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)

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

I just saw something… satisfying. It’s this morning around 10:45. Traffic is horribly constipated and visibility is less than two city blocks even though it’s “sunny.” A bus has cut into the bike lane so he can sneak up the side and budge back in near the front of the line. Of course this means a whole line of cars have decided to ride his coattails — all of them displacing the cyclists. The masses of bikers, me included, have to jump onto the sidewalk just to get by. Maybe one bike could squeeze past, but just maybe.

I realize there’s something odd as I approach the bus, which is sitting about 100 meters from the intersection (卫津路/南门外大街和南京路): it’s not moving and its front door is open. Facing the bus, right in the middle of the lane, is a lone, stubborn, indignant old man on his bicycle, wagging his finger at the driver through the windshield and giving him a big tongue-lashing. The driver is just sitting in his seat with that safely neutral/passive posture you see a lot, not willing to engage. A middle-aged passenger who looks like he thinks he’s somebody is out of the bus and trying to argue with the old man, who’s having none of it. Me and the other passing cyclists are chuckling to one another; 加油, Grandpa!

I want to take a picture but decide against it. When the old man finally starts to move on I head up to the stop line at the intersection with the rest of the herd. The bus inches forward; with a high curb on one side and a guardrail on the other, the bike lane barely contains the bus. Wishing I’d taken a photo of the bike lane hero, I turn around to see that the bus has stopped again because another old man, this time on a three-wheel cart, has parked himself directly in front of the bus and is giving him what-for. This guy has a case, too, because there isn’t enough room for his sānlúnchē to go around and those things are harder to lift onto the sidewalk. The light turns green and I jump back onto the sidewalk to take a photo, but I’m five seconds too late, so the bike lane hero grandpas remain anonymous. Still, it was nice to see those lane-hopping ozone-puncturing asphyxiators get what they deserve! :)

I like that Chinese people sometimes choose unusual English names or transliterate their names into English (when they can), not because we get to laugh at the occasionally odd results (though that is fun), but because a good Chinglish name often contains some self-expression while still being workable in English (Apple, Moon, Star, Rainbow, etc.); in perhaps an indirect or vague sort of way it expresses part of them and the fact that they’re Chinese and Chinese people do names differently than we do. Why shouldn’t they carve out their own space in the English name landscape? Of course other names, while nice in Chinese, are simply no good in English (Drizzle, Ripple); they’re too strange or silly to actually function as truly usable English names. I’ll let you decide for yourselves which of my current students’ names below have real potential. They’re listed in the order they came to mind:

• AK (yes, like the gun, she picked it on purpose because she likes guns.)
• Falcon (formerly Eagle: he had an annoying coworker named after some other kind of bird in Chinese, Sparrow I think, so for his English name he chose a bird that eats his coworker’s kind of bird.)
• Gaga
• Florra (She wanted to be different, but a bunch of other Chinese women who also wanted to be different already had the idea of using the Spanish word for flower, so she added an r.)
• Enya
• Eack (was supposed to be “Ike”, but somehow he spelled it wrong).
• Kobe
• Bryant
• Carter (we knew a “Spippen” in Taibei).
• Ray (don’t know why she picked this).
• Cherry
• Candy
• Duke
• Evian
• Edword (because he likes words).
• Win (I forget why she said she picked this)
• Queena
• Long (going for “dragon” (龙)? I don’t know.)
• Sharpay
• Coco

(This is exactly why it took me several months before finally settling on a Chinese name.)

Related Posts:

• Choosing a Chinese name – part 5
• Choosing a Chinese name – part 4
• Dragging this out…
• Chinese name suggestions
• Choosing Chinese Names: more dangerous than you think

Walked out of work today into a Tianjin dirt storm. That’s what you get for being downwind from the desert and powering the place with coal. Dust and garbage and branches were blowing everywhere, even way up between the highrises. Me and a co-worker clawed forward on our bikes straight into the wind, trying not to look straight ahead. I saw, but just barely because my eyes were squeezed almost completely shut in an effort to keep out the dirt but not the taxis and buses, a recyclables collector coming towards us on a loaded three-wheel pedal cart. I was phoning Jessica to make sure she shut the windows when a cardboard box flew off and hit me in the shoulder! Bang! Just like that! On my bike! In mid-sentence! “I can’t believe it!” I yelled. “I just got hit by a box!” But she couldn’t hear me because she was out in the wind/dirt, too.

On the way I stopped to get dumplings at a place where they had a loud, one-legged cricket named Hu Jintao (after China’s president — they thought that was pretty funny). After a whole conversation in Chinese — the standard: Where are you from? How much do you make? How much is your rent? (never: What’s you name?) — the cook still felt the need to mime putting the vinegar and hot peppers and garlic in the plastic bag for me. Similar thing happened when registering with the local police: one of the officers was suddenly surprised when we laughed at something she said to her co-worker (“Oh, they can understand!”) even though we’d already been chatting for half an hour!

I’ve kept my beard so far. The students think I’m from the Middle East and people keep asking if I’m a Moo-sa-leem — even the Muslims, who won’t allow a ham sandwich in their BBQ’d sheep-on-a-stick restaurant but they sure sell buckets of beer every night. An online acquaintance in Xinjiang, where most of Tianjin’s Muslims come from, managed to get an e-mail out to me today saying that the internet is still shut off along with international phone service.

Group bathhouse trip this weekend!