—an older cousin, a young uncle, someone with a vehicle and some free time—would say come, we go find the lion dance. And all of you would pile into the car or the pickup truck or clamber on to motorcycles or whatever it was and off you would go. You would find the troupe—they’d be a simple one, a small-town troupe with just a lion or two, more likely than not a little tattered and faded. The black or red trim on the lions would be falling out, the paint in need of a touch-up. There would be no poles, no fancy and risky moves to make the crowd gasp. But there was magic in those childhood lions that was never to be found again.

In the end, she took him to a mall. She looked up lion dance performances online and drove him to the biggest one, in the biggest mall.

The performance was magnificent. The two lions flipped and somersaulted on poles that rose six meters above the ground. She leaned into Midwest Husband and whispered, you know, we invented that, Malaysians. What, the lion dance? he said. No, the high pole lion dance. We’re the ones who took the lion into the air, made it fly, she said. Midwest Husband was very impressed, standing there drinking an iced bubble tea, his blue eyes tracking the movements of the lions.

But she looked around and something felt wrong, off. What was it? The crowd was appreciative, filled with young children gasping in awe exactly the way she used to.

Suddenly, she was crying and Midwest Husband was holding her, concerned. People were staring. Hey, he said. Hey, what’s wrong. She didn’t know but eventually she said: I left. I left home. He held her close and she didn’t push him away, even though that kind of behaviour was not acceptable where they were.

How do you explain what it means to be a part of a diaspora, the kind that’s so far gone it doesn’t even know that it is diaspora. To have culture handed down to you in fragments, and that, too, distorted by intervening generations and oceans. Once, we chased the lion across the village and now we chase it from mall to mall. What does it mean? When did we bring the lion inside? Five hundred, a thousand years from now, where will the lion dance? I want to know that something I love so much will not die, even if I will.

That was the year, the one after the pandemic was over, when it seemed like old habits had finally broken down and we all admitted that some traditions were no longer worth upholding and, finally, that hometowns were a mutable concept. Why struggle against the traffic, the timed restaurant seatings, the endless, boring hills that surrounded our town? Why bother inviting the lion dance troupe this year when every year it got more expensive, and last year the aunt who usually prepared the offerings, who bought the lettuce and made the chai boey and the rice wine chicken stew and knew the right words to say when the lion came around, had died? Why bother, why bother, we said. So much more convenient to stay where we were, to have a simple potluck dinner and then each go home. Why bother staying up for Choi San? After all, these are modern times and the young people are right—luck is what we make of it.

Midwest Husband was still holding her when she felt something warm and rough brushing against her cheek. She opened her eyes and the lion was standing next to her. Not one made of papier-mâché and bamboo, like the ones that still somersaulted in front of the crowd, but a real one. It was red and gold and its breath was hot against her ear as it licked her tears with a great, moist tongue, clearly trying to console her. She gasped and looked up at Midwest Husband, at the crowd around them, but no one else seemed to see the creature.

Tentatively, she reached out and stroked the lion’s cheek, black fur warm under her fingers. It lowered its huge head and nudged her shoulder gently. Far in the distance, the cymbals clashed and a drum beat the lion’s dance into an ancient rhythm.

VI. Home Planet—The Lion Dances On

Zhangyi shouldered her pack as she stepped out of the pod onto the platform. The transit station was crowded at this time of year, filled with travellers streaming in all directions, heading home. She made her way carefully through them, picking her way through gaps, avoiding the advertising bots and ignoring the pleas of the service kiosks. She had no desire for a cheap one-way ticket to Simcra, didn’t want to hear about the latest biosculpting packages, didn’t need an upgrade to her med-ring. She just wanted to get to where she was going. She felt the way you would if you’d had the longest day ever and just wanted to get home, where you could collapse into bed. Except that her longest day had lasted some twelve years, five months, and sixteen days.

She made her way to the Great Hall. She only had about thirty minutes to find her connecting transport and bio-register to board and she didn’t want to miss it—she had spent the very last of her remaining credits on this ticket back to New Earth.

But when she got to the cavernous space that was the heart of the transit station, she checked her stream and found nothing. It wasn’t just that her transport wasn’t showing up. It was that none of the other flights were either. This couldn’t be right. Zhangyi switched over to stream system settings and ran a diagnostic in case it was malfunctioning. But she had updated it just the day before and everything seemed in order. The diagnostic came up clean.

It was then that she became aware of a low murmur rising across the room. All around her, streams were pinging and travellers who had been striding purposefully across the hall suddenly came to a halt as they read whatever it was that had come up. And then, as if to emphasize the situation, a circular column of light slid down from the roof of the hall into its center, multi-language text and ideograms filling it from top to bottom. The message must be important if it wasn’t simply being fed into their streams, but also displayed on the hall board, in all the major languages to boot.

In short, there was a storm headed their way and all transports had been suspended until further notice. The transit company could not guarantee that passengers would be put on the next available transports nor could they guarantee refunds or compensation for canceled plans, etc., etc. Zhangyi scanned the boilerplate text without reading it, her heart sinking. Already, there was a mass exodus from the Great Hall in the direction of the station’s hotels and dorms. But Transit 221 was a relatively small station and, even if Zhangyi managed to fight the crowds to secure a room, she didn’t have enough credits for even the cheapest dorm bed. She would have to find some other way. And she wouldn’t be alone—as she turned away, she saw several others like her, exhaustion written on their faces, their worn boots and cheap knapsacks mirrors of her own gear, walking in the opposite direction of transit accommodation. They would bunk down wherever they could. The station authorities were usually strict about that sort of thing but they were hardly in a position to do anything about it tonight. Their booths were already being mobbed with travellers demanding details, compensation, refunds, rights. Fully three-quarters of the travellers tonight were secular human, all trying to head back to New Earth for the lunar festival. A good portion of the other quarter, Zhangyi was willing to bet, was made up of tourists also looking to head to her home planet to witness the ancient festival. Already, transit security was discreetly fanning out.

As she wandered around Transit 221, wondering where might be a good place to spend the night, Zhangyi felt the tiredness settle into her bones. By her estimate, she had been traveling for more than three days and had slept less than six hours in total. She took the glass elevator up to the third floor and walked until she found a quiet stretch of corridor. Here, she set herself up in a nook between a pillar and the wall, against the cold shell of a viewport. From her pack she pulled out a blanket and the small travel pillow that she had bought all those years ago when she first left home. The fabric, once a cheerful scarlet, had worn to a pale pink.

Unlike many secular parents, Zhangyi’s had had no objection to her going off-world. Why not explore your options while you were young, they said. One of her dads hadn’t even been from New Earth—he was part of the early extra-planetary diaspora, and one of the first to reverse-immigrate back home. Zhangyi and her siblings had grown up listening to Baba Hongyi tell stories about the different planets and stations and life-forms out there—he always gestured into the night sky when he said “out there,” and when she was very small, Zhangyi had thought he meant that all these things existed in her own sky, not yet comprehending how vast the universe had grown since humans had discovered a way to explore it.

And so she had left. The intervening years had been filled with adventures, it was true. Zhangyi had worked a myriad of odd jobs on a dozen different planets and stations. She had cleaned toilets in sim parks, taught school on the ocean planet of Vidisthi, camped out under the rainbow stars, even done a stint working security on a transport ship. She had seen wondrous things and ugly things and had all the adventures she had dreamed of when she was a little girl, listening to Baba Hongyi’s stories.

It was not that she regretted leaving. She would never regret that. But as her siblings who stayed home set up family units of their own, dialing into her stream to hold up tiny bundles with scrunched-up faces, sent her photos and vids of growing nieces and nephews whose names she could not quite manage to pair accurately with faces because she only saw them once every couple of years or so, as all of her parents grew older and more frail, she began to understand that the things you wanted when you were young could suddenly seem less and less important when you got older. It didn’t mean that they were less urgent at the time. It was just that the dreams an eighteen-year-old had could not take into account the regrets of an older self.

Zhangyi leaned her forehead against the cool surface of the port and gazed out at the black expanse of space. She felt too weary for tears. In her mind’s eye she pictured a series of concentric circles, each one nested into the other, mentally honing in on her home, reciting the names the way children were taught. Galaxy, system, planet, continent, country, region, town, settlement. It went roughly that way, although there were variations, obviously. And at the very bottom of her rings, at the centre, was Baba Hongyi’s face, the way the corners of his eyes crinkled when he laughed, his gentle voice that was so at odds with his outsize stature. Baba Hongyi, whose stories had sent her out into the galaxy and then ultimately brought her home. In the last vid call she’d had with him the illness seemed to have shrunk his very bones.

The message had come to her delayed by a full half-year. She had been working in a remote location, off-grid, helping a team of conservationists track wild kennings in Lovshania. Come home, it said. Terminal, it said. Not much time left, it said. The last lunar festival together, it said.

And so Zhangyi had quit her job and scraped together the last of her credits—more than a decade of minimum wage had earned her very little in savings—and bought a ticket to her home planet, terrified that she was already too late. Her father was hanging on but barely. Every day counted, now. And she was stuck for at least one more precious day in this transit station.

Home planet. She pondered that term. Baba Hongyi once told her that a very wise man on Old Earth had written that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. It was the one thing you didn’t have to earn the right to claim. Like all registered seculars, Zhangyi needed no documents, no permissions, to return to New Earth. It was her home planet, and if she could afford to buy a ticket, she was always allowed to come home. In all the vicissitudes of New Earth’s history, this was the one rule that had never changed.

The station was chilly and Zhangyi opened her pack and pulled out another layer, wrapping it around her. She blew against the viewport, her breath forming a patch of condensation on the icy surface. Absent-mindedly, she traced a shape in the cloud with her finger. The shape had two ears and a large, flapping mouth, a squiggle to symbolize a long-ish body. Four stubby legs.

It was Baba Hongyi who had taught her how to draw the figure when she was very small. Not all his stories had been of the wonders of the galaxy. Sometimes, during the lunar festival, he would gather all the children and tell them the story of the Nian, a monster of the Old Earth, a story that had been ancient even then. It was a story of new beginnings and hope triumphing over despair. Zhangyi had always loved it, had always tried to picture what a lion would look like. Baba Hongyi had described it to her and together they had come up with the little doodle. She was a grown-up now and still, sometimes, she found herself drawing it in idle moments, on whatever surface was handy.

A flash of golden light streaked in the corner of her vision. Zhangyi sat up straight. She wiped the condensation away and stared. She didn’t quite know what she was looking at, and then all of a sudden she knew all too well. The creature that danced outside the viewport, glowing against the blackness of space, had red and gold scales that shimmered metallic and bright, black spirals of fur running down its back and fringing its huge, rolling eyes. It had metal eyeballs that sat perfectly round in their sockets, and a smiling, gaping mouth filled with silver teeth. It danced in slow loops, every line of its body conveying joy and hopefulness and rhythm. Zhangyi placed a palm against the window. In the reflection, she could see tears streaming down her face.

The lion moved closer to the viewport and floated just a few feet away from Zhangyi. It blinked at her playfully, flirtatiously. She laughed in the silence of the corridor, the sound strange even to her own ears. The lion pranced and gambolled and somersaulted to a rhythm that only it seemed able to hear. Zhangyi thought about Baba Hongyi and how she couldn’t wait to tell him about this. He would believe her, she knew without a doubt. She would go home. There would be time. Tomorrow, the transport company would assign her to a new flight and she would board it and travel those concentric circles—galaxy, system, planet, continent, country, region, town, settlement—until she reached the faces of those she loved the most, all the people that she called home.

While in an unnamed universe of the diaspora, the red and gold lion dances on, through the deep luminous well of space, drums echoing across the galaxy, and in a cave a hundred years ago or three thousand years ago or maybe yesterday, the new year sleeps, waiting for its time to come.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors