She is Jenny Khuu. Jenny has nine children in all. They are spread from Philadelphia to Seattle. Linda is in the kitchen. Almost immediately she serves us tea, an eight-ingredient brew from expensive herbs for special New Year's guests that includes chrysanthemum, cranberry seed, rock sugar and four other things I couldn't write down fast enough.
Water is considered the eighth ingredient.
These are dried tangerines. When you pay someone a visit on New Year's Day, you take two tangerines and the owner of the house will give you two of something else. As meticulous as Linda is, not all of the Chinese New Year's customs are practical. The firecrackers, for example. The next morning there would be all this ash, but you're not allowed to sweep it out.