A festival of renewal
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, February 17, 2007
EDMONDS – Myong Paulson struggled to transfer a live crab from a cardboard box teeming with crustaceans into her shopping cart.
The crab reached out toward the handle of the large slotted spoon Paulson was using and gripped it with a pincer.
“Wishing you a happy new year from 99 Ranch Market. Thank you!” a soothing voice announced over the intercom, then launched into a string of Chinese.
Paulson gave up on the crab. She laughed, dropped the spoon, and turned away.
Paulson moved here in 1975 from Jeju Island, a dollop of land that appears on a map to have slid from the southern tip of South Korea.
There, the Lunar New Year, just as in China, Vietnam and other Asian countries, is marked with lavish feasts, outdoor markets that stay open late into the night and gifts all around. Trains are packed with young people traveling home to fulfill the traditional visit to their childhood homes.
“But not here,” Paulson said.
In the United States, the holiday is more about gathering local family members together for a meal, she said.
Many of Snohomish County’s Asian immigrants are evangelical Christians, said the Rev. Simon Cho of the Evangelical Chinese Church of Snohomish County. They avoid traditions rooted in Buddhist culture, such as displaying dragons and other Chinese zodiac signs.
“We simply take it as a celebration of a new beginning, and of the arrival of spring,” he said.
Short of heading south on Saturday for Seattle’s glitzy Lunar New Year bonanza, Asian immigrants in Snohomish County have few places in which their holiday is truly celebrated.
The 99 Ranch Market in Edmonds is one of the few places where they can find a festive atmosphere.
There are aisles filled with candies packaged in auspicious red and gold wrapping: red for happiness, gold for wealth. Cellophane-wrapped trays of cookies are embellished with holiday stickers. There are lotus, soursop and coconut candies stacked beneath bright banners wishing every shopper a “Happy New Year.”
The store is the best place in the Seattle area for a selection wide enough to befit what is, for some countries, the biggest holiday of the year, said Sue Liang, a Woodinville resident who wandered the aisles with her niece, Janette Nguy of Seattle.
“Compared to China, it’s quiet here,” Liang sighed as she reached for a tub of lychee jelly cups. “Right now, people are happier there. They’re having more fun.”
Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.
