So despite my promises to update more frequently here we are again a month after my last update… Well I am yet again going to plead being ridiculously busy. Sorry about that.

As a side note before we Begin I am writing this from the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf near my house because I didn’t want to spend the day entirely at home. I can’t help but find it ironic that although Coffee Bean has yet to reach the east coast there are plenty in the eastern hemisphere… Well there you go.

I just finished up with the main Chinese School break which centers around Chinese New Years or Spring Festival （春节）as the Chinese call it. It was very carefully explained to me that Spring Festival does not actually occur during spring but that after spring festival spring can arrive. This was a point that needed clarification as we all spent spring festival in ski jackets… Thus this will be the Spring Festival edition of the blog:

Spring Festival is the big family holiday in China. Think Christmas, Thanksgiving, 4th of July, and New Years all rolled into one huge holiday for which the entire country is given a week of mandatory vacation. Every one returns to their ancestral home town, which creates a really interesting phenomenon. I knew that a lot of the people in Shanghai had moved to the city for work from other places, but suddenly for a week anyone with a family that hasn’t been in Shanghai for two generations or so just up and leaves. The city was EMPTY. It was actually somewhat creepy. I am used to going out bumping into six or eight people before I go two blocks and almost getting run down at least once. Suddenly I went out and there was no one on the sidewalk and the streets were empty. Shanghai practically became a ghost town.

A side point on the home town thing. The Chinese think your roots are really important. When you speak to Chinese people they will often ask where you are from. Not only of me, but of other Chinese, and they will answer not with where they live, but with where their family is from. Sometimes even people who are born in one place will answer with where there parents were born. They have two different words for hometown, one meaning where you were born, the other with meaning of your ancestral home. Chinese grammar emphasizes this as well. When asked where you are from the answer isn’t the place name, it is directly translated “I am (place name) person” making it part of your identity.

This makes Americans very confusing to the Chinese. I have talked with my host family several times about my heritage. I am definitely American, but I have European heritage, German on my mom’s side and French on my dad’s. My host dad informed me that because of this according to the Chinese I am French or maybe German, but not American. However, almost all of the American’s I know have a relatively recent ancestor who moved from another country. American is made up of many different Heritages, but the people largely consider themselves American. The Chinese find this beyond confusing. They believe that a person of Chinese heritage living anywhere in the world is still Chinese. They even have a phrase for it “all under the Yellow Emperor.” They have a particularly hard time understanding Chinese Americans, who look just like they do, but have an American thought process. They refer to them as “Bananas” because they are “yellow on the outside, but white on the inside” I promise that I’m not joking.

Now that tangent aside back to Spring Festival. What I planned on saying about it being a family holiday was that I split my time between my host mother and Father’s relatives. Historically the holidays were spent with the husbands family, but now they most families alternate years spending the first night of the holidays with one family and then the next year with the other.

This year the first night (think New Year’s Eve) was spent with my host father’s family in Suzhou. We drove out in the morning and then went dinner with the family in Suzhou. My name has now evolved from Mei Guo Jie Jie (American older sister) to Mei Jie which as with most things in the Chinese language is a play on words, and one that my extended host family is quite proud of themselves for. In this case I like the pun. Mei can stand for one of two compound words Mei Guo (美国) meaning America or Mei Li (美丽) meaning beautiful (the direct translation for America into Chinese is beautiful country).

Here is a slight tangent on puns in Chinese. You can’t have a language where every word has four or more meanings depending on tone without getting a culture based on puns. Many of the things that are considered lucky or unlucky are based on puns as well. For example the number four is considered unlucky. Some buildings in fact dons have fourth floors this is because in Chinese four is said “si” (四) however the verb to die is also “si” (死). Another example is that a couple is never supposed to share a pear. This is because a pear in Mandarin is “li” and so is the verb to separate…

The first night of Chinese New Year there is a TV program that the entire country witches put on by CCTV. When I got here I didn’t know what CCTV stood for so in my mind I nicknamed it Communist Chinese Television. It turns out it actually stands for Central Chinese Television… same same… although China is now officially no longer Communist… They now practice “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” Don’t ask me what that means. Anywho it was a pretty cool program, although my Chinese wasn’t really good enough to get most of the stand up comedy. I tried though.

A few months ago I read the book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze By Peter Hessler, a man who came as one of the first peace corp volunteers in the early 90s to teach English in China. I really enjoyed it and strongly suggest reading it if you have some free time. Anyway he talked about a Canadian comedian called Da Shan in China who had learned flawless Mandarin and often appeared on TV. In the book Hessler complains about people telling him how good Da Shan’s Chinese was all the time. I remember reading it and thinking “thank goodness he isn’t around anymore, that would drive me crazy!” Well About halfway through the New Years Program who should appear but Da Shan himself. I consequently spent the next week hearing about how good Da Shan’s Chinese is compared to mine. I almost started cracking up the first time I heard it. After that it wasn’t so funny anymore, and then it was really irritating. After the fifth time I heard it I was quite tempted to yell “if I had been living here for 25 years, I too would have flawless tones, however, seeing as I have now been here for five months, I am not surprised that I am not perfectly fluent yet, are you?”

The next day, on a solid four hours sleep we headed back to Shanghai. I think my host family might think that I am narcoleptic since every time they put me in a car I am almost instantly asleep… But lets face it whenever I am in a car with them I am usually massively sleep deprived and then they put me in a nice warm rocking environment. What am I supposed to do? That night we had dinner at my host Grandparents house which was fun as usual, although I was again stuffed to an almost unimaginable level of fullness, and that is a difficult thing to do now. Due to being continually overfed my stomach capacity has enlarged considerably and it is pretty hard to get me to the point where I can’t eat another bite. The problem is that they keep offering my delicious little snacks and new year’s candies…

The next day I went to Karaoke with my host family which was a complete blast. The Chinese love Karaoke, but I had never gone with my host family before. It was hilarious. My host father is probably the most enthusiastic and at the same time one of the worst singers I have ever heard. He was constantly asking Angel to crank up the background music. My host mother very decorously and yet adorably sang her songs, but the best thing was when my host mom and dad sang duets. It was precious beyond words. I took videos, and I will see if I can post them on the blog, I don’t know if it is possible. I sang Mamma Mia by ABBA somewhere towards the end and my host dad thought it was amazing. He spent the next week spontaneously shouting MAMMA MIA. I spent the next week spontaneously cracking up. That night we had dinner with my host uncle, his wife, and daughter.

For the third day of Chinese New Year I went on a trip to the countryside with my hot mom’s family. We got up at 4:30 in the morning so that we could be on our way by 5:30. We drove by my host grandparents to pick up the gang. It ended up with me and my host family as well as my host aunt and her son in the our car (which made four of us in the back seat of my host family’s tiny Volkswagen) while my host grandparents rode with my other host aunt and uncle and there son. We were lucky because the host cousin that rode in the car with us is incredibly sweet and fun to play with. My other host cousin is a little demon child.

We went and saw quite a bit of pretty scenery which I will spare you the description of. However, we hadn’t pre booked a hotel so we drove through three different towns and visited seven different hotels before my host dad and uncle found one that was deemed good enough for us. I was supposed to share a room with my host aunt and cousin while angel stayed with her parents, but she decided that our room was going to be the “fun room” and wanted to stay with us so we crammed the two twin beds together and slept four in them. It did end up being a blast. The rooms were slightly oddly set up, mainly in the fact that the shower was a large window to the rest of the room so if you didn’t want to engage in massive over-share you had draw a two shower curtains, one to block the window, and one to contain the water…

There is a clear divided in China between city and country people, but this trip with my host family was one of the more dramatic demonstrations I have seen of it. In Shanghai you see a lot of scorn for the country side (农村). For one the one child policy has been relaxed in the country side. I was talking to the woman who comes a few times a week to do the house work for my host family. She has two children and said that people think that she is stupid for having to children and that her children are by definition stupid. This has created a huge issue for China. The population statistics show that when the current generation of children become adults that the population, especially in the cities, is going to become dangerously unbalanced it is going to have in fact almost halved leaving each Chinese couple responsible for supporting five others (both sets of parents and a child) So the government has relaxed the one child policy. In the city if you are an only child and marry another only child you can have two children, and in the country if you want a son and have a daughter, you can try one more time for a son. However the city people think that having a second child makes you a stupid country person, so although they have the opportunity, very very few people are taking advantage of the new laws.

Back to my observations on the trip about city vs. country tensions on my trip: we went to lunch the first day and everyone started treating everyone else badly almost from the minute we walked through the door. We sat down and the restaurant owner brought us plates. My host family automatically assumed they were dirty and requested that a pitcher of boiling water be brought to the table so that they could wash the dished themselves. They even washed the wooden chopsticks which came in hermetically sealed plastic so, as far as I could tell, could not possibly have been dirty. The owner being understandably insulted brought the local people who came in after us their food first, which then caused my host dad and uncle to get up and go demand where our food was. It was a downward spiral.

That night we were driving through the city where we had finally found our hotel looking for dinner. Since it was Spring Festival most of the restaurants were closed my host family then started to go on about how because this was the country there were no restaurants open. They then went on to say there were probably no stores open either and that these country people probably went the whole week without food due to general stupidity. Now keep in mind this was a decent sized city. Maybe the size of the combined beach cities… However, it had the misfortune to be surrounded by countryside and not a major government center, thus it must be filled with poor, uneducated, and inept residents… I think that this attitude is going to be one of China’s greatest issues as it becomes a more developed nation. My host family has asked me how the US “deals with it’s country people” and I simply did not have an answer.

The fourth day we got up in the morning and grabbed enough breakfast to hold me for the entire day, then we walked out of the breakfast restaurant and walked two blocks where passed a bakery and went in to get some bread to prevent our imminent starvation. We then continued on to a famous set of Chinese wetlands, where we met a friend of my host aunt. He took us to lunch when we arrived, which we ate roughly two hours after breakfast. I thought I would explode. Then we walked around the wetlands which were beautiful. We took a boat from sight to sight and then walked around on foot. The wetlands where also a sight were a recent and very popular Chinese movie Fei Chang Wu Rao was filmed. I had just seen it with Angel and she really enjoyed seeing the different sights from the movie.

On the drive home we stopped at a rest stop for dinner, where my hot family settled in to get a bunch of zong zi (stocky rice) and other goodies. They asked me how many I wanted, and I was just not hungry at all, plus the rest stop smelled like chiou do fu, a type of Chinese preserved fried tofu that almost all westerners and some Chinese think smells absolutely repellant. So I told my host family that I wasn’t hungry and that freaked them out to no end. Although I had already had four meals that day, they were utterly convinced that my starvation was imminent. As a result I ended up eating quite a satisfactory dinner made up of the portion of everybody else’s food that they fed me without taking no for an answer.

I got up the next morning, and since we didn’t have any plans for the morning I told my host family that I was going to the gym. They tried to convince me that I was far too tired to go to the gym, but I went anyway, and spent a blissful four hours there working out without a morsel of food in sight. There was a Pilates class that started while I was there so I took that which ended up being a very good choice for me. There were only three other women there since it was Chinese new year, so at the end of the class they all sat down in a circle and talked with me which ended up being an excellent chance to practice my Chinese and learn about the other people in my class.

That night we went to my host mom’s side of the family at a Hunan style restaurant in the mall near our house. The same place we had gone with my host uncle and also with some friends of the family. Thus making it the third time I had been in a week. It is a good restaurant and makes excellent food, however, three times in a week and any restaurant starts to loose its appeal. Although this will probably get me weird looks from all of you that restaurant makes amazing fish head. Seriously, it is really really good. The time that we went with my host father’s friend made me feel really bad though. My host father’s friend brought his wife and son, and I was like a torture device used on the poor son.

First of all the boy was fourteen, and no fourteen year old boy wants to talk to an eighteen year old girl. It is practically a law of nature. Second he was studying English in school. So I was a double threat: older person of the opposite gender and representing foreign language studies. My host father of course starts right in talking about what a great thing I have been for Angel and how amazing it is for her to have me around to practice her English, and how much better her English has become. Then he looks over at this boy and says “why don’t you take advantage of Zoe and practice your English? What is your English name?” The poor boy gives me the most terrified look I have ever seen. He can’t even get his English name out, forget a coherent sentence. Seeing this my host dad, you would think, would give the boy a break, but oh no no no. He then looks at the boys father and says “why don’t you bring your son over tomorrow morning and he can spend the day speaking English with Zoe!” I thought the kid was actually going to break and run for the hills. I think he probably spent the night begging his parents for mercy, because he did not come the next morning. Although it was somewhat hilarious I felt pretty bad because I had been in the kids place so many times it isn’t even funny (picture a dinner party of forty people: “Zoe, speak Chinese.” speak Chinese, SPEAK WHAT!?!?!?!?!? I’ve only been here for two months! WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO SAY!?!?!?! *Every one looks over* “ummmmm, Ni Hao”)

Anyway, That night was the fifth night of Chinese New Year. There are two days of Chinese New Year that are the big fire works days, day one and day five. For the night of day one I was in Suzhou so I didn’t experience the full firework joy of Shanghai, but the night of the fifth I was there. At the time I was reading a book about a Vietnam veteran who was talking about how they would hear machine gun fire all night. I distinctly remember thinking that I could sympathize.

I like the Chinese theory of fireworks a lot better than the American theory. The American theory is that you could hurt yourself with fireworks thus they should be outlawed within the town limits for the protection of you and your neighbors. The Chinese theory is that if you kill yourself with a firework you were too stupid to live anyway, so you can get whatever kinds of fireworks you want, and set them off wherever you want. The result of this is that they Chinese buy full 4th of July level firework shows in a box and set them off in the spaces between the apartment buildings. Now there is not really enough room between the buildings for a full fireworks show, so they kind of just bounce off the buildings and windows of the higher apartments. Not for love nor money could you get me to open my windows during Spring Festival.

The night of the fifth day of Spring Festival was a night to remember. I got home from dinner around 10 and the fireworks were going strong. We went out and lit some of our own, which was SOSOSOSOSOSO MUCH FUN!!!! My host dad found, in my opinion, the one really useful use of a cigarette. No one in my host family smokes, but people give out packs of cigarettes at a lot of Chinese New Year dinners so my host dad had acquired a few packs. Thus we used them to light fireworks. They burn slower than matches, but work just as well to light a fuse. There is a unique adrenaline rush that you get from lighting an exploding thing on fire and then running for your life. It was GREAT!!!

The thing that I don’t understand about fireworks and Spring Festival is where people get the energy. I sat in my window watching the show from midnight until about three in the morning when I went to bed out of sheer exhaustion, but the Chinese were still going strong on the fireworks. Who has the energy to light fireworks after 3 a.m. anyway?

I went out the next morning and the streets of Shanghai were quite literally coated in remnants of red paper, gunpowder residue, and sawdust. Every surface was a few centimeters thik with it. One of the most massive work crews I have ever seen appeared that morning and quite literally hosed down the entire city.

Then we went back to KTV (they call karaoke KTV here, who knows why) which was every bit as fun as the first time, except that angel had tried to teach me a few songs in Chinese which I attempted to sing, and succeeded remarkably poorly. Singing karaoke in Chinese is unlike singing in most other foreign languages. For example singing in French is pretty easy, even if there is a word or ten I don’t know I can still probably sing them largely correctly because I know how to read French and how the different letter combinations are pronounce. In Chinese karaoke you get characters: YAY CHARACTERS!!!!!!!! Because I can totally read the characters scrolling by quickly enough to sing them, NOT!!!! Oh, and in case that wasn’t fun enough since almost nothing in China is imported legally, neither are the videos in karaoke. They are largely stolen from Taiwan since they are Taiwanese artists. Taiwan, yep that means traditional characters: YAY TRADITIONAL!!!!!!!!!!!! Because I can totally read traditional characters especially scrolling by quickly enough to sing them, NOT!!!! Yep, I am super good at doing karaoke in Chinese, Really I am. But it is really fun anyway.

That night I had dinner at my host grandparent’s house before leaving for Vietnam…

Since I am now shaking from caffeine intake due to the second coffee I ordered so I could continue to sit here, I will write Vietnam, either later tonight or some time soon.

新年快乐 Happy New Year (belatedly)

Bye bye

Zoe