Tomorrow is my last Lunar New Year as a resident of Hong Kong. It feels quietly important, subtly monumental, like reaching the end of Gilmore Girls or turning 29.

Some people do a lot of reflecting on the precipice of a new year. I’m sorry to say that I am one of these people. Given any official occasion to look back and look forward (and basically in any direction but this way), I eagerly make an activity out of sitting wistfully and bathing in convoluted chains of thought.

I wish I could say that knowing this is the last Lunar New Year in the place I’ve called home for six years is as life-changing as knowing I’ll never again celebrate a Gregorian new year in a Western country. The idea of never again counting down or warbling Auld Lang Syne in a joyful stupor feels entirely unfathomable to me — and I’m not even a fan of NYE celebrations. But this isn’t like that. Lunar New Year stirs something inside of me, wakes this faint notion of familiarity and knowing, and of course, the festivities outside and even the small ones I adhere to in my home fill me with joy, but there is something removed. You know how you can be once or twice removed from someone else? That’s what this holiday is for me. That’s what knowing this is my last holiday here is for me. A few people removed. A few DNA cells removed. A few childhood experiences removed. It’s not as embedded and certain as the western parts my mixed-race being knows. Why do I wish it were different? Ah, the lifelong battle of trying to be two things in one body.

Unlike Western NYE, it’s quiet here tonight. Earlier, on the small island on which I live, there was a quiet bustle, a sense of getting things done: buying armfuls of flowers, carefully hanging decorations either side of front doors, queueing for meats and vegetables, sweeping dust over the threshold into the street. In the flow of conversation between customers and vendors about carrots or orchids, there were casual exchanges of ‘happy new year’ before both parties moved onto their next task. And then, at around 4pm, there was a quiet. The passengers from the 4:45 ferry, released from work early for the occasion, seemed to disperse in a calm, efficient fashion, perhaps understanding the nature of this particular moment on this particular day. Shops pulled down their shutters and taped up posters with festival greetings and holiday business hours, and the streets emptied. This quiet feels like some kind of reverence, a space being made for what’s about to come — tonight, tomorrow, all festival, this year. It’s like sitting down three hours before a big event (say, Western NYE) and taking the time to do your makeup, get dressed, and sip wine before you leave the house. It’s anticipatory in a subdued, calm way. We’re not partying; we’re preparing.

Preparing for tonight’s meal with family. Preparing for everything that tomorrow involves. Preparing for the festivities and traditions of the whole holiday. Also, preparing for the tiger. Its abundant energy and fearlessness, the potential for excitement and vitality after two years of precisely the opposite. But also sagely preparing for the unpredictability; it’s a water tiger and, as we all know, water changes course, water is flexible, water finds unexpected paths. So, some of us are mentally and energetically preparing for 2022’s tiger, too.

This holiday includes one more preparation for me. I am preparing for no longer being in Hong Kong, for knowing that I will not see these exact shops, whose owners I speak to every day, pull their shutters down in the late afternoon and hang posters this time next February. And if I do, it is because I am a visitor, a person who got on an aeroplane and took the MTR and then a ferry, instead of walking down the 28 steps to the narrow street and the one minute into the village. I am never going to be the person who lives here again.

The exact ‘thing’ I am preparing is my emotional centre, the part that feels a bittersweetness emerge like an orange liqueur from the inside of a chocolate when I think about all of these last’s I am going to experience over the course of this new year. Bittersweet.

But I’ve got the tiger to help me sort through this emotional medley. And so, bold and brave it is.