They inhaled the pineapple spiral tarts, really they did, and it’s not because I hung out by the food table saying, “Can I not be shy and say that I made these?”

Okay. Fine. I did. But only once, and only to Colin Goh and his wife. And he correctly identified the cloves in the pineapple jam, which confirms for all that Colin Goh is a win, even though we already knew it from that day we were in Singapore reading 8 Days and we came across: “If Harry Potter went to school in Singapore he’d learn in potions class that there are two kinds of potions: heaty and cooling.” I am sorry to keep bringing up this heaty and cooling thing, but I think it bears repeating. In fact, when I mentioned it at the party last night (after Colin Goh had left, natch, ’cause a girl’s got to keep her cool), Cheryl, who had heard it before, not only laughed but slapped her knee, that is how funny it still is.

Like the embodiment of Chinese New Year Past, Present, and Future, I showed up last night at Cheryl and Mike’s in red and gold, dong dong qiang! Daphne said, “Wah, kiasu ah?” which heralded a night of screaming, and eating Sugus sweets and haw flakes and dan dats and char siew baos and prawn crackers, and talking loudly and gesturing like samsui women, because we are (a) Chinese (b) IJ (c) girls (d) from Singapore.

It is quite possible the phrase “Eh, auntie,” has never been uttered quite as much in one night in the West Village. Daphne even has the auntie pointing thing down, the trick where with your index finger you get the attention of the person you’re speaking to by poking at them, and then with the same finger you seamlessly segue into pointing at whatever you’re talking about. Sometimes the thing you’re talking about isn’t a thing so much as a concept, or, better yet, a person not in attendance, then you just point, firmly and repetitively, with said index finger, accompanied by an insistent up and down movement from the wrist, at the general empty space in front of you.

Not that there was so much empty space. “Mike,” I said, when I arrived to the packed room, “there are like six thousand people here.” “Yes,” he said, “and I know three of them.”

About three hours in, I looked at this guy and said, “I know you.” “Yes,” he said. And I said, “But how—” And he said, “We met earlier tonight.” OH. UM. I think that’s actually what I said, exactly: “Oh. Um.” I might even have said: “Shit,” call me Maria-full-of-grace. But then it was okay, I remembered his name, and then he told me about an ivy-covered house in Harlem, and cycling round the city, and reading Proust in Taiwan.

Also at Cheryl and Mike’s:

Roxanne, whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in maybe four years, who is, holy crap, married, with cats, and living in the greater White Plains area. The things that can happen in maybe-four-years. Roxanne said there was something Faye Wongish about my new haircut, which is why, number (a), we like Roxanne, and, number (b), Wong Kar-Wai needs to give me a call illico presto;

Cheryl L. (not Cheryl who was hosting the party), who had just moved to 110th and Lenox, where I used to live. “My roommates say it used to be that they’d look out the window and think the sidewalk was moving,” she said, “but it was the rats.” I’d never had that experience, but I told her about when Kate and I looked out our window into the airshaft one drizzly morning and saw a gun lying, grim and grey, in the corner. Cheryl L.’s boyfriend lives in San Francisco, because he is a tech guy, but our new plan for him is that he is going to become a fashion guy and move to New York. Maybe he will become Marc Jacobs’s tech guy, maybe he will introduce us to Marc Jacobs, and maybe Marc Jacobs will give us clothes and put us in his ads, I will louche it up for Juergen Teller anytime;

Yao, who is in his first year at NYU, studying finance like a good Chinese boy. But he spent winter break backpacking through Venezuela and has hair down to his shoulders, so if we give him enough time he may well transfer to Art History or Performance Studies;

Caroline, who said, “I thought I smelled pot, but then I turned around and someone had just unwrapped a durian sweet, so I guess that’s what the smell was, ha-ha-ha.” The thing is, sometimes that smell of pot is just that smell of pot; I didn’t want to tell her Rox had just come in from an illicit smoke break.

At one point, I turned around and Daphne, Minna, and Caroline were looking at me. “Are you talking about me?” I said. “Yes,” they said. “Well,” I said, “carry on.”

And then Cheryl was handing us large Ziploc bags, telling us to take food home, and then there were couples of oranges handed out, and wishes for prosperity and years full of fish, and hugs goodbye.

On the way home, I was looking out the window of my yellow cab into the night when the Indian cabbie said, “Are you okay?” We’d just come off Flatbush and were heading down Fourth Avenue, past the twenty-four-hour laundry joint, past the Hess petrol station lit up green and white in the early hours of the morning. At Ninth Street he’d hang a left just before the big billboard at the subway station. And I said, “Thank you, yes,” because, well, yes.