Happy Pig Year!

The Year of the Golden Pig is upon us! And none too soon, the anticipation's been killing me. According to Chinese folklore, the Golden Pig is an especially lucky year. I'm sure some of you have heard, there's supposed to be a glut of births this year, a mini baby boom. Even if a lot of the Chinese don't admit to believing in astrological superstitions, with only one shot at a baby they're not taking any chances. Ironically I've heard it predicted that babies born this year will actually have it extra rough, first during birth because of a shortage of hospital beds and later because of a strain on school resources. Don't forget the extra competition when they apply for college. Like it wasn't tough enough already. Enough pessimism. Honestly, I hope that with the help of their zodiac sign every one of those Golden fetuses, developing even as I write this, will one day be bringing home the bacon.

The much talked about Spring Festival, the mystical Chinese New Year...what's it all about? I can't say it all in a sentence, but it sure didn't disappoint. Thinking back, I'm left with disconnected memories; unique moments that add up to my front seat view of the most important holiday in the most populous country in the world. It's easy to draw a parallel with Christmas. There's the original religious meaning, but to me what it really is is the sum of all the things I do every year with people I care about. Some are rooted in a broader tradition, others unknown to all but me and the few who share them with me. Just like Christmas, I feel that the fundamental importance of Spring Festival is of course the connection with family and friends. I'm sure every place and every person in China has their own permutation of the traditions, their own personal version of the holiday in addition to the things that are common across the board. The way I experienced it, at a particular place in a single year, doesn't make me much of an expert on the holiday. All I've got are some stories that will stick with me.

I arrived in Yichun about two weeks before new year's day. If you haven't read some of the earlier stuff, Yichun is in the far north of Heilongjiang Province which is in the northeastern corner of China. My roommate from Harbin, Jin Chao, generously invited me here to spend three weeks with his family.

One evening shortly after arriving I went night sledding with Jin Chao and a couple of his cousins. It was pretty fun. The hill looked tiny, the fact that it was ice rather than snow helped a lot. The unorthodox wooden sled's metal runners fit wickedly into slots carved into a slide headed for the river. Momentum gained on the sloping river bank carried us all the way to the other side of the frozen water, at least 50 yards past the bottom. After sledding, we were walking on the raised sidewalk parallel to the river. I felt Jin Chao tugging my arm, pulling me a little roughly away from my chosen path. I looked questioningly, and he pointed to the ground where I had been walking. I noticed a dark patch on the sidewalk. Looking more closely I saw that it was ashes, like someone had made a campfire on the sidewalk. I noticed similar patches up and down the sidewalk. In response to my still puzzled look, Jin Chao searched for words I would understand. "The ancestors," he said, and for a horrible moment I thought I had been walking through the cremated remains of some recently deceased grandparent.

Luckily it was nothing quite that disturbing. Jin Chao explained further that leading up to Spring Festival it's traditional to make offerings to the ancestors. The living can help out their forefathers by sending them things like money; since there are no mailboxes in the afterlife, you've got to burn it. Luckily symbolic money will do, thus avoiding a yearly upset in the Chinese financial markets. Thinking back, I realized I had seen several fires going that day. I spend the rest of the evening scanning the ground, navigating a minefield of ethereal care packages.

Jin Chao has been excited about the fireworks for quite a while, so I've been expecting them. They started in earnest on new year's eve day. All day our activities were carried out accompanied by festive but violent white noise; the staccato machine gun pops of firecracker strings and deeper booms of more potent exploding cylinders. Let me restate for emphasis: all day. I was woken by a particularly loud round right outside my window, and the onslaught of noise didn't begin to slacken until well after we greeted the Golden Pig's arrival at midnight. At times the sounds were distant, but just when I'd get used to the situation a neighbor would torch a loud one and make me trip on my sandal or choke on a dumpling. Jin Chao and I did our part, lighting fuses and chuckling at our snow craters as we strolled back and forth between his parents' and grandparents' homes. Thankfully, whistling noisemakers haven't caught on here like they have with our Fourth of July fireworks. Once it got dark, we began setting off some of the other explosive items purchased by Jin Chao's family, the ones which are more fun because they have colors with the noise.

I've always had a lot of fun with fireworks. I was part of the group that organized homecoming week in high school. When it was time to choose tasks, I took the football halftime show solely to ensure the existence of a sweet fireworks display. I always anticipate lighting fireworks at Fourth of July, but the last time I did it I was about 12 years old. Every summer since then I've somehow found myself in a large city without legal access to the best part of the holiday. That's why it felt so good scratching that pyro itch this Chinese new year's eve. Satisfaction at last; grinding the glowing cigarette into green fuse after green fuse, scrambling away with head raised proudly to watch my creations float then fade. Many exciting holiday traditions have lost the butterfly-guts excitement they gave me as a little kid, but 10 years of anticipation really juiced up this fireworks experience.

Let me rewind a bit, back to the morning of new year's eve. After the warzone out the window got us out of bed, Jin Chao and I recieved gifts from his mother. Spring Festival is a time for renewal and cleansing, so after some hot tub time and a thorough shower we tried on our presents: a full set of underwear, including boxers and long john top and bottom. I like the tradition. One, it felt great stepping into my new duds after a soak. Two, unlike all the underwear I've bought myself in China, these fit great. I guess moms the world over just have an instinct for these things, which is a little wierd but I'm happy to finally have boxers that don't fit like a thong. I'm now fairly certain that in China, the sizes start at XL and go up from there which makes me an XXXXXL give or take an extra. Maybe there are a lot of little guys in China with a serious size complex driving sales of the ridiculously labelled underwear. I on the other hand am embarrassed to buy a size that back home would fit only Reuben Studdard or a smallish pony.

TV plays a big role on new year's eve. At 8pm we all sat down to catch the beginning of the show. Every big name performer is present, with enough time for them all because it's not over until after 1am. To some extent, a star's popularity can be judged by whether or not they perform that night. I heard every pop song I've been listening to since I got here, along with the distinctive shrieks of the Beijing opera. Most regions of China were represented by an art form unique to that place. Occupying the prime slot leading up to midnight was China's most beloved comedian. He did a skit, like saturday night live. It had everyone around me clutching their stomachs and gasping for air, and even worked a few chuckles out of me as I understood the occasional joke.

I opened this blog with something a bit sentimental, saying holidays are all about people, then I went ahead and wrote about ash piles, fireworks, and TV. I guess what I meant to say is that family and friends are the essence of these major holidays, but the expression varies wildly. A more talented writer might be able to express those human connections at their most basic level, but I'm stuck with anecdotes. I've got one more.

(Side note: The guy next to me in the internet cafe is humming off key with his headphones. It's driving me crazy and I had to tell someone.)

Chinese culture has a lot to do with food and the eating experience. The Chinese New Year is no exception. When we go out to eat it takes an hour to finish our food and we stay four, an exhausting experience for me with casual conversation flying fast and furious around me. I'm used to eating at CET with a group of half Americans and half Chinese, when the natives all slow down and dumb down what they're saying for our benefit. Not so when the ratio is 13:1, Chinese. When they really get going, I feel that headache coming on that I lived with the first two weeks in Harbin. It's where your brain melts from too much Chinese.

On new year's eve, all the family members I've met gathered at Jin Chao's grandparents' house for dinner. That includes Jin Chao's parents and grandparents, three aunts, two uncles, and three cousins. I scored immediate points by readily agreeing to have some baijiu with the uncles. Baijiu literally translates to white alcohol. It's China's favorite hard liquor but I've got no idea why because it tastes like battery acid. One of the tests of manhood around here is a simple question: How much baijiu can you handle? For me, the answer is usually as little as possible because drinking it is like pouring gasoline down your throat and chasing with a match. However, this occasion called for a small sacrafice on my part.

I was actually lulled into a false sense of security because this was a really expensive bottle purchased for the occasion. One would think that such quality might bring an added smoothness or improved flavor, but apparently with baijiu price is directly related to causticity. Nonetheless, I smiled wide, raised my glass with the uncles, and got plenty of laughs when the smile was twisted by the burning in my throat. Drinking here is a constant toasting game of excuses engineered to cause others to consume more alchohol than you do. I'm terrible at this game due to lack of experience and language skills, but at least it's possible to get respect by taking a beating well. Luckily, this family is not very hardcore about drinking so I'm alive to talk about it.

After we finished eating, the talking and laughing continued around the dinner table. Grandpa moved to a chair off to the side. I zoned out a little, as I tend to do when they get into full swing and I'm left to fend for myself. I was jolted out of it when, on a cue I didn't catch and amid peals of laughter, one of the aunts jumped from up from her chair and grabbed a pillow from the couch. She set the pillow on the floor in front of her father and kneeled facing him. Laughing hysterically she raised her arms straight over her head and bent over until her forehead touched the hardwood floor. She repeated the kowtow twice. Her two sisters followed suit. I was stunned to see these middle aged women taking to the floor.

In China respect for elders is deeply rooted. You've probably heard of Confucious, the Chinese pholosopher. I don't want to overstep my knowledge but as far as I can tell, the fundamental thing he did was clearly and succinctly express a rigid system of respect and obedience in relationships; subject to emperor, son to father, wife to husband. This sounded pretty dang good to a lot of emperors, thus Confucious is extremely famous today. Anyway, one of the ways this respect was expressed was through the kowtow, performed to emperors all the time and to fathers/husbands sometimes.

What I saw was the modern version, at least for this family. Jin Chao told me that they hardly ever do it. It's the first time in at least five years. It's not required in any way, more of a joke than anything now. They do it if they're feeling jolly and festive, and I guess my presence helped get them in the mood as we kicked off the Year of the Golden Pig. After the aunts finished, the younger generation including Jin Chao took their turn. There was nothing solemn about it whatsoever, but the old grandpa was obviously touched by the gesture of love and respect from his family as he sat smiling in front of them.

the wierdest food yet

I've eaten some stuff that really stretched my limits since coming to China. Let's review. There was the dog meat with the drunk guys during the break after summer term. Then there were the cow knees and lamb spine soon after. I don't recall whether I've actually blogged about these next few, but there have at various times been duck brain, chicken head and claw, and cow heart ventricle. But I think this one may take the cake: deep fried tree frog. I'd definitely heard that the Chinese ate frogs, but I was under the impression that amphibian/reptile consumption was limited to the south. Apparently not because I'm about as far north as you get and today at lunch, out of the blue, comes a plate of the little critters.

I've been staying up late and sleeping in, so although they were served at lunch it was my first meal of the day. I stumbled out of bed unsuspecting. Jin Chao had roused me to tell me it was time to eat. For the past few days this has meant eat with his family at their house, but when I went upstairs to the common area the plan was to go eat at a restaraunt run by his cousin's husband. As usual, the host was incredibly hospitable, showing us plates of possible foods to eat and having us point at the ones we wanted fried up. I picked an innocuous plate of snow peas, and Jin Chao and Xu Chen's choices were equally mild. This of course only lulled me further into my unsuspecting state.

We were most of the way through our meal when they came out. I had been enjoying my peas, along with other standard dishes like fried eggs and pork ribs. The eating was punctuated by toasts from our small beer glasses as many Chinese meals are. When the plate appeared, I first thought they were small birds similar to those I'd seen a few days before. Birds and frogs may be fairly closely related in an evolutionary sense, but when they come crispy deep fried with the host smiling "dig in!" there's a big difference. Ignoring the obvious, here's a pertinent distinction: you're not supposed to eat the bird, you're supposed to eat the bird meat. I learned today that you're supposed to eat the frog.

I knew I had to act fast before I thought too much about it, so I dug right in as soon as I was absolutely clear that you eat the whole thing. I didn't want to do anything unnecessarily disgusting. Xu Chen did have time to remind me that only 10 minutes before, these frogs had been hopping around like crazy in some tub at the back of the kitchen. It must have been a sight because the plate had roughly 20 crispy hoppers. There was no doubt about their current condition, spindly limbs splayed out from a mass of froggy bodies resting at unnatural angles.

As I eat all these wierd things, I'm finding that taste isn't really a factor. Most of it is pretty mild, tastes-like-chicken stuff. The gut wrencher is the textures. Lamb spine grey matter was pasty. Cow knee was like really chewy jello. You might expect a frog to be slimy or gummy, but these weren't. When frogs are alive, they almost look boneless. The dead ones were very bony in the mouth. I'm trying to come up with something to compare it to, and here it is. The bones were a lot like those crunchy little Rold Gold pretzels. As for the rest, my family has a cream cheese and shrimp dip that we eat at holiday parties. It's really a great dish and I hope this doesn't ruin it for anyone. Imagine that dip; soft cream cheese, chewy shrimp, and a little cocktail sauce. Forget about the taste, and putting a frog in your mouth is like munching on pretzels and shrimp dip.

I got the frog down in two big mouthfuls. It wasn't bad I suppose, but I didn't go rushing for another. Sensing my reluctance, the host began a lecture about the high nutrition content, especially in the females. Apparently frog ovaries are preventative of all kinds of diseases. His graphic and passionate explaination didn't convince me. At least I ate one of the things though, and I believe it marks a new level of my adventures in dining - tree frog and beer for breakfast.

There's a couple more pictures of the frogs in this album: http://picasaweb.google.com/weiterong/Yichun

General update from my home away from home

I haven't been as good about writing this trip. I regret it now because there's so much to tell, but at least I've got a little time to catch up now that I'm "home". I'm going to start in this post by explaining where I am now, and then as I get around to it I'm going to fill in a few of the more interesting gaps from my really awesome month wandering around China. That's the plan anyway.

Since I've stopped moving around for the winter, it's time for a little perspective on where I actually went. I remember well the days before I was too familiar with the geography of China. Actually right up until I got on the plane to come here, all I had was a vague idea of the location and general shape of the place. The rest was just a black hole. I'm assuming some of you are still in the position I was in back then, so for your sake I'm going to put up a map of China showing the places I've been. Hopefully this way all the random Chinese place names that crop up in future posts will have some frame of reference.

Thick blue lines are my train trips, really thin blue lines are flights, and red dots are places I stopped for a look around. If you want more detail, compare it with a real map of China because it's way too tough to get the place names clear on here.

I know most of you have been reading this for a while, but just as a refresher I'm studying in Harbin, that's way up in the northeast. On this map, it's the red dot that's the second farthest from the top. The northernmost red dot happens to be my current location, my home away from home.

My home away from home belongs to the parents of Jin Chao, my roommate in Harbin. It's been in the works for quite a while now that I'd be spending the spring festival, also known as the Chinese new year, with Jin Chao's family. This happens to be really great for a few reasons.

First, traveling would be really difficult during and around spring festival. It's the most important holiday for the Chinese, something like Thanksgiving and Christmas on the same day. The upshot is, almost everyone in the country packs up their things wherever they happen to be and hop on a train to go home. This happens in the week or two leading up to the big day, February 18th this year (the date floats around depending on the old Chinese calendar). Everyone stays home for a week or more to celebrate the new year, then heads back to wherever they were. With so many people on trains, it becomes extremely difficult to get a ticket and very cramped on the trains. I've heard horror stories that scared me out of even considering it - loooong rides, standing room only, so many people it's impossible even to move to the toilet. Buses are the same. Plane tickets are relatively easy to get due to the cost being too high for your average college student or worker, but that makes them a little on the expensive side for me as well. All this means that I need a place to hunker down during the rush, dubbed "chun yun", or the spring movement, and reported on heavily by the Chinese media.

Second, who wants to be traveling when all the action is happening on a single family level all over China? This stuff is way more interesting than some historical landmark or unique mountain. This is real people doing what they do to celebrate their most important holiday. I'm going to watch ancient traditions mesh with pop culture and local customs. Based on Jin Chao's excited accounts of previous years festivities, we'll be lighting fireworks, watching the new year's countdown TV program featuring China's best entertainers, and making jiaozi to be eaten at midnight.

Third, Jin Chao's family makes wicked good food all the time, not just on the new year. I know that first hand. We were greeted by a real feast when we got here. The table was covered with all the northeastern dishes I've grown to love, each as good or better than any I've eaten before. Amazing. This is my third day here, and all three I've been stuffed with similar fare.

I definitely felt like I'd be imposing by staying here so long, maybe three weeks, but Jin Chao assured me over and over that it would be great to have me. I'm doing what I can to soften the impact; I bought gifts in Yunnan for his parents, and I'm speaking a lot of English with Jin Chao and his cousins. I feel like I'm giving them something valuable with the English, trivial as it may be to me personally. I'm not able to speak it in Harbin with Jin Chao because of the language pledge, which doesn't apply now since we're between semesters. He is a great sport about it while I'm not allowed, but like every other Chinese student he really would like to improve his English. I can take the opportunity of this lengthy stay to even the score a bit. His cousins are the same way. Their parents love sending them to hang out with Jin Chao and I. Foreign English teachers are rare and valuable, and me just hanging out with them is even better. One of Jin Chao's cousins is 17 years old attending a top quality high school of more than 1000 students. The whole place just has one native english speaker, and here I am with just the few of them talking about whatever they want to.

I can't remember what I've written in the past about Jin Chao. He's great. I have a hard time relating to many Chinese people. On bad days I feel like the cultural gap is more like a chasm filled with frustrating misunderstandings, endless questions, and gawking Chinese faces. Jin Chao is a very important bridge over that chasm. There's a tradition in China of hiding true feelings behind a mask, saying one thing while thinking another. This mask can be impenetrable, but it seems Jin Chao never had one or at least takes it off for me. I find him to be wholly Chinese, yet extraordinarily perceptive about Western ideas and attitudes and willing to accept and adapt to them. He is a great listener and an endless source of insights about all things Chinese. We've had some surprisingly deep conversations, both of us (I think) revealing our true thoughts about life in general and the chasm we both recognize. It's a great exchange, neither of us giving up our own roots but always hungry for and respectful of the other's perspective. Perhaps the most important aspect is the willingness to be absolutely frank. Maybe it's an unfair bias, but I feel like a lot of Chinese are uncapable of this type of connection with me as a foreigner. I'm just too...foreign. Jin Chao and I have gotten past that. I guess there's a simple way to describe our relationship. We're friends.

Most of Jin Chao's great qualities extend to the rest of his family. There's a big extended network of uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents who all live near each other and spend a lot of time together. Jin Chao's parents are doing well financially, which makes me feel a lot better about staying here so long. They own and live in a commercial facility which offers a bathhouse, massages, rooms for the night, and meals. His dad also owns a factory producing coal blocks and is a partner in another factory.

I'm staying in one of the rooms with Jin Chao and another friend of ours from Harbin who came to visit for a week or so. After the feast our first night here, we cleaned up in the bathhouse area. I took a shower and spent time in the big soaking tubs. The whole place is separated male/female so everyone was completely naked, including us and some other customers. I was a little taken aback at one the services offered by the bathouse. As I showered I saw a customer lay down on a table in the middle of the room. A thong-clad male attendant produced a special cloth and gave the customer a thorough, cleansing, probably exfoliating rubdown from head to toe. As I finished up in the tub I was encouraged by Jin Chao's father to take advantage of the service myself. In response to my initial reluctance, Jin Chao's dad went on and on about how comfortable and relaxing it would be after so much traveling. I'm sure he was just trying to overcome my politeness, thinking I didn't want to take advantage of his hospotality. I couldn't help chuckling at how far off the mark he was. After my continued rebuttals he gave in to Jin Chao's explaination that us foreigners will say what me mean, and I wasn't just being polite. I'm pretty sure he wasn't convinced though, and never lost that puzzled look. Why wouldn't I want to partake in something so luxuriously relaxing, especially when it was free? It truly was beyond his comprehension; laying naked on a table getting a rubdown from thong-man would be slightly uncomfortable for me. To be honest, it would probably feel great and maybe I should just get over my un-Chinese inhibitions. I'll think it over.

I hate to leave everyone with that story, but I need to wrap this up. I'll try to get back to the internet cafe soon to write about a few of the interesting things that have happened in the last month. Even if I don't, the pictures are up so you can go see them if you're curious. I've started using the google version of online photo posting because the yahoo one was giving me trouble, so now there's two links to photos after each blog post, one for the early photos before my winter break and one for more recent photos. Don't worry, my camera wasn't with me in the bathhouse.

I get sick

I decided to head out of Xi'an a little earlier than planned. I was feeling vigorous and it felt like a waste to spend too much time in one place. In retrospect maybe this was a bad decision because as soon as I acted on it things started to go slightly wrong. I had decided to head for the Shaolin temple because 1) it's really cool and 2) it's on the way to Shanghai from Xi'an. I needed to be in Shanghai soon to meet my mom flying in from the states. Unfortunately the travel was a little tricky. After boarding the the train, I started to feel a little under the weather. My train got into Zhengzhou at 5am or some ungodly time in the morning, and then I had to hop a 2 hour bus to a smaller town near the temple. From that little place, it was another 30km or so to the area right next to the temple I'd decided to stay, based on my travel book's information. Probably due to my poor, interrupted night's sleep, feeling under the weather turned into a full blown cold/flu something by the time I got off the train. I pushed on.

I got off the bus in the small town at 7am and needed to go that last 30 km. A taxi driver lurking outside the station pounced, claiming there were no buses this time of year because it was the off season. I didn't believe him and pulled out my book to double check. Sure enough, there were supposed to be buses. He insisted, so I decided I'd ask an employee of the station. To my surprise, his claim was backed up. Apparently, no buses. In frustration and feeling crappier and crappier, I climbed into his expensive taxi. The whole ride, he was talking about how he'd never try to cheat me, of course he was telling the truth. He wasn't offended I didn't believe him at first. He liked talking to foreigners. Some Chinese will say one thing and mean another, but he always deals straight with people. As I found later, a big line of BS. I might have caught on early enough to avoid the whole situation if it weren't for my exhaustion.

He took me to a place he said was about 200 meters from the gate to the Shaolin Temple. Just around the next bend. I negotiated for the room with a heater, and was all set with an overpriced room by 8:30am. Originally, I'd planned on going to the temple that day but decided I needed a little nap. I was in bed until 5pm, when I got up freezing cold and feeling sicker but more awake. The heater hadn't worked and it was extremely chilly. I went out to the unheated "lobby" (read: room with a couple tables and chairs) and got some noodles, then decided to take the short walk to the temple. It turned out to be a solid kilometer with many other places to stay between mine and the gate. Fuming but helpless, I imagined their powerful central heating systems and soft, inexpensive beds.

The temple had closed for the day, so I walked back and read for a while. I fell asleep about 9pm with the heater finally working and slept straight through until 9 the next morning. Since my mom's plane ticket said this was to be my last day, I resolved not to waste it despite my head and lungs being stuffed with mucus. This turned out to be a great decision. My luck turned around at that point, except for that mucus hanging around for the next four weeks or so. I'm still hacking up the last of it as I write this.

He took me to a place he said was about 200 meters from the gate to the Shaolin Temple. Just around the next bend. I negotiated for the room with a heater, and was all set with an overpriced room by 8:30am. Originally, I'd planned on going to the temple that day but decided I needed a little nap. I was in bed until 5pm, when I got up freezing cold and feeling sicker but more awake. The heater hadn't worked and it was extremely chilly. I went out to the unheated "lobby" (read: room with a couple tables and chairs) and got some noodles, then decided to take the short walk to the temple. It turned out to be a solid kilometer with many other places to stay between mine and the gate. Fuming but helpless, I imagined their powerful central heating systems and soft, inexpensive beds.

The temple had closed for the day, so I walked back and read for a while. I fell asleep about 9pm with the heater finally working and slept straight through until 9 the next morning. Since my mom's plane ticket said this was to be my last day, I resolved not to waste it despite my head and lungs being stuffed with mucus. This turned out to be a great decision. I had a sweet day at the temple which words wouldn't do well describing. I've been having trouble uploading pictures lately but I'll get them up as soon as I can. My luck turned around at that point, except for that mucus hanging around for the next four weeks or so. I'm still hacking up the last of it as I write this.