It’s quitting time on Friday at the Red Cross. When the boy arrives on his bike, it has stopped raining but the roads outside are still wet. There is a single nurse drawing blood and a burly man by the backdoor stacking blood packets into a cooler. The room is small and, at seventeen, the boy is the youngest person there. Ahead of him are a heavyset man in his 50s, a woman with a sleeve tattoo, and a tall businessman in a suit. All of them look as though they’ve been waiting a long time.

It was a few days before Commencement and we were eating at a sushi restaurant on Chapel. Seated next to us was a table of graduating seniors and their parents, so thrilled to stop paying college tuition, that no extravagance felt too great. Courtney and Kyle had each finished their last final exams, and along with Kyle’s fiancée Jean, the four of us were out celebrating, too. We wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, but we were not just celebrating graduation, or even the end of the year – but what felt like something bigger.

The fireworks started just after midnight. The four of us – me, Andy, Rebecca, and Eric (their English names) – stood outside, waiting for them to go off. A large, red papercutting hung on the front door of the apartment complex, its Chinese characters signifying “double happiness” – two stick figures joined in an embrace, the perfect pictographic embodiment of marriage.

It was two days and thirteen hours before the New Hampshire primary, where back home Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, was inciting Americans to turn out and vote for him like it was their destiny. But halfway around the world, in the ethnically Chinese enclave of Malacca, people were met with a different kind of providence: the Lunar New Year.

It was a week after the student protests at Yale, and I knew better than to engage in even the most minor form of cultural appropriation, so I passed on both the pilgrim hat and the Indian headdress in favor of a Thanksgiving turkey that I traced in the shape of my hand and cut from a sheet of construction paper before circling around my head.