SAN FRANCISCO
Liz Heidhues – Guest writer and photographer – 1.28.2025
The Year of the Dragon ends today. The Wood Snake Year begins January 29, 2025, and ends on February 16, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(zodiac)
Good things may be coming for the Merry Makers of The Chinese New Year celebration, when the Chinese calendar cycles to a new zodiac animal.
But only pain and suffering are in store for those poor animals destined to be the celebrated delicacies for the groaning tables of the Chinese New Year feast.
I wouldn’t want to be a Dungeness crab waiting for a buyer to take me home and boil me alive for their New Year’s dinner.
Last Sunday my gaze was riveted by a crowd of happy people hovering around a makeshift stall outside a market in the outer Sunset District of San Francisco.
I saw a vendor selling live Dungeness crabs, many with legs broken off, to a throng of captivated shoppers.
The shoppers were poking and dangling the crustaceans by a claw up in the air, to inspect whether one of the sentient creatures would be suitable for purchase.
Afterwards, they would toss the poor thing back into the box from which it had been plucked — upside down on the heap of its brethren crustaceans stacked like logs — to thrash futilely about, as it tried to right itself and crawl away to escape a cruel death.
The unnecessary pain and suffering the human species inflicts on the animals it kills and eats is enough to stop a thinking person in their tracks.
I looked at the oblivious faces of the shoppers around me.
I had to force myself to turn my attention back to the purpose for which I had cycled from the Richmond District, through Golden Gate Park, and to the Outer Sunset District for.
I had cycled to Irving Street to find a cardboard cut-out to adorn my front door.
Every Chinese New Year’s, I put the lunar animal associated with the new lunar year on my door to invite good luck and happiness into my home where I have lived 41 years. This time I needed to put the Snake out. To my chagrin, I discovered I was lacking the Snake in the extensive collection of Chinese New Year’s cardboard cut-outs I have saved.
I possessed all the other astrological signs of the Chinese lunar calendar, from the Rat to two versions of the Pig.
But I was missing the deepest thinker and the enigma of the Chinese zodiac cycle. The sixth sign in the lunar cycle of the 12 animal signs. The Snake.
I scoured all the stores I knew within hiking and biking distance of our home and finally found a decent facsimile of a Snake. It was hanging in the 22nd Ave and Irving housewares store where I buy my bamboo steamers and toilet bowl brushes.
But this Snake had a happy and cherub-like face that I had never seen on the supernatural reptile that Western culture considers evil and cunning.
I had to buy embellishments to add to this angelic-looking Snake to give it the aura that we all attach to snakes.
When I asked the owner of the Richmond District’s Clement St store, where I have shopped for over two decades to buy my Chinese New Year’s decorations, why was it so hard to find a snake, she said to me: “People don’t like the Snake. They’re afraid of snakes. They won’t buy them. So I sell different kinds of things instead.”
After admiring the Snake and the other purchases I had made on Irving St, while wandering up and down its stretch crowded with shops catering to Chinese culture, palm trees, cars, and shoppers in search of Red Envelopes, I realized it had grown dark.
I packed the things I’d gotten into my pannier and rode my 30-year old bicycle back to a dark and deserted Golden Gate Park.
It was peaceful and quiet there after the noise and bustle of Irving Street.
City dwellers had surrendered the space to the dark, a serene and philosophical time when all the people and cars pack up and go home, leaving this natural space to its wildlife and a few unhoused denizens to enjoy.
Top photo. The Snake is a supernatural animal able to wriggle out of its skin to exchange it for a new one as time marches on.
Lee's Perspective 