Years ago when I lived in Chinatown, I had only to walk out my front door on Eldridge Street and I would become an incidental onlooker at the Lunar New Year Parade. This year I made the trek from Brooklyn to capture the festivities in Manhattan's Chinatown.

One thing I've always noticed is how the names of the animal signs in the Chinese Zodiac sound better, perhaps more elegant, in English than they do in Chinese. For example, if I were to translate the character for "rooster" literally into English, it wouldn't be the year of the rooster, but rather the year of the chicken. Born in 1985, my zodiac animal is the ox—that's Chinese for cow.