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)

Or maybe Santa Claus is the Western money god…

财神到
cái shén dào
“The god of wealth arrives”

This just went up at the subway station/shopping center that I walk through to get to work (小白楼). He faces a McDonald’s. Chinese New Year’s decorations are going up everywhere.

You can see lots of Chinese money god （财神 or 财神爷） images by doing a google image search for 财神。

I’m not kidding; that’s exactly what these signs say:

Currently in the Chinese media, and now all over the English China blog world, is the news that China is considering passing a law that would make it illegal to eat dogs and cats. But even if it passes, I have my doubts that those hypocritical pork-eating bourgeois specie-ists will succeed in enforcing their shameless attack on cultural practices that go back thousands of years.

The image on the right is a bag of dog meat one of our Chinese teachers gave us as a gift.

Anyway, I just couldn’t pass up sharing a photo of a sign that says “Cats are friends, not food!” （猫是朋友，不是食物）。 Also visible in the photo:

• “Refuse to eat cats.” （拒绝吃猫）
• “Please show humanitarianism, set them free.” （请发扬人道主义 放过它们）
• “Cherish humanity’s good friends! Refuse to eat cat and dog meat.” （爱护人类好友！拒绝吃猫狗肉）
• “Refuse to eat cat and dog meat. Cherish humanity’s friends.” (拒食猫狗肉 爱护人类之友)
• 请口下留情 is a play on the phrase 手下留情 (“restrain your hand”), as in showing mercy or sparing someone’s feelings by not meting out more punishment than is needed, often in the context of criticizing. On the sign they switched “hand” (手) for “mouth” （口）, so it might mean something like, “Be merciful; please restrain your mouth”.

For our personal encounters with cats and dogs as food in China, including a downloadable translated menu from a local dog meat restaurant, see here:

• Dead puppies (don’t look, Grandma!) – menu included
• Obligatory cat eating post
• 龙虎斗

This is a dog meat restaurant near our old apartment:

The last time we ate dog, at a Korean restaurant with one of our teachers and her Korean fiancé:

Honestly, it tasted better at the dump-of-a-restaurant two photos up, but it wasn’t great at either place. Not like some of the donkey I’ve had.

So I’ve just got off work and I’m about to leave the building for the ten minute walk to the subway. One of my upper level English students sees that I’m planning to eat a pear on the way and she’s immediately concerned.

“You’re going to eat that outside?”

“Of course!”

“But it’s cold and windy! You can’t eat that outside!”

“Why not?” I know exactly what’s coming.

“You’ll get wind in your stomach!” The other students voice their agreement.

I know what she’s talking about because I’ve heard this before. Fear of getting cold “wind” in your “stomach” is considered at least as reasonable as covering your mouth when you cough to avoid spreading germs. But this time, instead of having the same old predictable conversation about how foreigners don’t know anything about getting “wind” in their “stomachs” or our “fire” going up and down, I decide to have fun with it.

“It’s no problem. Foreigners can’t get wind in their stomachs. Only Chinese people can get that disease. Getting wind in your stomach is a special disease only for Chinese people.”

She doesn’t believe me, and gives me an annoyed look to boot, like she’s not sure if I’m making fun of her/China/Chinese medicine or not. And I’m not, mostly; I’m just curious to see what will happen if I appeal to inherent biological differences between foreigners and Chinese (something that’s not uncommon for Chinese people to do in other situations) instead of chalking it up to cultural differences that affect how our respective societies understand health.

When Tianjiners wear face masks (口罩) in public it’s not because of air pollution or swine flu. These are cloth face masks, not medical face masks, and people wear them because it’s cold outside and they don’t want to get “wind” in their “stomachs” (受风 — to receive/suffer wind). I put quotes around those words because in Chinese medical theory they both carry important nuances and added dimensions that don’t correspond exactly with what we normally mean when when we say wind and stomach. (I borrowed this image from a Chinese website. It’s supposedly from Tianjin.)

For more about Chinese medicine:

• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Q&A with an American doctor who practices TCM

After all the whining about the pollution and fear-mongering about the bathrooms, I should mention that in some ways Tianjin is far superior to, say, Vancouver (host city 2010 Olympic Winter Games).

For example, in Tianjin, a massive city of 8 million people, you can get a live chicken delivered straight to your door for ￥8/斤！ Ordered online! That’s like $1.25 per pound! Behold (click the image to go to the site):

The part I circled is the end of a list of special instructions you can choose from, in this case: “…slaughtered, alive, etc.” （宰过，活的等）。

(P.S. — Camilla)

Last night, 7:23, according to the monitoring equipment installed in the U.S. embassy in Beijing:

What “500″ means:

150+ = “Unhealthy”, 200+ = “Very Unhealthy”, 300+ = “Hazardous”. So what are we supposed to call it when it maxes out the scale?

Of course, you might be wondering what the Ministry of Environmental Protection was reporting at the same time:

The Chinese version site had the same:

As we couldn’t see down the street today, I don’t wonder who’s numbers are more accurate. However, three things you need to know about comparing pollution numbers:

1. Part of the reason for the discrepancy is that China doesn’t monitor the smaller, more harmful forms of air pollution.
2. It also helps that they shifted the location of their monitoring equipment to get better averages and record more “blue sky days”.
3. Measurement scales vary from country to country. You can see how China’s pollution scale compares to those of Honk Kong and the U.S. here: API and PM10 – health. These are also helpful (Wikipedia): Air Quality Index and Air Pollution Index. This site has a convenient widget that lets you compare China’s interpretation of its current pollution levels with that of other countries.

On days like this you can smell it as soon as you open the front door and see it just by looking across the street.

We first found these sites via MyHealth Beijing. Click the screen shots to view the source pages. See the links below for some pollution photos.

Related:

• Behold the power of China’s weather gods!
• Everything you wish you didn’t know about air pollution in China

Have you ever had parents, siblings, friends, etc. visit you in China after you’d been here a while, and it was their first time in China? Did you tell them anything beforehand? How did it go?

“Normal”
I had a weird experience this week while I was looking out the window. It was a typical busy street scene and I wasn’t really paying attention; mundane daily Tianjin’s increasingly soulless cityscape has long ceased interesting me. But then I suddenly realized my parents are coming — it’s their first trip to China. I looked out the window again and tried to identify all the things that would be new or different for them, the things I would have noticed during our first semester and maybe even photographed. I wasn’t sure I could remember them all, and it’s a strange feeling to suddenly realize your idea of normal is drastically changed.

Comfort Zone WMD
Had a similar experience again last night. I was going through photos that two of my photographically-gifted American friends took of our other friends’ wedding. They have a good eye for photos and had taken entertaining street shots around the church, which is in an older, not yet totally redeveloped neighbuorhood. But then right in with all the interesting photos was a shot of the women’s bathroom at the church. I thought, ‘what’s this doing in here?’ and completely failed to see the significance of the photo. No interesting angles, patterns, colours, people, activity, or funny signage. Just a quick shot of the can.

And then I realized why it caught their eye. And then I thought about my parents coming. And then I remembered the first time (and the second time) that I encountered this kind of old school Chinese bathroom and the unbidden incomprehension/shock/horror/so-bad-I-have-to-look-car-wreck-feeling that instantly raises your pulse. The communal, “privacy-what’s-that?” old school Chinese public washroom has got to be the most effective method ever devised for mortifying privacy-loving Westerners. It’s not like eating chicken feet or double-dipping your chopsticks in a communal plate or learning to use a squatty potty — those things merely stretch Westerners’ comfort zones, and stretching your comfort zone is a good thing. But a tiny room with an open, cramped row of squatty potties where people will be brushing past you or asking you what country you’re from while you’re in the middle of doing your business? That’s not “stretching” our comfort zones; it’s dropping a WMD on our comfort zones.

I’m not a big fan of these things and I don’t mind avoiding them, but it’s strange to realize I looked right at a comfort zone WMD and didn’t even notice.

(P.S. Mom and Dad — most bathrooms in Tianjin city aren’t like this; you won’t get stuck having to use one… probably. Just don’t be surprised when people don’t bother to close their stall door… assuming there’s a stall… with doors.)

(P.P.S. If you didn’t already know, the cross-cultural potty dispute goes both ways. A lot of Mainlanders feel that Western-style sit down toilets are a “comfort zone WMD” because even the idea of a sit down toilet is so appallingly unsanitary they can hardly believe we would even consider inventing sit down toilets. We have Chinese friends who refuse to use them, even in peoples’ homes.)

There’s a long tradition of wedding games in China — many are designed to tease or embarrass the bride. In Lin Yutang’s Moment in Peking, one bride is so well-educated and strong of character that she ends up embarrassing the people who were trying to tease her. Nowadays the games often have to do with trying to make the couple kiss. Not every wedding includes these kinds of games, but it can be fun when they do.

Friends took these photos (below) at a wedding we were part of last weekend. Chinese weddings involve a big banquet (婚宴). The couple goes around to each table, toasts everyone, and receives “red packets” (红包), which are fancy red envelopes with money inside from each guest. Our table decided they weren’t getting their hongbaos for free; they had to play a game first (pictured below). I think traditionally you’re supposed to tie an apple to the end of the string (“apple” sounds like “peace”), but we opted for a tiny candy instead. Captions are below each photo:

The bride uses a package of wedding candy (喜糖) to try and bribe the best man (I was the other groomsman) to give the hongbaos without making them play the game. He’s having none of it. The best man married an American girl last year.

“不满意，不给钱！”
bù mǎnyì, bù gěi qián
“(If we’re) not satisfied, (then we) won’t give the money!”

It took them a few tries, but they got it in the end (with a helpful shove in the back of the head from the best man’s wife).

After a full-on and packed-out Western-style church wedding with the white dress and suit and all that, James (the groom) and Jiā Xī (the bride) arrived at the banquet in Qing dynasty style traditional wedding clothes, complete with the giant red silk bow (大红绣球). I asked a couple Chinese friends what the bow was about and none of them could tell me, but they were emphatic that, “He has to wear that!” One of my co-workers later said it’s a word-play on “glorious future” (锦绣前程), since the name of the bow in Chinese and the idiom “glorious future” both have “绣“。

For every one Chinese skyscraper there are thousands of these guys:

I took this just before 9 this morning as I was walking from the subway to work thinking about how cold and brutal it was (-13′C with a sharp, dry wind). Remind me not to complain about my commute!

Migrant workers in China would be the bottom of urban Chinese society if they were actually included in society. They live a brutal parallel existence far from their hometowns, where the rural life they left behind was even tougher. Without the millions of migrants filling the factories and building the skyscrapers, there would be no new New China.

This is the original:

For another, happier Chinese-migrant-workers-in-the-back-of-a-pickup photo, see here.

Related Migrant Worker posts:

• Migrant worker CBC radio interview
• Who’s building the new New China?
• Meeting the migrant workers
• China’s fabled migrant workers migrate into our backyard
• Welcome to the City

A snowman (with Chinese characteristics):

In Chinese you don’t “make” a snowman, you “pile” (堆) a snowman. Unless it’s young people getting creative/naughty, most snowmen look like the one above. If they have any arms at all it’s usually a broom (branches are in short supply) and usually only one.

All the daytime photos were taken around 12:15pm, on my way to the subway.

A “beautiful frozen person” (right).
“美丽冻人” is a word-play in Chinese on “美丽动人” (a beautiful and captivating person), describing women who don’t wear the socially-prescribed multiple layers of long-johns because they don’t want to look fat.

The entrance to our apartment complex:

Going home from the market:

My students this evening at the entrance to our building:

It didn’t stop all day. It’s night time and still going. They’ve canceled a bunch of schools for tomorrow. I have to be at work at 9am but don’t teach until 2pm. Still waiting for that phone call…

Last photo — My students had to design snowmen in class and then draw them according to other students’ spoken instructions:

Next year is the year of the tiger, hence the “王” on the forehead of the ferocious snowman on the left indicating that it’s a tiger, not a kitty. They said its whiskers were chopsticks.