I went to ANOTHER Chinese New Year parade this past weekend, in Rockville, Maryland. Rockville is the county seat of Montgomery County, one of the most prosperous and most ethnically diverse counties in Maryland. They estimate that 17% of Montgomery County’s population is of East/South-East Asian origin, and growing. This is actually one of the new centers of the Asian community in the Washington DC metro area, along with Fairfax and Annandale in Northern Virginia. Although not gigantic, the parade in Rockville was several orders of magnitude larger than the one downtown DC in Chinatown (which is a pale shadow of its former self, now consisting of less than a dozen actual Chinese restaurants, perhaps a handful of other Chinese businesses, and a residential facility for the elderly, plus a bunch of other businesses like Fuddruckers, Comfort One Shoes, Legal Seafoods, a pair of Irish pubs, a Hooters(!!!) and a CVS pharmacy with Chinese-language signage trying to preserve the look of a real Chinatown). The parade was organized by the VisArts art center in Rockville, which is a terrific public/private partnership to make art accessible to the community. Here are a sampling of images from the parade and the crowds watching it.