The Year the Fire Horse Came Home

March 2026 | Living REAL with Heidi Coleman

The Chinese New Year parade was the reason I got on the plane. San Francisco hosts the largest one outside of Asia, and this year felt different — this is the year of the Fire Horse, which comes around every 60 years, and I was born in 1966, the last time it came. I’m turning 60 in December. I am Chinese, something I learned at 56 when a surprise conversation and DNA test upended a story I’d been living my whole life. The parade was the door. So I booked the hotel, bought the bleacher seat, and went alone, the way I sometimes need to go places — without having to narrate it for anyone, without managing someone else’s experience of it, just me and whatever the trip was going to turn out to be.

What I didn’t expect was to spend the whole weekend receiving answers to questions I hadn’t asked yet.

· · ·

The hotel had upgraded me to the 25th floor, and when I opened the door and saw the bay coming at me from three directions — left, right, straight ahead — I just stood there in the doorway for a long moment and let it be exactly what it was. I am someone who needs a view. Always have been. A garden, a pool, a mountain, a skyline — anything but a wall. This one stopped me cold.

Friday night I went to R&G Lounge in Chinatown, which had a line out the door that disappeared the moment I walked in alone and was seated immediately at a high top. The room was full of large tables, big plates making their way around lazy susans, the kind of laughter that comes from people who’ve been eating together for years. Mostly Chinese, mostly families, mostly groups of people who clearly belonged to each other. I noticed that — not with longing, just with attention. Everyone was with someone. And I was alone at a high top with a full view of the room. After I ordered, I sipped on my tea, didn’t scroll my phone and just let the noise of the room wash over me.  Somewhere while waiting for my meal, I realized I wasn't lonely. Not even a little bit. Being alone and being lonely are such different countries, and I don’t always know which one I’m in until I’m already there. That night I was solidly in the first one, at peace with my own company in a way I’ve had to earn.

It was dark when I got back to my room. I looked out at the skyline and that’s when I saw it — the Salesforce Tower, its LED crown glowing red with a horse in full stride, rotating slowly against the dark sky. For Chinese New Year. Unplanned. Just the city’s quiet welcome.

Saturday morning I woke early to that view still waiting for me and I put in my earbuds and found the right songs and then I just — danced. Alone on the 25th floor, the whole San Francisco skyline behind me, nobody watching. Not performing joy. Just feeling it. The particular kind of joy that comes when you realize you actually did the thing you said you were going to do. I was here. I had made it. Something in my chest that had been tight for a long time just loosened.

I grabbed coffee from the shop across the street and an uber to Pier 14. No words for the view that greeted me.

I got there before the light. The Ferry Building clock tower slowly going golden. The Bay Bridge still holding the last of the night sky. The moon sitting just beside the Salesforce Tower — the one that had welcomed me the night before — and the whole city reflected in the water below.

The weather was perfect in every way so I started to walk back to the hotel. And then I turned around, and there she was.

Bliss Dance. A 40-foot steel woman by Marco Cochrane, made entirely of open lattice so the light passes through her. Arms open. Facing Market Street. Standing there at 6:40 in the morning like she’d been waiting for the parade, like she’d been waiting for all of it.  I couldn’t have planned her.

Later that morning I climbed three flights of stairs to Tin How Temple — not a grand entrance, not a polished experience designed for visitors. Just a door, then stairs, and then something I wasn’t prepared for.

The doors to the outside were open. Wind coming through. Incense already burning on the balcony, smoke curling out over Waverly Place four floors below. Lanterns lined the ceiling — hundreds of them — with names written on them, their red tassels moving in the cross-breeze like they were breathing. Three women sat together at a table folding lotus flowers. Not for me. Not for show. Just folding, the way you fold something you’ve folded ten thousand times, your hands knowing exactly what to do while your mind goes somewhere else entirely.

I didn’t know what to do.

I had done the research. I knew the history — built in 1852, Cantonese immigrants, the oldest Chinese temple in North America, my people. I knew what a Kau Cim ritual was. I thought I knew what to expect. And none of it mattered, because you cannot research your way into belonging. You cannot prepare yourself for the feeling of standing somewhere that is yours by blood and foreign to you by experience. I was a stranger in my ancestors’ house and I knew it and the only honest thing to do was admit it.

So I asked.

One of the women showed me what to do. One question, held in your heart, and then you shake the cylinder of numbered sticks until one falls out. I shook the sticks. Number 28 fell out. She found the paper and handed it to me. She repeated - one question.

I held it to my chest, respectfully. I put it in my purse without reading it.

Because I still didn’t have a question — only the feeling of having arrived somewhere real. The smoke from the balcony drifted through. The lotus folders kept folding.

The paper stayed in my purse all weekend.

· · ·

On the walk back through Chinatown I stopped in front of a wall covered in red tiles. A small crowd had gathered. I waited. When they moved, I raised my phone and took a picture. I didn’t stand back to look at it. I didn’t read it. I just captured it and kept walking.

Later, resting in my hotel room, I looked at the photo.

Year of the Horse. 2026 Bing Wu.

My year. Announced in gold on red on a wall in Chinatown, on the morning of the parade, in the city built by my ancestors. And I had walked right past it without knowing what it said. 

I’ve been sitting with that ever since. How sometimes we document what we’re not yet ready to receive. How we point our phones at things that are trying to tell us something, and we keep walking, and later — in a quiet room, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon — the meaning catches up.

That’s not a failure to pay attention. That’s just how arrival works.

Somewhere on the pavement of an ordinary sidewalk, someone had stenciled a message in pale blue letters: Love is the ultimate longevity hack. I stopped. I thought of my husband, who was home waiting, who always is. It was time to go home.

· · ·

That afternoon I packed a snack and my jacket, grabbed a coffee, and walked seven minutes to my bleacher seat on Post Street. Section C. Two men near me became, for the next few hours, exactly the right company — easy conversation, genuine warmth, the kind of strangers who make you feel like you’ve known them longer than you have. The parade started on time, paused in the middle, stretched long into the evening. Dragons and costumes and performers and the noise of a city celebrating itself. It didn’t matter that it ran long. The city was alive and I was in it, and that was the whole point.

I left the bleachers a little early, and followed the parade route on foot - and then turned uphill, toward Grace Cathedral. 

Some spaces do something to you. Grace Cathedral is one of them. I walked back to the hotel carrying that, and a coral parade badge, and a slip of pink paper I still hadn't opened, and a question just out of reach.

· · ·

Sunday morning I had my last coffee at the window, describing the view out loud to myself the way you do when you’re trying to memorize something before you have to give it back. The Transamerica Pyramid. The bay appearing in the gaps between towers. The Salesforce Tower catching the early light. An ornate old building below, all stone and copper trim, holding its ground between the glass. Ships in the distance waiting for their next cargo load. And then, on a rooftop just visible between two skyscrapers: a single word on a building.

ABLE.

Not a question. Not a command. Just a quiet statement left on a rooftop for anyone paying attention. The city’s last word to me.

 

· · ·

The question didn’t find me at the temple. Not standing in front of the zodiac wall. Not in Section C with the dragons going by.

At home. Sunday night. Unpacking my clothes, getting ready for the ordinary week ahead. And then, quietly, from somewhere I hadn’t been looking:

The question I hadn’t been able to form in the temple, the one I’d been carrying the whole weekend without knowing I was carrying it. I stood there for a moment with it. Then I went and found the pink paper.

Lot 28. Tin How Temple.

“The moon rises in the east, so full of grace and beauty: Concealed from sight, but still in place. Sometimes rising, sometimes full, it runs its course. The cloud that covers the moon is only fleeting; so don’t worry or draw back. It will soon pass. Once the clouds disperse, all things will be clear and forward move.”

I read it twice. Then I folded it back up and set it on my dresser.

The answer had been in my purse the whole time.

· · ·

You are allowed to let a thing be complete without extracting every lesson from it. You are allowed to come home with the question still forming. You are allowed to carry an answer in your purse all weekend and not read it until you’re standing in your own bedroom, putting away your clothes, finally quiet enough to hear what you’ve been asking.

The Fire Horse year is just beginning.

I don’t know yet what it’s asking of me.

But I know I’m able.

— Heidi Coleman · heidicoleman.com