From Chinese patients demanding (and receiving!!) I.V. antibotics for viruses to the local “businessman mentality” among expats who smoke, drink, and sleep around way more than they ever would at home, the good doctor at MyHealthBeijing.com introduces us to the differences he encounters practicing Western medicine in China: “An American Doctor In China: What’s Different?”
Western N.G.O’s sometimes struggle with the ingrained sense of hierarchy in which their Chinese colleagues naturally operate. This little article contains some words of wisdom for egalitarian-minded expats working with Chinese colleagues.
Tonight is 元宵节 (yuán xiāo jié, a.k.a. the Lantern Festival), the last big fireworks night of Spring Festival. This is our living room (4th floor) around 9pm — you can imagine the noise.
We partied it up too hard during all the other days of Spring Festival (photo galleries will be up soon!), so tonight we’re staying in nursing Lilia’s and Jessica’s colds. By this time (15 days into Spring Festival) the fireworks have long since changed from fun to annoying. We’ll be glad for the relative peace and quiet after the fireworks season is over.
Other fireworks posts:
One of our Chinese friends in Vancouver has a blog post about the Olympic atmosphere in Vancouver (in Chinese) and photos from downtown:
It’s time for preemptive voodoo dumplings!
My younger, university age students couldn’t tell me anything about this, but my older students (over 45) got the biggest kick out of explaining it — it was the same with Mr. Sòng two Spring Festivals ago when they invited us over for dinner on 初五，the 5th day of Spring Festival.
Traditionally on the 5th day of Spring Festival (初五), no one visits anyone in the evening and parents would make their kids come back before dark. The evening of the 5th day is for “beating the petty people” (打小人), who, my students explained, are those infuriating neighbours or coworkers who oppose you in secret, messing up your affairs without you knowing who’s behind it. So there’s a whole traditional custom during Spring Festival using dumplings as voodoo dolls to preemptively give trouble to anyone who might secretly give you trouble in the new year.
Chūwǔ (初五), like chúxī (除夕), is an evening of dumplings and fireworks. According to this tradition, the dumplings and fireworks on chūwǔ are for beating your future petty people. Specifically:
Hong Kong is famous for 打小人 as a paid service — you go under overpasses and pay someone to chop for you.
Other stuff about “beating petty people” in China:
Other stuff about celebrating Chinese New Year’s:
The guy in the stationary shop by our front gate says our daughter is “our neighbourhood’s little superstar.” I love showing off our little “foreign doll” (洋娃娃); she deserves all the attention no matter what country she’s in!
But sometimes the friendly little crowds that occasionally form around her can be too much. Especially when total strangers try to stick their fingers in our daughter’s mouth to make her smile! When I come home from work on the subway I always wash my hands before I play with her; there’s no way we’re letting random dàjiěs fresh out of the càishichǎng stick their fingers right in her mouth!
And that’s where this post’s foreign-baby-in-China essential comes in: āyí finger-blockers.
We have an Erogobaby baby backpack (they really ought to pay me for this!), and it has this very convenient lǎotàitàis-who-want-to-stick-their-fingers-in-foreign-babys’-mouths-finger-blocking device. It’s not in any of these photos because in winter the snowsuit does almost as good a job, but this baby carrier has a panel of fabric that you can button over the baby’s head when she’s sleeping. She doesn’t get distracted and people can’t get at her.
These photos are from today at Tianjin’s 古文化街。Lilia would not stop drawing friendly crowds! It was fun and she was smiling at everyone, but I was glad for the big snowsuit hood that she could hide behind and sleep behind when she needed to.
Related stuff:
Other foreign baby in China essentials:
The only thing more amazing than the fireworks on our street last night (Chinese New Year’s Eve) — I won’t even try to describe them, you’d have to see, hear, and feel it to believe it — is the fact that our eight month old daughter slept right through them.
Last night and today are the most special time of the year for Chinese. Last night families crowded the streets in our area to set off an unbelievable amount of fireworks in between family meals, and today (Chinese New Year’s Day) they’ll eat in or out in great Spring Festival family banquets — the restaurants are all packed full. It’s the annual family reunion, which in its ideal form embodies fú, or blessing/good fortune. I’ll let someone more qualified than me explain.
In The Chinese Have a Word For It, Boyé Lafayette De Mente spends most of his chapter on fú talking about Chinese food and banquets:
There is a famous Chinese saying that shíwù (食物) or food is heaven to a peasant, a stark reminder that throughout most of Chinas history the specter of starvation was a constant companion to the majority of the people.So compelling was the threat of hunger that the Chinese used the symbols of a cultivated field and a mouth integrated with heaven, representing a full stomach, to mean fú (福), or happiness.
Today the ideogram for happiness is one of the most popular “good luck charms” in the country, and is familiar to patrons of Chinese restaurants around the world.
The role that food plays in Chinese life is one fo the most conspicuous and important aspects of their culture, and one that can be fully enjoyed by outsiders as well after only a few minutes of orientation.
A Chinese meal served and eaten Chinese style is a tableau of the culture in action, graphically depicting the hierarchical order within the family or the group, the etiquette that controls their behavior, and the substance of their relationships.
The typical Chinese meal eaten in a restaurant — and the Chinese love to eat out — is an even more dramatic representation of Chinese culture. Evening meals in particular are typically banquet style, a thanksgiving for the food and a celebration of family ties and the bonds of friendship.
Unlike some Western cultures that require people to eat quietly and quickly, when a typical Chines family or group eats out it is a noisy, lengthy affair, brimming with the hubbub of humor and ribaldry.
To the Chinese, the banquet table is more than just a convenient meeting place for a meal. It is the place where they confirm their cultural identity and just as important if not more so, enjoy fú and their Chineseness to the fullest.
It is around the informal banquet table that the Chinese let their formal hair down, nurture the bonds of old relationships, and make new ones. The informal banquet table is thus a doorway — the only easily accessible doorway — to the inner circle of Chinese life.
Outsiders wanting to establish close relationships with Chinese … must eventually enter this “doorway to happiness.”
(If anyone of consequence has a problem with me quoting this much text, just let me know and I’ll remove it.)
We had our own little fú-fest last night with friends and family:
Other stuff about celebrating Chinese New Year’s:
Albert at LaowaiChinese.net has a whole post on how to write your contributions to the 19 billion Spring Festival greeting texts that will be sent this year.
In Chinese you can’t simply chainj the speling of senserd werds to sumthing mor fonetik to avoid getting caught by internet filtering because, of course, you don’t spell in Chinese. Using replacement, homophonic or nearly-homophonic characters can work to a point, like writing “river crabs” (héxiè) instead of “harmonious” (héxié), but there’s an even more creative method for one-upping internet senser ship software: pulling characters apart into pieces.
We both write, but Jessica only writes when I bribe her. See all of her posts here.
Pronounced: guó bǎo
Literally: National Security/National Treasure
Means: The two terms are homophones, and "national treasure" often means "panda". A writer at Seeing Red in China explains the rest: "how panda becomes the symbol for Chinese security thugs: Chinese national security (more like secret police) is called 国保 (guó bǎo) for short, and it’s pronounced exactly the same as 国宝, national treasure. Netizens sometimes refer 国保 as 国宝, jokingly, hence Panda, China’s national treasure. Kungfu Panda movies provided the basis for Panda to be a martial character."
With the recent confrontation between Batman actor Christian Bale and some infamous Chinese security thugs, online Chinese are been passing around "Pandaman vs. Batman" jokes, and photoshopping "Pandaman" into all kinds of scenarios, including movie posters and images from other security embarrassments and scandals. See here, here and here for more.
- 2011/12/19
Those aren't Chinese New Year's fireworks; they're "recreational munitions"
From Nankai Rob's Chinese New Year 2012 post "Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load":
"...parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions."
For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:
Happy Chinese New Year!
- 2012/01/22
Tension rising with Mainland students in American universities
Interesting observations at China Law Blog about how Mainland Chinese students studying in the USA -- in contrast to Chinese from other countries -- are apparently generating a lot of anger among the American students: Chinese Students In America. It's Bad Out There.
It seems that Mainland Chinese attitudes toward education don't play well among their American classmates. For example:
"They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate."
"One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again."
- 2012/01/11
A brief introduction to Watchman Nee & the Little Flock Movement
You've maybe heard the name "Watchman Nee" before. That's because he founded one of the largest Christian groups in Chinese history before dying in a Chinese labour camp. Here's a summary of a longer article on him and his work, with a link to the PDF of the original article: Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China
A basic understanding of the place of Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Chinese history adds some helpful nuance to understanding the relationships between the Party, Chinese Christianity, the TSPM, and Chinese patriotism and anti-foreignism.
- 2011/12/29
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