year of the dragon

On Saturday night I went to the Embassy of Vietnam's Tet (lunar new year) celebration.  I met up with my single male adopting friend, and we spent the evening explaining that we are adopting....separately!  It was a good time with free-flowing wine, amazing food, and lots of nice people to meet.  The year of the cat has not been my year, maybe I can blame it on being a rat, but rats are supposed to fare well in dragon years, so will this be the one?  If there is a dragon god up there somewhere, he will not let me turn 40 or live through another Christmas without my girl.

This weekend I got a bit of much-needed reassurance about my case.  I still don't know when Vietnam will re-open for "regular" cases (under the new law, it seems that irregular is the new regular and the old regular is no more), nor do I know if mine will be regular, irregular, or both.  But I'm done my paperwork, I don't have to change anything or spend any money to do so, my request is wide open and, dragon god willing, the roller coaster will stop once my dossier finally, finally makes it to a province.

I've been learning a little about the significance of dragons in Vietnamese culture.  I came across this proverb that I love:

 

“Con rồng, cháu tiên”: “child of dragons, grandchild of immortals”.

According to legend, the Vietnamese people are descended from the union of the dragon Lạc Long Quân and the immortal Âu Cơ.  They had a hundred children together, but because they were so different (he was a dragon from the deep seas, she was an immortal and only felt at home in the mountains), they ended up separating.  Lạc Long Quân, summoned home by his mother, took half the children and went towards the sea; Âu Cơ took the other half into the mountains.