Today I was told that I’m beautiful. Not only because I’m really white (this actually was said with a sigh and a slightly envious tone…and I’m NOT exaggerating at all), but because I have “双眼皮” (double eyelids) instead of “单眼皮” (single eyelids). Actually, thanks to my Native American ancestors…I’ve always thought that I don’t really have much in the way of eyelids at all…eyeshadow is just about useless for me. I tried to tell my friend this, but she refused to believe it. So, after making me take off my glasses and close and open my eyes a few times, she pronounced that my eyelids are indeed double eyelids, though maybe not very deep. I guess that depth isn’t the most important criteria though, what counts is that the double lid is present.

Now, this “double eyelid” is not to be confused with the triple eyelids of the camel…there really is only one eyelid, and the term double has more to do with the shape of the lid and the presence of a crease in the middle of it. For those of us who don’t pay much attention to people’s eyelids at all (most of us, I think) I’ll post a couple before and after pictures of people with “single eyelids” that got surgery done to create the apparently beautiful and extremely desirable “double eyelid.” Since Asians tend toward “singleliddedness” this is also (reportedly) the most popular cosmetic surgery in this part of the world.

There…now I’ve passed on my recently acquired beauty knowledge to you. Why does this matter? Well, Chinese believe that “double-lidded” eyes are much more beautiful. I’ve heard from several friends that some Asian born actresses and models that have become famous in the West are, in their own part of the world, not considered beautiful at all…and the lack of a double eyelid is sometimes part of the criteria for this. These friends also told me that they couldn’t understand why foreigners think that Asians have beautiful eyes, given the dominance of single-liddedness. When I tried to explain that most of us are referencing the “exotic” (to us) shape of the eyes, and that many people may not have even paid much attention to eyelids or lack thereof…my explanation was met with a bit of amazement and a hint of disbelief. How could such an important beauty standard not even register on our radar screens? How could shape be a more important factor?

Some of me wonders how much this is a classic case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. We’ve got “double lids” and they want ‘em. They’ve got the “exotic shape.” Neither side is satisfied, and people on both sides go get cosmetic surgery done to change what they’ve got. Fortunately, since my eyelids have been pronounced “sufficiently double-lidded” by a Chinese friend, and “slightly exotic” by Western friends, I guess I can rest easy in both beauty standards. :D Living in a world where some more obvious beauty standards (body size and shape, in particular…more on that in the next post) are decidedly NOT in my favour, it’s nice to at least have one or two things that are.

Okay, I know it’s been a while. I won’t promise to turn over any new blogging leaves, because every time I do…I don’t write again for six months or so. However, Joel bribed me into writing this one (he’ll arrange dinner if I write) and if he keeps making deals like that, you may hear from me a little more often.

This may actually end up being a post series…I keep getting into these really interesting conversations with some of my Chinese friends and keep uncovering more and more fascinating little tidbits that just beg to be shared. Lately, most of these have been regarding the differences between what Chinese and Westerners think of as “beautiful” or “attractive.” I’m not presenting any textbook facts here, or citing any surveys to support anything I’m about to say…just sharing a few anecdotes from recent conversations that have been pretty interesting.

In Taiwan, it was not unusual for some of the older ladies to come up to me and make a big fuss about how white my skin is. At first I thought, wow…I must look really sickly for them to be making this big of a deal over it. Then it dawned on me that I was white and that they LIKED it. It’s nearly impossible to buy any kind of moisturizer or beauty product over here that doesn’t have added “whitening” components. There are whitening creams for parts of the body that I had never even dreamed might need whitening. When friends (foreign or Chinese) go get facials, even I can tell that they have become whiter. It’s also not unusual to hear ladies that haven’t seen each other for a little while say something along the lines of (in a very excited tone of voice) “你变白了！” （You got whiter!)…or (in a “What happened to you?” tone of voice) “你变黑了！” (You got darker…).

My best joke lately has to do with what happens if someone as white as me goes and gets these “whitening” beauty treatments that are available everywhere. I tell my friends that I’m afraid I’ll turn clear…and then they won’t be able to see me. I also have another foreign friend (who is also pale) that recently got engaged to a local guy. On hearing that she must (as part of her preparation for the wedding) schedule a whole round of these beauty treatments, we joked… “What if she turns invisible? Then her husband won’t be able to find her!” Okay, maybe you have to be here and be surrounded by the obsession with whiteness for it to actually be humorous, but we thought it was a knee-slapper.

Having never paid much attention to my own skin color, or that of those around me (except for “working on my tan” while camping in the summer), it’s a bit disconcerting to know that one of the first thoughts that run through the minds of people here (mostly other women, I think) when they meet me has to do with how white I am. I don’t know why this is so disconcerting, except that from my viewpoint, the difference between my skin color and the color of my Chinese friend’s skin is minimal. But from their viewpoint, or at least judging from the things that are said, it seems like this is a very big and important difference between us.

It’s also been fun to watch the reaction from my Chinese friends when they hear about beauty ideals from the Western side of things. Though the idea of a “healthy tan” may eventually get more popular, at this point the idea of intentionally trying to get darker is not only a beauty crime, it’s viewed as borderline insanity.

Ever since we showed up here, I’ve wondered what these guys think about while they fish (usually) alone all day. Turns out, they apparently aren’t thinking about much of anything – on purpose. They’re doing this for their health.

(Click either photo to see a bigger size. You can see our apartment in the second photo’s far left edge. We’re on the top corner of the building closest to the camera. The guy in the middle is Mr. Lu, our neighbourhood bike repairman.)

We had an awesome culture lecture about how to celebrate Chinese New Year from an older man who does calligraphy, and also teaches foreigners Chinese and Chinese English, among other things. Aside from providing a lot of enthusiasm and good information, he tried to teach us how to use a Chinese yo-yo.

He also talked about the old men who fish all day, and why they do it. He says it’s not about the fish; it’s about their health. When they fish, they just sit. They only look at and think about one thing: the floater in the water right in front of them, tuning out everything else. They try to clear their mind of all the worries of life. Traditional Chinese medical perspectives see more relationship between physical and emotional health, this de-stressing, non-worrying, mentally and emotionally calming experience is thought to improve their health and lengthen their life.

So, fishing is healthy.

You can see more ice-fishing photos here (now with slideshows!).

We had so much fun with cabbages in the last post, I thought we’d try gourds. No toilets this time, though.

Why are these gourds, which are called hú lu (葫芦), all over this neighbourhood?

Taxi drivers hang little ones from their rear-view mirror sometimes. Restaurants and businesses hang them on the walls. People hang them from the bars over their windows. What’s the deal with the gourds?

I’ll give you a clue: it’s indirectly related to cabbages, and it’s a wordplay.

I asked how much they cost – apparently it depends on the shape and quality. The guy told me over 800元 ($114) for the best ones with painted pictures on them, and 5元 ($0.71) for the cheapest ones.

I have two questions for you, only one of which I know the answer to:

1) If you were taking a shower and you dropped the soap in the toilet, how would you fish it out? I should add that you were taking your morning shower when this happened, it’s cold in the apartment and you’ve got about three minutes of hot water left. And yes, the toilet and the sink are in the shower. And no, you can’t flush it; you can’t even flush toilet paper, let alone a bar of soap!

2) Why did one of our friends receive a giant candle in the shape of a Chinese cabbage as a Christmas present (which she re-gifted to us in a ‘secret Santa’ gift exchange)? It’s the same answer to this question: Why is one of the prize pieces in Taibei’s National Palace Museum a life-size, solid jade cabbage?

I’m asking about the cabbage because there’s a cool culture/language thing I want to share. I’m asking about the soap because… I just need to know. I’m not asking about why the sink and toilet are in the shower because I’m afraid the answer might be more irritating than the not knowing.

The full-throated spitting that goes on here is amazing. But it’s not nice to bring it up, regardless of the fact that it is ever-present. However, this – this is cool.

The latest Eric Liddell biography spends a lot of time describing life in Weihsien, an internment camp to which the remaining foreigners in China were sent by the Japanese during World War II. News and uncensored communication from the outside world were strictly forbidden. The internees couldn’t even buy food from local Chinese merchants; the only people who regularly went in and out from the camp were some local Chinese workers who emptied the latrines. One interned missionary teamed up with one of these workers and devised a way to get messages into and out of the camp:

For several months Father Raymond DeJaegher, a Belgian priest, had been communicating with the outside world through a coolie who helped empty the camp latrines. The coolie, with his eye on DeJaegher, would bend over to blow his nose or spit on an ash pile, thus depositing a message in a tightly wrapped wad of waterproof paper. The priest would casually retrieve the pellet and leave outgoing messages in a prearranged place. …and soon, messages began to be smugged into camp from the two escapees, giving the [internee leadership] accurate information about the progress of the war. (p. 274)

When two men succeeded in a carefully planned escape, they used this system to feed accurate information back into the camp and help coordinate aid from the outside.

I bet none of those interned foreigners ever dreamed they would one day be glad for all that spitting.

My dad told me once how he went to dinner at a family’s home in Vancouver who were recent immigrants from Africa or Albania (I forget). For dessert, they served up dishes of frozen juice mix – the kind that comes frozen in the cardboard can that you’re supposed to mix with water – like it was ice cream. I can’t remember if my dad said anything or not. He may have just eaten it like everything was normal.

Just this week a fellow language student couple told me how they did the same thing when they had some of the teachers over for dinner recently. For dessert, they served a plate of uncooked 汤圆 (“soup spheres,” also called 元宵), not knowing that you’re supposed to boil them. They’re little sweet dumplings made out of glutinous rice flour, which, when they’re cooked, are gooey white doughy balls with sweet stuff inside, usually red bean paste. Uncooked usually means frozen. One of the teachers got a big surprise when she bit down, but then she told them and they cooked them and a good time was had by all.

We were planning to eat some tonight, which is what made me think to write about it, and I was going to show you a picture of what they look like cooked, except I cooked them wrong, the insides all fell out, and we ended up with a rice-flavoured blob of slime.

Just a simple anecdote of how easy it is to ‘not get it’ when you live elsewhere. Makes me have a lot more sympathy for the real immigrants back in Vancouver!

Jessica’s teacher asked about the U.S. election campaigns, and they got talking about potentially having a female or ‘black’ president, and then got talking about Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement. When she heard about the 1960′s social context for the civil rights movement, she said, “Chinese women are like American black people.”

(by the way, posts are getting back-logged so there’ll be short posts almost every day for a little bit, so check back often!)

For Jessica’s birthday a bunch of friends went skating or playing with ice sleds on the lake.

Then we went out for Indian food (oohhh curry heaven!) and ice cream. And then, oh we’re so sad… we all decided we should found a Facebook group: Tianjin is for Lovers!

Remember the movie Chariots of Fire, with the Vangelis music and everyone running on the beach in slow motion, where the Scottish guy refused to run his best event in the 1924 Olympics because the heats were scheduled on a Sunday, but ended up winning an Olympic gold medal in a different event? He was born in Tianjin, lived and served in Tianjin, has memorials in Tianjin, and died of an undiagnosed brain tumour as a P.O.W. in a Japanese internment camp near the end of World War II. We’ve been to his house, which is apparently finally being partly restored.

My only beef with Eric Liddell: Pure Gold, the latest Eric Liddell biography, is that I couldn’t get a feel for what kind of guy he was – what it might have been like to interact with him – until near the end of the book after he’d already died. The author desires to present Liddell as an inspirational Christian role model, and this becomes the book’s tragic flaw. Instead of letting Liddell’s inspiring life and character speak for themselves, the author coats the narrative in an artificial layer of Evangelical-ese, going out his way to over-emphasize and massage the aspects of Liddell’s spirituality that resonate in the popular Evangelical market. In the end, the Evangelical gene pool misses out on some potentially beneficial diversity, and the author produces a biography that reads a little too much like hagiography.*

Liddell comes across as so virtually perfect that he doesn’t seem real. The few token flaws mentioned are so minor and forgivable that they just reinforce the impression of an impossibly high degree of saintliness. It chaps my hide all the more because Eric Liddell’s life doesn’t need an author to compensate for it; his story is plenty inspiring and admirable in and of itself. Being able to see that this was a real man with whom we can relate and connect would make the story all the more compelling.

I finally found a pulse on this book’s Eric Liddell near the end, when the author quotes from an unnamed internee’s personal diary, written soon after Liddell’s unexpected passing in 1945:

He was not particularly clever, and not conspicuously able, but he was good. He was naturally reserved and tended to live in a world of his own, but he gave of himself unstintedly. His reserve did not prevent him from mixing with everybody and being known by everybody, but he always shrank from revealing his deepest needs and distresses, so that whilst he bore the burdens of many, very few could help to bear his.

His fame as an athlete helped him a good deal. He certainly didn’t look like a great runner, but the fact that he had been one gave him a self-confidence that men of his type don’t often have. He wasn’t a great leader, or an inspired thinker, but he knew what he ought to do, and he did it. He was a true disciple of the Master and worthy of the highest of places amongst the saints gathered in the Church triumphant. We have lost of our best, but we have gained a fragrant memory. (285)

This entry, for me, put some flesh and bones on the Eric Liddell of history, and in a way salvaged the whole book for me. I can look back at the stories and imagine a real, living and breathing brother, teammate, teacher, co-worker, husband, and father, rather than merely seeing a stock Evangelical archetype labeled “Eric Liddell.”

Historically, this book opens a window into the lives of missionary families of the day, how family members were often separated by oceans for long periods of time, dependent on written letters for news in an unstable time of civil and world war. The book offers only minimum detail regarding the larger, momentously consequential historical setting of aggressive Western economic imperialism (Liddell lived in Tianjin’s British ‘concession area’) and the brutal Japanese occupation of China. The Chinese people and culture of the time period, and Liddell’s interaction with them, also receive minimal attention. The bibliography is quite impressive; the author obviously did his homework. I just wish he’d backed off a bit and let us hear the story speak for itself.

Rumour has it that there’s an old man who sometimes attends one of the local churches here who actually remembers Eric Liddell, and who likes to give tours to all the related places of interest. Friends of ours did this a couple years ago. We just might hunt that guy down.

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*(hagiography - an idealized, overly romanticized, and usually partially-fictionalized pseudo-biography intending to present the subject as worthy of admiration and imitation.)