My folks came to see us during Spring Festival and we spent a couple days in Beijing. Ditan Park has Beijing’s biggest Spring Festival Temple Fair and it barely contains an unbelievable amount of people, noise and colour. We had a blast, though I wouldn’t recommend it for those who easily suffer from sensory overload! Click the link or the photos below to go to the photo gallery.

Beijing’s Ditan Park Temple Fair 地坛庙会 – 2010 Feb. 20

The Problem

Problem: you have someone’s grandbaby, niece, nephew and/or great-grandbaby, and you live on the other side of the globe. Aside from mom and dad, all the people who love him or her the most are far, far away. This really, really sucks!

We were in Canada for the first four months of Lilia’s life (she spent her first month outside her mommy in the NICU). During that time our Facebook accounts were filled with baby photos and videos as well as daily comments from family and friends all around the globe. And that was when we were still living with family in our own country; we hadn’t even left yet.

In China, Facebook is was the ultimate tool for sharing baby photos and videos with far away family members (and, thanks to the privacy options, not the entire sleaze-saturated, creep-infested, pervert-enabling internet). Everyone from my grandparents to their great-grandkids are on Facebook, and it just kills to not get to share our daughter with them. We also miss the weekly and often daily FB interaction revolving around our nieces and nephews and whatever other family adventures are going on (most recently: the 2010 Olympic Games in our hometown!). Obviously it’s not as good as being within driving distance of your relatives, but FB was a big help and it’s sorely missed.

Some Options

So, 怎么办？ Here’s the three options we’ve come across for making the physical distance from family members a little less painful. If you have other ideas, please let us know in the comments!

1) Get a VPN
We haven’t bothered to used a paid service to unrestrict our internet in China. When it comes to the internet less can be more, I’m really cheap, and I assume those VPN services will be blocked eventually anyway. But for $60 bucks a year (wow, I really am cheap…) you can get great services like the one we just won for free! The good folks at ChengduLiving.com had a free giveaway and just yesterday we won six months of free VPN service! We tried it this morning and it’s working great; click here to see the details — you can get a discount code from ChengduLiving.com. (Thanks tons, guys!) Our original strategy didn’t involve VPNs, so I don’t know if we’ll keep using it or not once our free six months are up.

2) Get/Make a Facebook substitute
I’m really cheap, Facebook was already sucking up too much of my time, and I wanted a baby-photo-sharing backup that would work even if/when China blocked every proxy and VPN in the world. So we set up a private, password-protected, family-only WordPress blog. Since we already pay for our own domain name and hosting, this didn’t cost us anything extra. It’s not as slick as Facebook, of course, but we can still share photo galleries and upload video clips that our family can download, and everyone can leave comments and share their own stories and photos. It’s also nice to have some family-members-only space on the internet. Our families can see photos and video the same day we take them.

There’s no guarantee that our domain name/hosting server won’t go the way of Facebook, YouTube, and a growing list of proxies and VPNs; personal sites get blocked, too. But we try to play nice by staying away from topics and words that the gov. deems sensitive. Plus sites like ours aren’t as high priority for censors or as high profile as proxies anyway.

3) Use Skype
You don’t need a top-of-the-line computer or video camera (we have older stuff) to pull off great Skype video calls. And it’s free! And if your grandparents are too computer-illiterate to handle Skype, you can just Skype their phones for pennies a minute at the most ($0.02/minute to Canada and the USA). When international video calls or phone calls are this easy, it’d be tragic not to take advantage of the opportunity.

Any other ideas? How do you stay connected with family and friends back home?

Related:

• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

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:

• A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood
• Fireworks

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” (打小人儿), 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:

• 剁小人儿 duò xiǎorénr. Chopping up the jiǎozi filling (always chopped very fine) is “chopping petty people.”
• 捏小人儿的嘴 niē xiǎorénrde zuǐ. Pinching the dumplings closed is “pinching petty people’s mouths.”
• 崩小人儿 bēng xiǎorénr (zēn xiǎorénr in Tianjin dialect). Lighting off firecrackers is “exploding petty people.” This is harder to translate exactly; “给他们崩走” is the example my students used, meaning something like “explode them away” as in scaring them off with the explosion (as opposed to blowing them to pieces).
• 踩小人儿 cǎi xiǎorénr. Apparently you can also draw a picture of a “petty person” on the bottom of your socks and “step on petty people.”

Hong Kong is famous for 打小人 as a paid service — you go under overpasses and pay someone to chop for you.

I added the 儿化 to the sentences above because my students all used it when saying these phrases, but they said when written you can choose whether or not to include it.

Other stuff about “beating petty people” in China:

• How to hate people in China

Other stuff about celebrating Chinese New Year’s:

• Enjoying 福 (fú) and the inner circle of Chinese life
• I pity the fú​
• ‘Tis the season for… RED PANTIES!
• The Nian monster is coming! Better get some red underwear!
• Sharing Chinese New Year’s with the neighbours
• Happy New Year! Congratulations for not being eaten!
• Chinese New Year: a Passover?
• Fireworks
• Happy New Year! (Taibei 2006)

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:

• Our friends the rock stars
• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

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:

• I pity the fú​
• ‘Tis the season for… RED PANTIES!
• Pun-based Chinese New Year customs
• Spending Chinese New Year with a Chinese family
• The Nian monster is coming! Better get some red underwear!
• Sharing Chinese New Year’s with the neighbours
• Happy New Year! Congratulations for not being eaten!
• Chinese New Year: a Passover?
• Fireworks
• Happy New Year! (Taibei 2006)

The Chinese love fú​ (no, not that foo’). Of all the characters you see in China, fú​ (福) has got to be the most common. It’s everywhere, especially at Spring Festival. It can be understood as good fortune/luck/auspiciousness/blessing and is used in everything from the Chinese word for “happiness” (幸福) to “the Gospel” (福音) to “Blessed are the poor…” in Luke 6 (“…有福了。”).

Here’s a cheesy, hauntingly Dr. Suess-esque e-mail we got at work today (in Chinese) that expresses nicely how it feels to be literally surrounded by fú​s everywhere you go:

Tiger comes, fú​ comes,* every household fú​,
Tiger brings blessings filled up with fú​.
Tiger year enjoy fú​ different kinds of fú​:
Big fú​, small fú​, everywhere fú​,
Gold fú​, silver fú​, fully-stored-up fú​!
Welcome fú​, greet fú​ every year fú​,
Guard fú​, implore fú​, every age fú​!
Wish you tiger year even more… happiness.

I thought that last line is kind of a downer. You really though it was going to end with “fú​”, didn’t you? It does in Chinese, but as part of the word for “happiness” (幸福).

We just got some of our our Spring Festival fú​ today when my parents arrived from Canada to see ustheir granddaughter (it’s their first time in China!), so the blog may be a little slow the next two weeks.

*(This older style grammar actually means ‘has arrived’ but doesn’t literally have past tense, sort of like “The Lord is come”… so I’m told.)

P.S. – For some reason it’s not letting me include the Chinese text… I’m using Wordpress. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know! If I include the text, it removes all text (English and Chinese) from the post preview. Help!

Other stuff about celebrating Chinese New Year’s:

• ‘Tis the season for… RED PANTIES!
• Pun-based Chinese New Year customs
• Spending Chinese New Year with a Chinese family
• The Nian monster is coming! Better get some red underwear!
• Sharing Chinese New Year’s with the neighbours
• Happy New Year! Congratulations for not being eaten!
• Chinese New Year: a Passover?
• Fireworks
• Happy New Year! (Taibei 2006)

To: the subway car driver who saw me sprint through the station at 8:39am only to be mere seconds too late and have the subway car doors almost take big foreign nose off when they closed right in front of me, who sensed my despair as I looked at the monitor and saw nine minutes until the next train, who must have guessed that there was no way I could wait nine minutes and still clock in at work on time, and who instead of pulling away like normal opened the doors back up and let me on,

哥们儿，你是在历史上最棒的地铁司机！感谢你啊！

- Joel

(I told you so!)

If you have a infant in China and you’re using baby formula, then this is for you.

The Problem

After the 2008 melamine milk powder scandal, in which several infants died and hundreds of thousands were harmed by drinking melamine-tainted baby formula, we heard other foreigners multiple times say, “Now’s the best time buy Chinese milk powder — it’s never been safer.” Thankfully, we knew better.

That kind of thinking is what Chinese people call “using foreign thinking to understand China” — in other words: wrong. Now in 2010 it’s all over the news that 170 tons of unsafe milk powder products that were supposed to be destroyed in the wake of the 2008 scandal were simply repackaged and put back on store shelves. Melamine is an industrial chemical used in plastics and adhesives that also creates false, boosted protein readings on quality tests of watered-down milk powder solutions so that they don’t appear diluted. It also causes kidney stones and kidney failure. Despite the very public scandal, people knowingly repackaged and resold a product that they knew was lethal. Silly foreigners; “you laowais can’t understand China.”

It’s not a matter of being overly cynical about the priorities of China’s highest leaders. The system is broken, or rather, it was never designed to protect and empower individuals and the public in the first place (just the opposite; it was designed to empower the rulers at the expense of the people). Even if high-level leaders have good intentions they simply can’t adequately enforce these kinds of policies. In response to a major international scandal in which babies died, hundreds of thousands were harmed and the public was outraged, they executed a dairy farmer and a salesman, shuffled the responsible gov. officials around, and obviously failed to remove 170 tons of the stuff that caused the damage in the first place. (Those ‘disgraced’ officials are now back in same-level or higher positions.)

It borders on irresponsible, in my opinion, to trust the Chinese system more than you have to. Thankfully, when it comes to baby formula, trusting the system is unnecessary.

Breast milk is best, of course, but if you live in China and your baby needs formula, 怎么办？

Our Solution

When we need baby formula, we use Táobǎo to get imported name-brand Dutch formula (inspected by our Dutch friends) for the same price or cheaper than what’s on the store shelves in China. No doubt it includes ingredients made in China, but Dutch babies haven’t gotten kidney stones from baby formula yet.

Taobao.cn is the cuter, blinkier, Chinese eBay. Some of your Chinese friends or co-workers most likely have accounts. My Chinese co-workers used to shop on Táobǎo all day before the company blocked the site. Get someone to order imported formula for you or open your own account (opening an account requires Chinese and Táobǎo accounts can be complicated, even for locals).

*Special tip: The first time you order from a vendor on Taobao.cn, order a small amount so you can check the product closely to see if anything looks suspicious. You can get fake stuff on Taobao just as easily as anywhere else. If it checks out, you’re good to go! The vendor we use is here.

**Warning: This is not foolproof! By ordering off Táobǎo you’re trusting your ability to spot a fake product. Some fakes can be very well done. Be extremely careful. Ordering imported formula from Taobao is no guarantee, it’s just significantly better odds than domestic formula, imo. For a safer and only slightly more expensive option, see the first and fifth comments below.

If anyone has any other baby-formula-in-China advice, please let us know in the comments!

(This is the first in a series; several more are cued up, in no particular order. We have a baby, so as we discover the tricks of the trade in China, we’ll share them here.)

Related:

• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

That outta get some attention.

Right inside our front gate and on the corner of the nearest intersection there are people hawking red panties. With tigers on them. They’re piled up right next to all the other Chinese New Year decorations: lucky hanging lamps, lucky window hangings, lucky door hangings, lucky underwear… Mountains of fireworks are piled on the opposite corner (also lucky). They’ve been on sale for about two weeks now because Spring Festival is coming, and if it’s your animal’s year in the Chinese zodiac (your “life origin year” 本命年), you’d best be wearing your lucky red underwear. And lucky red long-johns (also for sale). And lucky red every other article of clothing including your belt. Red helps people avoid evil spirits (避邪), especially the Nian monster (more Nian monster here and here).

Not everyone follows this tradition. Even if everyone did you’d only wear all red once every twelve Spring Festivals (people turning 12, 24, 36, etc. after the start of Spring Festival). Those that do aren’t hard to spot, obviously. And the stores are all conspicuously abundantly stocked with lucky red underwear. There’s lots of variety in the supermarkets, but these designs are for sale on the sidewalk right outside our building next to the vegetable, bean, and fried noodle vendors:

The tiger on the left is on a fú character (福 — good fortune, happiness, auspiciousness), and the tiger on the right says “Year of the tiger good luck!” （虎年好运）。 I told you it was lucky red underwear.

And let’s clear up some confusion about what animal you are. Forget those calendars that say, “If you’re born in [whatever year], then you’re a [hippo, or whatever].” They’re wrong. The animal changes at Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), not January 1st. Spring Festival can fall pretty much any time in January or February, so if you were born after January 1st but before Spring Festival you’re still in the old year with the old year’s animal. Jessica’s a horse and I’m a goat (nice!). Lilia’s a cow (thanks for nothing, China!). Wikipedia has a handy chart so you can accurately find out if you’re a monkey or hippo.

Other stuff about celebrating Chinese New Year’s:

• Pun-based Chinese New Year customs
• Spending Chinese New Year with a Chinese family
• The Nian monster is coming! Better get some red underwear!
• Sharing Chinese New Year’s with the neighbours
• Happy New Year! Congratulations for not being eaten!
• Chinese New Year: a Passover?
• Fireworks
• Happy New Year! (Taibei 2006)