I never delight much in the Chinese New Year.

The feeling of emptiness occurs when you know that even the daily newspaper will come to a break. Newspaper stops, shops are closed, and a lot of hospital services come to a halt. Everything stands still, the way a city stays behind after all the clocks vanish and the minutes quit their orderly tick. Pause.

I can also remember all those legendary words of greeting one has to say in front of the elderly. It isn't that I hate to say kind words. But a lot of them are coming out of courtesy, not from the heart. Add a few more those pretentious sentences, and you end up in a hollow vacuum.

In trying to get out of the vacuum, I have developed my own rituals. Every year, I use up all my library card quota before this long holiday, as if the library won't open again. I made good picks this year, and now end up reading four books at the same time: Michael Sandel's Justice , The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die , Fiction 100: an anthology of short fiction.

Now there's a man living fully.