Pronounced: nóng cūn
Means: a rural village.

One of our school’s directors knows a guy who knows a guy who is apparently somebody of consequence in this village, because they arranged for us and our classmates to get distributed among different village families for a morning and lunch. It was a little over an hour’s ride outside the city with about 3000 people, but it felt like stepping into another world – not that Tianjin doesn’t already feel like another world sometimes. Jessica, myself, one other student, and one of our teachers met our village family around 10am. We chatted, went for walk around the village to see the ‘supermarket’ (by village standards, I guess) that the son owns (this family is among the well-to-do in this village), had lunch around 1pm, and headed back. Took a million photos, and got better shots than usual – lots of people-pictures this time; people are always more interesting to me than places. There’s a few photos below, plus the full photo gallery, and a few seconds of cute video (getting swarmed by kids and Jessica holding a baby).

Something to keep in mind: The last figures I saw said that 900 million Chinese (the vast majority) are from the countryside, while a mere 400 million are urbanites. Our hosts today quoted the same numbers. Yet most of the West’s contact (news media, English teachers, language students, etc.) is with a minority within the urban minority – the relatively few rich and/or educated who have some decent English skills. So our view of China in the English speaking world is a bit skewed. Most Chinese don’t live in cities.

Split-pants are most definitely the apparel of choice for babies in this village. Most people seemed excited that we were there; having a couple foreigners visit is apparently big-ish deal.

Lunch with the son and his little brother (that’d be Mr. Wang and Mr. Wang). There were other family members around, but they didn’t eat with us. We talked and ate in the kè tīng (客厅), which is kind of like a living/dining/drawing/entrance room for entertaining guests.

Houses and apartments aren’t arranged like they are in North America, nor are priorities the same when it comes to home design and repair. This family’s kè tīng is about the same size as our entire apartment (we also have a kè tīng, but it’s tiny, and most Westerners probably assume it’s like a landing, where you take off your shoes and hang your coats). It was really nice, with a high ceiling, painted, clean, shelves with books and photos and trinkets, a huge engraved mirror, TV, stereo system… all very impressive, especially considering what we’d just seen outside. The rest of the house – the family part, or non-guest part – was pretty spartan by comparison, but not entirely. They sleep on kàngs (炕), which are brick beds heated from underneath by a pipe system that runs from a coal stove in the kitchen. But what surprised us was when the girls asked to use the washroom (it had been kind of a long bus ride right after breakfast). The wife led them out of the house to her neighbours’, apparently trying to find friends who had a washroom, but she gave up after ten or fifteen minutes. Then she finally led them back to the house and through a bunch of rooms into a walled courtyard (this house had at least two such private, outdoor courtyards). She showed them a panel of wood leaning against part of the wall in one corner, behind which was the ‘washroom.’ She was terribly embarrassed, but once Jessica returned and smiled and didn’t make any big deal about it, and the other student and our teacher didn’t seem to mind, she seemed much relieved. I feel bad almost, bringing it up, and I only bring it up because it is so curious to me the way they seem to have prioritized the house – a fancy kè tīng but facilities that, honestly, rank below most of the choos we used when staying with village families in rural Africa (who didn’t have the means to improve the situation).

Picking cotton, and shucking corn. This cotton lady was really friendly and stopped to talk. It was corn harvesting time in this village; the streets were lined with small mountains of corn and corn husks, and it seemed that the job of shucking the corn belonged to the elderly.

Many front gates were decorated this way; front entrances are important. The second photo is from the side street our family lives on, and a pile of corn husks in the foreground.

School got our for lunch while we were walking around, and our presence caused quite a stir among the elementary age kids. I love all the different expressions in this photo.

The full photo gallery is ready.

This Tuesday you should tell your Chinese friends, “zhōng qiū jié kuài lè!” (中秋节快乐！). Mouseover the pinyin for the translation, and click the characters for a dictionary with pronunciation sound files.

To the ignorant and mostly innocent foreign bystander, the Moon Festival (中秋节) is when everyone buys and gives mooncakes (月饼 / yuè bǐng), hence the nickname, “the Great Mooncake Exchange” (I’m betting a foreigner made that up). Most Chinese people I’ve talked to say they don’t really like mooncakes, but everyone still exchanges them. I guess it’s like what people in England and Canada used to do with fruitcake, only on a much more massive scale. This year the office gave the staff mooncakes, the apartment complex where the foreigners live gave each room a box of mooncakes, the school gave the teachers mooncakes, the teachers gave us mooncakes, we should have remembered to buy mooncakes to give to the teachers even though they would be destined for re-gifting, in Taibei they have ice-cream mooncakes… and this was all before 10am!

You’re supposed to go outside on 15th day of the 8th lunar month of the Chinese calendar with your family and eat mooncakes together while you enjoy the full moon in the crisp, autumn night. If it’s cloudy, then people might save the mooncakes ’til the next night. The downside is, mooncakes don’t taste as cool as they sound (the average mooncake, that is, not the special ice-cream ones). So much potential, but they just aren’t all that. The average moon cake is kind of dry – you need tea with it, weighs almost as much as a hockey puck, and you can smell the oil/preservatives. (That may sound picky, but we were at a friend’s house last weekend trying to figure out what kind of cooking oil he’d bought since we couldn’t recognize any of the characters on the label, and when I smelled it immediately said, “It smells like a mooncake.”) Anyway, inside they can have all manner of stuff from red bean paste to dried pork shavings to an egg yolk to “5 nuts” to mixed fruit pieces, to we don’t even know all what. People have started adding to the traditional varieties, but it seems like they were way more creative about it in Taipei. The outside is usually fancy, with designs and characters used in the molds. So far I’ve found two kinds of regular mooncakes that I really like.

Anyway, there’s a good (real) introduction to the Mid-Autumn Festival, aka Moon Festival, aka Great Mooncake Exchange, at Journal for Intercultural Learning:

The Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节 zhōngqiūjié), also known as the Moon Festival, is a popular celebration of abundance and togetherness, dating back over 3,000 years to China’s Zhou Dynasty. This day is also considered a harvest festival since fruits, vegetables and grain have been harvested by this time and food is abundant…

It’s worth checking out, especially if you have Chinese friends. For Chinese, this is one of the most important holidays of the year.

Pronounced: yuè bǐng
Means: mooncake

So, on Thursday we went with 40 other foreigners and a couple Mandarin teachers to see China’s women’s soccer team beat New Zealand 2-0 in the new Olympic stadium, and it pretty much rocked.

I got an old slogan banner from some of our neighbourhood’s more ‘official’ comrades (they wear red cloths around their arms), and we cut it up and painted it to make the karate kid head bands and two bigger banners. We mostly yelled 中国队加油! (Chinese team, add gas!)… they do it as a call and response. The banner in the photo says, 铿锵玫瑰加油! (Steel Roses, add gas!) The team’s name gets translated as the “Steel Roses,” but it’s hard to explain because it’s not literally steel, but the sound make by forcefully striking steel objects together… or something like that, only no doubt much more poetic. As long as you don’t think of redneck 80′s bands, “Steel Roses” gets the idea across I think.

One thing we didn’t expect was how people responded to us – a pile of foreigners cheering for China. Jessica, myself, and a fellow language student from Germany went early and waited just inside the stadium grounds for some of the others. We had our China stuff on, and I think had literally hundreds of photos taken of us. People would come up and ask to pose with us. And this happened continuously until we finally went to our seats. But then in our seats, we were loud and yelling and starting cheers and stuff, and the sections around us seemed tickled that we were going for China. After the game people came up to get even more photos. It was kind of weird, but I sure don’t feel bad anymore for all the photos I’ve taken of locals! ;)

Probably the coolest thing that happened all night was in the second half when little American girl, maybe 7 years old, started a cheer all by herself. All of a sudden this high, thin little voice cut through the chatter: 中国队! And we immediately responded: 加油! She kept it up, every time more and more people joined in, and the people in the sections around us turned around to look, and in the section next to us they started clapping for her! It was pretty cool.

Speaking of cool, here’s a fun kung-fu soccer ad for China’s 2003 women’s team. And here’s a video (in English) on this year’s China women’s team.

One more photo.

Pronounced: jiā yóu
Literally: add oil
Means: refuel; also what you say to encourage someone’s effort.

The Chinese staff at the office of the library where I’m studying today isn’t sure if people lit firecrackers inside the apartment next to ours this morning at 8am because they are moving in, or somebody’s died. Opinion seems to lean in favour of the moving-in theory, but I guess we’ll find out when we knock on the door and ask. But apparently if I straight up ask them if they’re moving house or someone’s died, they might punch me (amazing what a few months of Mandarin classes can get you!). We haven’t been sure for a while whether or not we even have neighbours, as we rarely see anyone going in there and when they do it looks like they’re showing the apartment to people. Maybe we finally have next-door neighbours!

Either way, tonight we’re going with 40+ other foreigners to cheer on China’s women’s World Cup soccer team in the new Olympic stadium, which is literally down the road. Pictures soon!

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night because I thought Jessica was talking to me. But then I realized she was just talking in her sleep. And then I realized she was speaking Chinese! And this wasn’t just the usual sleep-mumbling; this was loud, full sentences with clear diction just like she was wide awake speaking confidently to a room full of people. I have no idea if it made any grammatical sense or not because I didn’t stay awake long enough to try and figure out what she was talking about.

But next time I’m recording it with the camera’s sound setting and posting it on the blog. How cool would that be?!

Special Super Slogan September
Not only does this month’s slogan come with a free bonus slogan, it even includes free slogan educational material!

Each generation of China’s Communist rulers have defined their leadership with slogans, from catchy to obscure … these are more than just catch phrases — they define the goals of the nation.

The top red banner says:

倡导文明，告别陋俗，爱我家园
chàng dǎo wén míng, gào bié lòu sǔ, ài wǒ jiā yuán
“Advocate culture, bid farewell to vulgarity, love our home”

And the bottom red banner says:

让公共场所净起来， 让城区面貌美起来！
ràng gōng gòng chǎng suǒ jìng qǐ lái, ràng chéng qū miàn mào měi qǐ lái!
Let public cleanliness rise up, so the city’s beauty can rise up! (poor translation… sorry!)

This second slogan in particular has been hung in a lot of places around here lately. I can just totally see Miller lovin’ it if the U.S. government started hanging policy exhortations everywhere as a public service for his benefit! ;)

I’m trying to get one of our neighbourhood’s something-or-other committees (I think this one may be the “Sit around all day eating watermelon and drinking tea Committee”) to give me an old banner so we can cut it up for red karate-kid-style head bands… this Wednesday we’re going with 43 other people (mostly foreigner Mandarin students and some teachers) to cheer on China against New Zealand in the FIFA Women’s World Cup in the spanking new Olympic stadium they just opened down the road. We’re all sitting together, and we’re hoping to get on TV.

Today was one of the occasional almost-magical language learning afternoons. Not magical in the sense of comprehending unprecedented amounts of Mandarin conversation, but in the sense that the language practice was “effortlessly fun.”

After meeting with a bunch of other foreigners all afternoon to discuss how to be more culturally sensitive and appropriate and how to counter the common temptation to be culturally judgmental (among other things), I went with a foreigner friend to the old guys on the corner in our neighbourhood to get his bike fixed. It was busy, and there was a small crowd, and the old boys club was in fine form, ready for some good-natured messing-with of the foreigners. We kicked a jiàn zi around (“You kick jiàn zi bad!” “Oh, you don’t give me face!”), and they saw I had my guitar so they wanted an English song. Then they wanted a Chinese song, so I did the only one I know (“You sang wrong! It’s not missing ears; it’s missing a tail!”). The friend I was with is a big guy, so they wanted to know how much he weighs and if he lifts weights and some other personal questions that I couldn’t understand, and they were squeezing his arms and stuff. Nice to see someone else get the treatment! But with these guys it’s all in good fun, and on days where your tolerance levels for stuff like that are good (when you aren’t already tired and feeling the culture stress and just generally not in the mood), these guys are a total blast.

After a trip to the 菜市场 (where they had fake English Harry Potter books for less than $3, but I think they’re missing some chapters) Mr. Huì – the neighbour who nicked a kitten from the restaurant down the street after the one we found got stolen, and who strangely reminds me of my former 70-year-old American landlord with whom I and a classmate shared a house back in my undergrad bachelor days – tried to teach me how to use a sort of Chinese yo-yo thing that makes a really loud noise when you spin it fast enough, but I couldn’t decipher his Tianjin accent to understand the full name for it… 风something, maybe 风竹? It wasn’t a usual Chinese yo-yo. Anyway, we also heard a cricket while we were out walking, and asked the lady who was there if she had one. She did, and two of the newly arrived foreigners got to see their first Chinese pet cricket (which apparently seemed monstrously huge to one of them).

It may not sound like much, but being able communicate all that in Mandarin, albeit not perfectly, is really encouraging. This neighbourhood can really be a blast sometimes for language students.

So I traded our unwatchable, “rated R,” 65-cent copy of the latest Harry Potter movie for a different one, and here’s what it says on the back:

the acting is not really that good. Keanu Reeves is miscast in his role and a better actor could have done more with it…

Ah, China – it’s Harry Potter China-style!

I hope the Harry Potter series makes it huge in China and every kid grows up reading it (the real books, not “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince” or any of the other fake ones).

Why? (Thanks for asking!) Partly because the ever-present sub-surface rumble of culture stress, which is an unavoidable feature of living elsewhere, predisposes me to dislike certain aspects of Chinese culture that are most contrary to my own inherited values as a Westerner, and major themes of the Harry Potter series just happen to run directly contrary to said aspects of Chinese culture. It wouldn’t bother me personally if millions of Chinese children were influenced by those particular “foreign” values.

And partly – and more importantly – because at the end of the day I still buy the notion of absolute truth, moral absolutes, personal responsibility for one’s choices, and that personal agency can play a big, perhaps bigger, role in life on this planet than fate. These are major underlying themes in Harry Potter and I don’t believe they can be completely reduced to mere cultural products. Chinese culture traditionally, and still today among young people, emphasizes the opposite.

From everything we’ve seen, heard, and read, fatalism is still typically assumed in China, and is one of a few major influences perpetuating a legacy of avoiding personal responsibility like the plague, turning excuses for ethically questionable behaviour into moral maxims, and tolerating suffering or oppression with selfish, cynical indifference (ha, this might be the culture stress talking, just fyi). The work of 林语堂 (Lín Yǔtáng), who was critical of Chinese culture but (it seems) still preferred it Western culture, explains and illustrates this for Westerners in My Country and My People and Moment in Peking.

Joanne Rowling’s underlying messages, which become explicit at certain points, are directly contrary to deterministic fate and moral relativism. She manages to emphasize the importance of families and parents while at the same time arguing that a person’s character and identity, while highly influenced by their family, is ultimately self-determined by the choices they make. Family and parents are of utmost importance; Rowling takes great pains to demonstrate the importance of good parents and family life, and illustrates the impact of fathers and mothers on the character of their adult children. But for Rowling, a person’s inherited lot in life does not determine whether they will be good or bad. Everyone has both choices within them, and it’s how one chooses that ultimately determines the kind of person one becomes. And in Harry Potter, individuals are ultimately responsible for their own personal integrity, and personal integrity is clearly more important than securing wealth, power, security, prestige, etc. for oneself or one’s family.

I’m all for tempering popular Western notions of personal agency and “free” will with healthy doses of biology and family psychology. An unbalanced emphasis on personal agency too often results in judgments lacking in compassion, and besides, biology and nurture matter. But not to the point of completely dissolving choice and will. We can make real choices, and our choices can make a real difference. Sure, things in life happen beyond our control and we aren’t all dealt the same cards at birth, but acknowledging that is a far cry from adopting a fatalistic approach to life.