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What’s quacking, Ducks fans?
You didn’t fall far from the tree, Buckeyes!
You ended up starting your 2025 right here in my back yard in the city my brilliant ad man uncle Ted Wilson — president, Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association, 1974 — dubbed the place Where Happy New Years Begin.
So welcome to the University of Oregon and The Ohio State University, especially as you make us old-timers feel like the Rose Bowl Game is normal again rather than some weird aberration a quarter of the way to a national championship, as if it were the age-old battle between the champions of the Pac 12 and the Big Ten rather than … whatever it is now.
The Pacific Coast league is gone, for all practical purposes, and the corn-fed Midwest farm boys have been invaded by Californians and Northwesterners, but, whatever. Nothing lasts forever.
Welcome, anyway, and thanks for letting us fake it, until we make it.
Parade’s gonna be great, rain’s not gonna fall. Just don’t mistake that 70 degrees at the 2 p.m. kickoff for anything like warmth when the sun goes down behind the Linda Vista hills west of the stadium. It’ll be in the 40s before you know it. Please don’t wear shorts and a team paint job on your chest as a T-shirt, as it’ll make me cold just looking at you.
On the television, that is. Though the stadium is a few hundred yards from my home, home is where I’ll be watching the game from this afternoon, and the parade from, this morning. After a dozen years of being editor of the Pasadena Star-News, majordomoing live coverage of the entire livelong Tournament of Roses New Year’s Day, working from dawn to 10 at night, I’ve had my fill. Black-eyed peas with a glass of something good while watching the crowds strolling my neighborhood is enough Jan. 1 for me.
But welcome, as I say, hundreds of thousands of strangers, to town, and to the San Gabriel Valley, where history is a bit more present than elsewhere in Southern California, where the fact of a centuries-old Spanish mission and the legacy of the old orange groves, the wintertime glories of which brought our ancestors here, make us a bit different than the rest of vast L.A.
Aside from the historically big party that is the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl Game, here’s what makes the SGV so up-to-the-minute even grander, news-wise, than the rest of the nation.
You, elsewhere America, might have your headlines that read, as today’s did: “Treasury Department says systems hacked by China-backed actor.”
That’s a national, impersonal hack.
Whereas Sino-American political intrigue and spy-vs.-spy shenanigans have gone entirely local at this new year’s holiday in our neck of the woods.
As our Scott Schwebke reports, “Residents are demanding that Arcadia City Councilmember Eileen Wang resign amid revelations her fiancé and campaign treasurer allegedly acted as an operative of the People’s Republic of China in a clandestine, grassroots plot to influence U.S. politicians.”
Arcadia may be a town of just 54,000 residents, but it’s punching above its weight with this crazy revelation.
The FBI on Dec. 19 arrested Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 64, of Chino Hills, as a suspected foreign government agent. So the question, of course, is whether Wang, elected two years ago to Arcadia City Council, “is the shadowy ‘Individual 1’ described in a federal criminal complaint as a ‘new political star’ courted by the PRC.”
You might ask, why on Earth would it be worth it for the boys from Beijing to infiltrate a city council in a quiet suburban city? Where’s the geopolitical gain in having a toehold in a governmental body that mostly deals with potholes and changing street addresses to 888?
And the answer is both a simple and complex one. The large majority of Arcadians in 2024 are of Asian descent, with most of those families having ties to either mainland China or Taiwan. All five of the city’s political leaders on the City Council are Chinese-surnamed. And they have the ears of other local electeds, including members of Congress. Vying for influence with them on issues such as support, or lack thereof, for the security of Taiwan would clearly be a very big deal for the Chinese Communist Party.
“Although it isn’t clear if Wang, 55, was aware of Sun’s alleged work advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-Taiwanese policies, clearly the optics aren’t favorable. The same day that Sun was arrested, Arcadia city officials learned of an FBI presence in the 1000 block of Huntington Drive, which, according to public records, is where Wang lives,” as Schwebke writes. Now, this is going to make for a very interesting 2025.
Cheers for a happy new year to you all, filled with intrigue.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com
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