Snap! Crackle! Pop! Happy Year of the Dragon

Happy Chinese New Year, everyone. It was quite an exciting couple days. Let me recap them for you.

First, things all began last week, as everyone in Guangzhou bought their orange trees.

the orange tree in our lobby

Then it was finally Spring Festival Eve. A local coworker invited a few of us to her home for dinner and dumpling wrapping. She is from northeast China and has her mother living with her, so suffice it to say, the food was excellent and abundant. She kept feeding us. To ward off the chill in the air, she made bowls of hot water cooked with apples and hawthorn. I think I drank about a gallon. All right, that’s an exaggeration, but it was delicious.

My coworker, Michelle

While we were there, the CCTV New Year’s Gala began. This is four and a half hours of glittery spectacle that puts Las Vegas to shame. Speaking of putting things to shame, let’s talk about viewer numbers. The Superbowl is coming up soon in America, and we often talk about it as the most watched live broadcast ever. Wikipedia tells me that about 93 million people watch the Superbowl. Wikipedia also tells me that about 700 million people watch the Gala. Scale, my friends. Scale. You need a new one when you talk about China.

one of several displays at one of several giant malls

Now, I can’t really follow China television too well. The  Gala includes music, comedy, magic, skits, Chinese opera, and acrobatics. The opera and music I never understand, magic and acrobatics are refreshingly non-verbal, and as for comedy, just imagine me sitting in front of the TV with an expression somewhere between listening intensely and extreme confusion. At best, I take so long to actually comprehend a joke that by the time I think I know why it’s funny, it’s way past time to laugh. Ah, well. I still enjoyed it.

can you tell which ones are mine?

While we watched, we made some dumplings. No matter how many times people show me how to pleat a perfect edge, I am just miserable at it. My best efforts aren’t so bad, but it takes me about a minute and a half to fold. Meanwhile, the expert next to me has made about six. Alas.

But, as everyone points out, it doesn’t really matter what it looks like as long as you seal the edge so it doesn’t burst open while boiling. It’s true. They may be a little lumpy and misshapen, but they were delicious.

To get home, we walked a while through the cool night, passing close to the flower fair. I didn’t get a chance to go, but friends who did report it was a colorful, riotous mass of people, flowers, fish, and pinwheels. Pinwheels are for catching evils spirits and for casting back luck out. They are everywhere, in every size and color.

flower pinwheel

I hopped a bus for the last leg of the journey. The TVs on the bus were showing the Gala.

When I got home, it was about 10pm, so I turned on the Gala and made a cup of cocoa. I have to admit, this is the first time we’ve turned on our television. The batteries in the remote were dead and stuck in the casing, so we ignored it for a long time, but I finally pried out the old batteries with a screwdriver and replaced them.

At midnight, there was a countdown and then it was cheerful noise and happiness. Then there were several explosions outside my window. There were fireworks in the distance, mostly hidden by skyscrapers, but also firecrackers being setting off somewhere in my near vicinity. There is a New Year’s monster that comes to terrify/possibly eat children at Spring Festival, but luckily is it driven off by loud noises and the color red. Hence firecrackers. Then, someone just outside my window set off a few fireworks. I’ll tell you, looking down at fireworks is an interesting angle.

fireworks

Really, though, we saved fireworks for Spring Festival evening. First, a large group of us went out for hotpot (yum) and then meandered down to the southern side of the river, near the Shangri-la Hotel, to watch the show with about a million other people (I may be exaggerating. It might have been only 300,000 people or so.). They were, hands down, the most impressive live fireworks I’ve ever seen.

I think that about sums it up, except to say firecrackers are still going off at random times, the oranges on the orange trees turn out to be edible (bitter, but “good for your throat”), and the city is weirdly empty feeling at times (everyone has gone home for the holidays. It makes you realize how many people “from away” live in this city). Oh, and I’d like to remind all my fellow Dragons out there to cheer up. It may be a bad-luck year for us, but we can avert disaster by wearing red underwear. Everyday. From now until February 10, 2013. Yeah, good luck.

another dragon display at another mall

10 Things

This week is the first week of winter camp classes, so I apologize in advance for having little to say and not much time to say it. Chinese schools are out for vacation for 3-4 weeks for Spring Festival. Now, what this means at my company is that we have special intensive classes on weekdays for three weeks. Students come for 3 hour classes four days a week. What this means for us teachers is that we have one day off  instead of two, and 12 extra hours of teaching per week. Ah, well. It is the job and I will do it. What this means for you (three? four?) readers is that this week's post is basically just a list of things that I've thought about writing here but haven't really had reason to include. Next week, we do have a week off for the holiday, so expect some lovely pictures of Chinese New Year next week.

10 Things You Don't Know About My Life in Guangzhou

1. People sell things from blankets and little stands on the pedestrian overpasses. Today for sale: calligraphy supplies, pencil cases, slippers, Spring Festival trinkets and decor, "traditional" bric-a-brac, roasted sweet potatoes, scarves, and cell phone minute cards.

2. My students, of all ages, say "oh my Lady Gaga" instead of "oh my God." It's up there with "no why" and "so-so" as phrases they use every day that I'm not sure they're aware that native speakers don't use.

3. The streets currently look like an orange grove. Apparently, Guangdong's tradition for Spring Festival is to have an orange tree (much like we have Christmas trees). Because oranges resemble old copper money, they are a symbol of money/wealth, thus orange tree=money tree. But, they die after a few months and my students tell me it's a major trash disposal problem for the city.

4. The air quality is bad, but you don't really notice it after a while.

5. It's the light pollution that is the worst.

6. Going out for dim sum is really fun but it takes about three hours. You just don't notice the time passing, you're having so much fun with a big group of friends.

7. You can watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report online without a VPN for free. You can also watch WCSH6's weather report, if you're really curious about Maine's winter weather forecast. Have you ever noticed how much of a Maine accent Joe Cupo has?

8. Students and foreign coworkers alike are fascinated by American gun laws.

9. The thing I love most about living in the city is all of the children. Especially today, when the weather is nice and they're on vacation, our courtyard garden is full of children playing. Badminton, little bicycles, soccer, tag, the indecipherable games kids make up that only make sense to them -- you name it, they're doing it. They're cute. It's heartwarming.

10. I am taller than my showerhead. It's awkward.

Well, that's about all I have to say. My vegan chocolate cake (made in a pie tin-that-isn't-a-pie tin) has just dinged in my little tabletop oven and I really want to try it.

I Saw it in a Movie Once

Or, Everything I know about Chinese weddings I learned from watching Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. However, as we all know (either because you’ve seen it [you really should, it’s hilarious] or because you just Googled it) it actually takes place in New York. Also, it is nearly 20 years old. And, the eponymous wedding banquet is a sham marriage, anyway. So really, it’s not exactly the fictional work off of which to base one’s understanding of reality.

(Every sentence in the above paragraph starts with a conjunction. I’m sure Strunk, White, and Philip B. Corbett, the New York Times editor in charge of style, are in great intellectual pain about this fact, but it was entirely coincidental and too funny, so I am leaving it as is.)

The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) Don't they look happy?

Getting back to the topic at hand, why am I so interested in Chinese weddings today? To make a long story short, I had the opportunity to attend a wedding banquet last Thursday evening, and I was nervous and excited about what to expect. This is when I realized that despite four years of formally studying China, I had never learned about modern wedding culture. Tariff laws, revolutionary ballet, the introduction of fast food culture, and avant garde performance art: yes; but weddings: no.

Here’s what I did know: a Chinese wedding banquet is the main event. Unlike Western Judeo-Christian/secularized weddings, where the church (beach, ski slope, fake bridge of the Enterprise  set) ceremony is the main event and the reception is just the fun part afterward, there is no important public ceremony. There are still legal documents to sign and whatnot, but there is really no need to swear eternal love and fidelity before God/etc if you don’t believe in God/etc (which is not to say that there are no Chinese Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc, but I imagine they have their own modifications to general tradition).

Then there are wedding photos. In America, people who have professional photos taken usually have them taken the day of the wedding. In China, you have them taken in advance and have them displayed at the wedding banquet (in nice weather, you can see people all over the scenic spots of the city having wedding photos taken). Then you have more photos taken at the wedding banquet itself. A coworker who is married to a Chinese woman mentioned that they had over 5,000 photos from their wedding (side note: I think digital photography has made us really lazy about photography. Also, who is going to look at 5,000 photos? So what was the point?).

The Wedding Banquet (Ang Li, 1993). Of course, if your wedding photos looked like this, I can see why you'd avoid looking at them.

Now, there are sadly no photos of the wedding in this post. Alas, while I remembered my camera, I forgot to grab my SD card out of my computer. So I was limited to the 9 photos I could store on my camera’s internal memory (I had to delete the ones I found there to make room – they were from my own 18^th birthday. Seriously, friends: these pictures had been languishing there, forgotten, since the day I got the camera.) Anyway, I did take a few pictures, but unfortunately, I did not bring my camera’s cable to China with me, since I usually just transfer photos directly off the SD card.

The banquet itself was fantastic. We arrived as a large group of coworkers, about an hour late. We tried for a long time to get a cab, but it was peak rush hour and that failed miserably, so we eventually squeezed onto the subway to the nearest stop and then hot-footed it to the restaurant. Mind you, most of us woman are wearing nice clothes and high heels, and it’s raining and cold. Bleah. Although we were late, we were not the latest arrivals and in fact we had quite a bit of time to settle in and pose for photos with the bride and groom before things got underway. The menu consisted of several very traditional dishes, and it was all delicious. Add shark fin soup to the list of things I’ve tried (although my internal ethicist debated hard about whether to try it. But the try-anything-once part of me won out). Verdict: it’s not good enough to overcome the ethical concerns. We also had whole roasted pig, fish (homonym for abundance), and lobster. First off, this lobster was way over the legal size limit in Maine. Second, have you ever tried to eat slippery sauce-covered lobster with chopsticks? While wearing nice clothes? Yeah. Not for the chopstick novice. I had to use my fingers. It was not pretty, but it was delicious.

The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) Actually the drinking in the film is crucial to the plot.

There was also quite a bit of drinking. The wedding party goes table to table and engages their guests in various toasts, and guest get up and find the bride and groom and engage them in various toasts. I managed to not drink much but good heavens, the best man (well, I assume he was the best man. He seemed to be good friends with the groom and seemed to be part of the wedding party) was as boisterous as a Bowdoin student on Friday night.

Last, but certainly not least in terms of how much I agonized over it, wedding gifts. In China, you give a red envelope full of money, much like you give to children at Chinese New Year, except with more money. But how much money? I googled it, but to no avail. Most of the information was for Chinese-American/Canadian weddings. I knew I needed to avoid anything with fours (sounds like ‘to die’) and that eights (sounds like ‘fortune’) and nines (sounds like ‘long-lasting’) are good luck. Also, much like at American weddings, closer friends and family are expected to give more than more distant friends/coworkers, but really, how much?

Well, I did get an answer, and I gave over my red envelope at the door, after writing my name on it. Then later, the bride and groom came around and thanked us and gave us unmarried folk back our envelopes with a little bit of cash inside. This was a new tradition for my Chinese-American coworker, and through questioning, we determined this was possibly a Cantonese tradition (but don’t quote me on that).

Overall, it was a lovely evening. There were certainly at least 200 guests, the bride wore three different beautiful dresses over the course of the evening, there was fun and merriment, and I wish the happy couple a long and wonderful life together.

The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) They have a long and wonderful life together. I'll leave you to determine who I mean when I say "they."

Before I go, in unrelated news, yesterday marked six months since I arrived in Guangzhou. Sometimes I wonder if I’m having the adventure I set out to have. Sometimes I just want to be home. Sometimes I still marvel that I live in a foreign country on the other side of the world. Sometimes I wonder if this experience has changed me. Well. In any case, six months down and six to go!

The Years Keep Coming

Happy 2012, everyone. Where did 2011 go? I spent the first five months of the year in northern Maine, one month in southern Maine, and the last six months in Guangzhou.  How time flies.

Now, you might have notice from the title of this blog post that I had Smash Mouth's "All Star" stuck in my head today. A little quality time with Google has informed me that the song was released in 1999. This makes me feel a bit old, as I can remember that song coming out and being on the radio all the time. Google also tells me that Smash Mouth peaked around Y2K and hasn't really done too much in the last six or seven years. Ah, well, things change. Now we have Justin Bieber instead of the Backstreet Boys and Lady Gaga instead of Britney Spears. I think I'll stick to folk music.

There really isn't much to say about the last four days. On New Years Eve, I went out with some coworkers and friends-of-friends for Indonesian food. Then we stopped by a dim sum place for dessert (yum, sweet bao filled with egg yolk custard). Then we went down to the riverside and walked along it down to the Canton Tower. It was lit up and pretty as ever, but I didn't realize we were going down there, so I didn't take my camera. We found a little restaurant near the festivities with big screens showing the magic show/etc going on inside the tickets-only area and we sat and had popcorn and drinks while we waited for midnight. Midnight itself was... anticlimactic. Other than the happy new year wishes of fellow tables, there were no fireworks and no Auld Lang Syne or equivalent. We walked home in a flood over other revelers and thus began a new year.

And, of course, I get another new year in a little less than three weeks. Everyone assures me that Spring Festival is when Guangzhou has fireworks. All the little paper goods stores have grown riotous displays of red and gold decorations seemingly overnight. When asked about their hopes and dreams for the new year in class this week, most of my students expressed a desire for lots of "lucky money" (red envelopes full of money that adults give to children during Chinese new year). It looks and sounds like it will be quite fun. On the other hand, next year is the year of the dragon, which is my sign. Alas, superstition dictates that it will be an unlucky year for me. Only time will tell if this is true, but considering my 2012 new year resolution is to worry less, and work on the pursuit of happiness, I think I will not worry unduly about it.