The first time a rocket hit me, I threw my hands over my face thinking I should be in pain, but I felt none. As I lowered my hands, a smile spread across my face. I smiled because the firework meant that year wouldn't be like the previous one.

I had learned the hard way that the most important Chinese festival, Chunjie, is all about real estate. It's location, location, location.

For my first Spring Festival, I was in the wrong location. That night, I wandered lonely streets in eerie silence in Tianhe, the ultra-modern district of Guangzhou.

The problem with Tianhe is that Spring Festival is a time for Chinese to return to their ancestral hometowns. No one's ancestral home is located in an ultra-modern district of high rises that was rice fields only 20 years ago.

To be fair, there was the thrill of discovery: That night I finally discovered what Tianhe's sidewalks really looked like, since this was the first time I had ever seen them any less crowded than a rugby scrum.

But the joy of discovery wasn't enough to quiet my stomach rumbling as I walked past all my favorite restaurants - all shut that night. Handwritten signs hung on the shutters: "Closed for Chunjie."

So I went to bed, hungry and alone in a now-empty city of many millions, in an apartment without heat, in puzzlement about what the big deal was with Spring Festival.

But last year I went to Longyan, Fujian province, where the airspace was so packed that an errant rocket from the arsenal of a pack of young whipper-snappers on the side of the road found its way to my face. When it hit me, I was so elated that I had finally found where the Spring Festival action was that I watched the lights swirling in my vision and counted my lucky stars.

Soon the stars I was seeing weren't just in my eyes. They were sprouting and blooming in mere fractions of seconds amid the cracks and ravines of the streets of Longyan. And as I watched, up on the 15th floor far above the other buildings in town, I realized these stars blew July 4th out of the water.

The explosions were so loud I couldn't hear the TV blaring a few meters away with the New Year extravaganza, CCTV Spring Festival Gala. The fireballs erupted so close to the building that I could have reached out and touched the beautiful fire trails.

When I ventured out onto the streets that night, my stomach was full. The fireworks' shredded paper casings fell from the sky onto my face as I gazed up in awe. While I was out, the rich sulfur smoke settling on the city filled my room with its acrid smell.

As a foreigner in China, it's easy to get praise, but hard to feel part of the culture. Intense language study doesn't remove all the barriers. I learned as much when I sat that evening staring blankly as the jokes of the annual CCTV comic crosstalks performance sailed over my head faster than the fireworks outside. The pounding explosions and colorful sparks in the sky outside, though, knew no language or culture.

My head was foggy with a sulfur-induced hangover when I awoke the next morning. Outside, I saw the sidewalks like I had never seen them before. Overnight they had sprouted a covering of red casings, as if a million pounds of red confetti had been airdropped on the city.

Tradition says that fireworks are supposed to scare away evil spirits from sticking around for the New Year. White-skinned foreigners have been called "ghosts" (yang guizi) in China for as long as anyone can remember. But the rocket that pegged me in the face that day convinced me that this tradition was something worth sticking around for.