The Year of the Fiery Horse
These events began in the year that Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union and Nelson Mandela began to travel to some western countries seeking help against a*******d. It was the year of a record-breaking art theft in Boston and a mass-murder by arson in New York. The calendars in standard use throughout the world said it was A.D. 1990, but on the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, the year was about to become 4688, the Year of the Golden Horse.
On Friday, January 26, a little after 8:30 P.M., Ted Chang walked into the Jade Buddha Garden Mandarin Restaurant and Lounge in Van Nuys, California. It was in his own reasonably comfortable, mostly white neighborhood. The night was Chinese New Year’s Eve and he was almost forty-one years old, divorced
