At first I was surprised when my friend decided to have a Red Egg ceremony to celebrate the first month of his newborn daughter.  I was surprised because although he’s Chinese, he’s practically more Americanized than I am.  After all, my first impression of him was when I walked into his college dorm room and saw a Debbie Gibson poster on the wall.

Back then, it wasn’t necessarily disturbing to have a Debbie Gibson poster, just lame.  But we couldn’t really fault the guy.  Listening to Debbie Gibson is like taking a tour through the nine circles of hell in poor fitting shoes, but you figure she had a lot of money and could easily buy beer for underaged people like us, so what the hell? Go Debbie.

However, we’ve all doubled our age since then and my friend still listens to the same crap Top 40 music.  Pink.  Avril LaVigne.  It’s as though his body has aged but his taste in music is frozen in time.

At one point we tried to stage a musical intervention:

“Listen, have you heard of the Half Plus Seven rule?”

“Sure.  That’s when you can only date someone who is half your age, plus seven years.”

“Right.  Well, the same thing applies to music.  You can only listen to singers who are half your age plus seven.  Otherwise it’s just creepy.”

“Shut up you guys.”

“We’re serious.  You’re one step away from the F.B.I. placing you in a database of Musical Offenders.  Your neighbors will all be notified.”

Somehow my friend managed to get married.  And it’s not like he was a ladies man.  In college? His strategy for being around women was to pretend the girl didn’t exist when she was standing three feet from him, and then pretend he didn’t exist, and then pretend the entire room didn’t exist, and just hug the wall and grin stupidly until she went away and he could relax again. Somehow, this modern-day Casanova found a tiny girl with a big laugh who saw all the qualities in him that we saw, plus one additional quality that none of us ever saw: studliness.  And then she one-upped all of us by giving him a daughter.  That totally trumped the Top Gun special edition DVD we gave him for his last birthday.

And their marriage seems to be pretty good, although at one point I witnessed a conflict over expectations that had been set in the courtship process and were subsequently never met.  My friend loves movies as much as I do:

“When we were dating, we used to go to the movies. Now you never want to go to the movies.”

“Movies take so much time.”

“But we used to go to the movies.”

“That’s when I was younger and I had nothing better to do.  I can’t afford to waste two hours in a dark room anymore.”

“Well, what do you want to be doing instead?”

“Shopping.”

So anyway, I’ll be glad to go and celebrate the Red Egg ceremony--whatever it is--to see how my friend managed to splice off a piece of his DNA with his little pretty wife and create something that will eventually walk and talk without even using batteries.  And I said that I was surprised that, after all I knew about my friend, he had decided to go with such a Chinese-specific tradition.  That is, until he sent an email yesterday clarifying the ceremony.  And in doing so, he made me relax because it was abundantly clear that he was still the same person I’ve known all these years:

“Dear Friends: I have received a few questions about Red Egg ceremony.  So I Googled it, and here is a little about the tradition...”