恭喜發財！新年快乐！Happy New Year!

We started off in grand style with sojutinis (this year's big hit: Soju Ginger Cosmopolitans), the best grade of pu-erh we could find, a bottle of Iron Boat wine, and a jug of Zhejiang daughter wine. The courses were pork tenderloin cooked in the best master sauce ever (what a different lemongrass and cardamom make!), duck from Sun Wah, baked salmon from Martin Yan, longevity soup with uncut Chinese-style noodles from Thailand, spicy pickles, cold marinated asparagus, spicy-sweet-sour napa cabbage, and steamed eight precious pudding with almond water for dessert. The only thing missing were the jiaozi, which apparently formed a nasty mess in the bottom of the skillet and had to be discarded. (But they were vegetarian, so no great loss.)

After everyone left, we collapsed in front of the tv for the Discovery Channel special on Qin Shihuangdi. Slightly better than I expected, actually, although they lavished their attention on palace intrigues and made scant mention of Li Si's innovations in standardisation and centralisation. Also, it wouldn't be a cable archaeological programme without some gratuitous narrative subplot about a Western scholar's quest to prove some Really Important Theory. On the plus side, it reminded me to add 荊柯刺秦王 (The Emperor and the Assassin) to

monshu's NetFlix queue.

This time of year, I always end up reading some East Asian novel or other. We picked up Yu Hua's Chronicle of a blood merchant (徐三觀賣血記) in NYC almost a year ago, but neither of us had gotten around to reading it. At first, it began to look like To Live all over again but with a slightly different cast of characters, but it had two big advantages: (1) Less bathos and (2) way more humour. Like Yu's earlier work, it also follows the struggles of a Chinese family from the post-war period up through the Cultural Revolution, but they don't suffer as stoically as Gong Li in a Zhang Yimou film. When the going gets tough, the wife sits on the doorstep, sobs, and complains theatrically about her miserable fate to everyone within earshot.

The last Chinese novel that I enjoyed this much was Green River Daydreams (蒼河白日夢) by Liu Heng (劉恒), which managed to merge the forbidden-love and coming-of-age plots into a harrowing and entertaining story of life in the last years of the Qing Dynasty. It also had a similar mix of funny and sad, which is so much more appealing than unadultered misery.