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Happy Lunar New Year!
The Lunar New Year is two days away. For Chinese families, this holiday is like Christmas in the West — a time of reunion, steaming dumplings, red envelopes, and hope. But this year marks my seventh Lunar New Year in the U.S., and my second one entirely alone. Loneliness, that old companion, has settled into my life like a cat that refuses to leave the couch. It’s heavy, but I’ve learned to stop shooing it away.
When we first moved here, my wife and son Jack anchored me. Our family wasn’t perfect — my wife’s cancer treatments, my messy career, and Jack’s school struggles sometimes turned our home into a battlefield — but traditions kept us grounded. We’d argue over how much ginger to put in the minced meat, debate the merits of store-bought versus homemade dumpling wrappers, and then laugh over the absurdity of it all. The chaos of togetherness was all but loneliness. And it was ours. In 2023, cancer took my wife. Two months later, Jack went off to Northern California for college. Suddenly, I’d become the cliché of middle-aged crisis: “Wife gone, Children flown.”(妻离子散).
Since then, loneliness has been my shadow. Some days, it’s a quiet roommate that I barely notice; other days, it blares like a foghorn. I’ve discovered four flavors of loneliness:
