Flower streets are one of my favorite Guangdong New Year’s traditions. In the day’s leading up to those beautiful streets, moreover, local flower shops begin to sell intwined bamboo, mandarin orange trees, and narcissus, which if cultivated properly bloom for Spring Festival. The mandarin word for narcissus is “Water Immortal Flower (水仙花)”. The convergence of English and Chinese names for a variation of daffodil shows up an interesting divergence in interpretation. Both focus on the fact that narcissi bloom in shallow water. However, in English, Narcissus was a self-absorbed young man, who rejected Echo’s love and died staring at his reflection in the water. In Mandarin, the flower is an immortal, clearly a wonderful way of welcoming the New Year.

Point du jour is that I learned both the English and the Chinese rather late in life. As a child of the Jersey suburbs, I learned the names of topiary, a few trees, and grass, but gardens and wilderness and oceans and rivers were not part of my world. Or rather, my understanding of these areas was limited to how I interacted with them – hiking in the Pine Barrens, swimming at the Shore, and planting weeping willows. In other words, if learning names reflects the ways through which we come to inhabit the myths and traditions that constitute our worlds, then not learning the names of plants and animals tells us a great deal about our distance from earth. I grew up in a beautiful area, but it was clearly beautiful in the sense of conformed to human desire of what the world should be rather than what it may or may not be.

Yesterday I bought two bulbs of narcissi and placed them on my desk. Today I am wondering about the nature of self-absorption.