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)

It’s time for the annual Christmas posts, but we’re a little handicapped this year without youtube, plus I don’t want to repeat, so no poems, cute TCKs, crucified Mickeymouses, or churches with Santa painted on them all year long.

Instead you get to hear some Christmas songs for grown-ups. It’s not the ultimate Christmas song selection (for that I’d need the Trans-Siberian Orchestra stuff we accidentally left in Canada), but we like it. All the songs are from Over The Rhine‘s 2007 Snow Angels album. OTR gets points from us for mixing real Christmas (i.e. love, forgiveness, hope, Jesus, etc.) with married-people’s business. I’ll let you figure out for yourself which songs are about which, or both. You can buy these and other OTR music here.

• “Here It Is”

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• “All I Ever Get For Christmas Is Blue”

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• “Darlin’ (Christmas is Coming)”

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• “Snowed In With You”

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• “White Horse”

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• “North Pole Man”

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More Christmas posts on the way; we have a little Tianjin Christmas adventure planned for Christmas Eve.

Other Christmas and Christmas-in-China posts:

• Christmas Eve… with Chinese characteristics
• An UnChristmas party in Tianjin
• “And the 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to…”
• Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China
• 圣诞快乐! (Merry Christmas!)
• Some Tang dynasty poetry for the Christmas we’re missing
• Take this, capitalist!
• 聖誕快樂! – Shèng dàn Kuài lè! (first Christmas in Asia)

Last night was 100 days from Lilia’s birth, and in China the 100th day is a big deal. It’s called 一百天 or 百岁。 The parents are supposed to invite everyone to a banquet; it’s a bit like being a debutante, since up until this time they’ve spent their whole lives indoors. I imagine back in the day with high infant mortality rates, this might also have been a celebration of the child’s likely survival.

I don’t know what all traditions are associated with the 100 day celebration, but one big one is to put things in front of the baby that symbolize options for their future: academic stuff (pens, etc.) artistic stuff (needle point), silver, toys, sports stuff… the idea is that whatever the child reaches for will indicate their future. Red eggs for good luck are involved somehow, too, I think.

By total coincidence Lilia (心语) actually was at a big Chinese banquet for her 100th day because the fund raising dinner for the Canadian branch of the NGO we’re with in China just happened to be last night, and I was the speaker. We dressed Lilia up in traditional Chinese baby clothes that a friend had sent from China, drove downtown and kept her out from 4:30pm to 11:30pm, and she was perfect! There were about 80 people there, almost all Chinese Canadians, and I’m pretty sure Lilia got cooed over by at least half of them. Anyway, wanted to share a photo… I guess it’s a new dad thing not being able to help showing off his daughter!

Aside from personal motivations, character, attitude, and general posture toward China and Chinese people, this is the one decision that enhanced our China experience more than any other single thing we did during our first two years in China: we moved out of the foreigner ghetto and into the most average-looking Chinese neighbourhood we could find.

(If what follows starts to sound culturally patronizing, just hold on… I saved that part for the end.)

Welcome to China! the Foreign Bubble

When we first arrived in China with next-to-no Mandarin or knowledge of our city, the organization that helped arrange our visas and school placement also arranged our apartment: we had a prearranged flat in a complex occupied entirely by foreigners where the manager had good English (back in the day this was the only place foreigners were allowed to live in Tianjin). It was super convenient, especially for China newbies who are usually high-maintenance. From the standpoint of an organization facilitating foreigners’ language school placement it was ideal. But for foreigners interested in China and Chinese, it sucked.

Ditching the Laowai Ghetto: hunting apartments armed with Chinglish

We’d come to China to study language and culture, and we’d decided before we even arrived that we’d be moving out of “洋人街” ASAP. It was inconvenient for language practice, and besides, going to a foreign country and living unnecessarily isolated from your new city’s regular people seemed really lame. So after about two months of classes we took a vocabulary list of apartment words, a map, and went and squinted at the scrawled 汉字 on the papers tacked to boards outside the little first-floor rental agencies tucked away in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

We knew what we wanted: an average neighbourhood (“average” as defined by locals, not foreigners) with a lot of outdoor community life and an apartment we could tolerate and that our neighbours, teachers, and local friends wouldn’t feel strange in. Surely, we thought, that isn’t too much to ask. Foreigners from one of the international schools told us we wouldn’t find “anything” (read: “livable”) for twice the price of what we eventually paid (also twice the price of what they said was the average Tianjin salary). We went with what our teachers told us instead, quickly realizing that foreigners can spend years in China and still know next-to-nothing about it.

Of course it was awkward pointing at a circle on a map and mispronouncing vocab words to rental agents who had maybe never talked face-to-face with a foreigner in their lives, but we managed to have three apartments shown to us. I wanted the first one, but the landlord balked when he discovered we were foreigners (that’s when we learned what “他有事” really means). The third location was perfect — better than we’d hoped. We incurred some 关系 debt because we had to ask a local friend (the boyfriend of a fellow foreigner) for a big favour to come with us to the contract negotiation and signing. It went smoothly, so we borrowed an electric 三轮车 and moved in.

The Benefits: people, people, people

Rather than bring local Tianjiners into our cultural space, we wanted to meet them in their own world where they were more comfortable. The single biggest benefit that living in this kind of neighbourhood gave us was exponentially increasing our daily opportunities for interaction with average, mainstream locals more on their turf than ours. We couldn’t come or go without speaking to someone, and usually more than one. The old boys club that hung out on the bike repair corner regularly included me in their Chinese chess, outdoor meals, and teasing. Families would invite us into their homes on the various big holidays. The only person we met in that neighbourhood in two years who had any amount of English — besides one charming but mentally handicapped man who would yell “I love you!” at us — was a university student three floors down who became a language exchange partner. It was a laid back but crowded, active community where language practice opportunities with everyone from laid-off factory workers to university professors were immediately available in excess of what we could handle. Those neighbours taught us more about China and made China more interesting, alive, and lovable to us than any books or classes ever could. Even on the worst days, we never regretted our decision to live there.

A few months after moving in our teachers, in their more candid moments, would sometimes confess that they felt extra awkward and distanced when visiting their foreign friends’ apartments for two big reasons. First, the furniture, decor, food, and even the way they were received as guests all felt foreign. Second, although the foreigners were taking a step down in living standards, to the Chinese their apartments just screamed wealth and economic privilege. In addition to the unavoidable language and cultural barriers, these foreigners, through their lifestyle choices, were emphasizing another gulf of distance between themselves and local Chinese: economic disparity.

The Downside: our economic elitism

The economic privilege in which most of us were raised (speaking globally here) gets us in two big ways. The first is largely practical, physical, external. The second is intensely personal.

Physical Annoyances & Inconveniences
My mother would be appalled if she saw that apartment. The whitewash was peeling and rubbed off on your clothes. The kitchen was the size of a closet. The toilet was in the shower and the exposed plumbing both precarious and temperamental. The sewer gas that came up the drains in the evenings smelled so bad it woke us up at night until we devised an overly complicated water-bottle-in-a-plastic-bag-hung-from-a-nail method for mostly-sealing the bathroom drain (plumbers don’t do U-bends in Tianjin). The windows let all the coal dust in and the layout of the place didn’t make sense to us. The electricity often shorted out and we had long extension cords running everywhere. There was only enough hot water in the winter for fast showers. I wore a toque to bed the week before they turned on the heat. In the words of younger versions of my little sisters: it was totally ghetto. But we would choose to live there again, no question. It was totally worth it. That apartment was slightly better or slightly worse than those of our neighbours, depending on the neighbours, and close enough to what they knew that our Chinese friends and neighbours felt much less awkward when they visited than they might have otherwise. I mention these things to give fair warning: if you aim to move into an average Chinese neighbourhood chances are you’ll be getting an average Chinese apartment. Count the cost, because not all foreigners are willing to pay it. Also, the neighbourhood and apartment described here, while unremarkable for that district of Tianjin, is still probably well above average for most places in China.

Uncomfortable Personal Discoveries
(Warning: confession/soap box/rant/sermon ahead.)
Whether it’s right or not, what’s a huge step down in living standards for the average foreigner is normal for the average Mainlander. If that embarrassing, awkward and unfair economic truth makes you feel uncomfortable and maybe even vaguely guilty, I promise I know how you feel, but I don’t apologize for bringing it up. That’s what we get for being the economically elite six percent of an otherwise much-less-privileged world. Keeping the hoi polloi at a distance so that we’re less poignantly reminded of this stark economic reality and our consciences are less likely to be called out does not make it any less real — but living in an average urban Chinese neighbourhood makes it harder to avoid.

If you’re a thinking, reflective person at all then living significantly below the comforts you’re accustomed to brings special challenges. Basically, you begin to discover how much of a pampered, manicured, whiny, elitist snob you are who has tragically confused unwarranted privileges with basic entitlements. When you get genuinely frustrated and upset about how sub-standard everything is, then you can enjoy the guilt that comes with realizing that you can’t handle what’s more than good enough for most of the world; for thinking that living more like the majority of the world is such a big sacrifice for which you should get some sort of multiculturalism medal. And when you’re in a good mood and those physical inconveniences aren’t annoying you as much as they would the average foreigner, then you can hate yourself for actually feeling proud of the fact that you deigned to lower your living standard closer to that of the global average, for thinking you’re better than all those other foreigners, and — last but certainly not least — for being so patronizing to the local Chinese.

The silver lining, I guess, is that living this way also creates ample opportunity to contemplate lifestyles that respectfully transcend economic divisions while still being honest about who we are and acting morally with our affluence given the economic disparity in the world… Anyway, that’s a big tangent I maybe should have saved for another post, but it’s part of our experience, so I’m leaving it in.

Gearing up for Location #2

That old apartment with its neighbourhood comes to mind today because right at the moment friends in Tianjin are securing an apartment for us for when we arrive in a couple weeks (we had to let the old one go when we left for Canada). When friends are doing us this huge favour we obviously don’t want to be picky, and with the baby we won’t be as mobile or tolerant/flexible as we were before. I’m also only on a year-long contract, so I don’t know how likely we’ll be to move after we arrive. The photos they sent make this second apartment look several notches above the first. I guess we’ll see…

Fun Chinese Apartment & Neighbourhood-related Posts:

• Becoming morning people
• Negotiating rent in Chinglish – Round One
• Lost the kitten, found the ninja
• Almost Famous
• Some rather dry illiteracy fun
• Our current home by the numbers
• Hunting Tianjin apartments, armed with Chinglish

Related “Living in China” posts:

• China-friendly New Year’s Resolutions for Laowais
• Living in China Q&A with a California Intercultural Studies class

The only way one of my teenage ESL students from Beijing could reconcile the fact that Canadian mothers apparently routinely engage in self-destructive life-threatening behaviour after giving birth is that Chinese and Westerners must have different biological constitutions. It was funny (and not entirely untrue). I was tutoring her this morning in between trips to see Lilia in the NICU, and she was alternately gushing with very earnest advice about what Jessica must eat as a brand new mother and appalled with the things we let Jessica do.

I was telling her how the day after the surgery Jessica walked to the NICU to see Lilia in the incubator (and rode back in the wheelchair) — my student couldn’t believe I’d let Jessica out of bed. Then she couldn’t believe that after getting discharged from the hospital we actually let/make Jessica ride in the car to the hospital at least twice a day to see the baby (there are bumps in the road!). Basically Jessica shouldn’t leave the house — actually, better that she just stay in bed, for a month.

When Jessica was still pregnant one mother of a teenager from Sichuan was talking to me about the traditional Chinese custom of being house-bound and not showering for a month after giving birth. “Oh, that’s silly. I had a shower after only two weeks!”

Of course we’d heard about the popular traditional Chinese beliefs surrounding pregnancy and birth. No doubt our various cultures contain plenty of mutually jaw-dropping popular advice in this area. But this kind of stuff sounds even funnier in Canada for some reason. :) And no matter how particular advice sounds to us, it’s great the way our Chinese friends show their care and warmth by showering us with concern and advice.

(P.S. – Commenting *should* be fixed now, so you can leave comments again. Stupid security plugin changed my settings without telling me!)

Related Posts:

• Lilia Eden

If blogging is a little slow for the next little while, here’s why:

Lilia Eden was born 7 weeks early at 9:21pm on May 23! She’s 4lbs 10.5oz, 18.5 inches. Jessica is doing great, despite the unexpected emergency surgery, and Lilia is in the NICU getting stronger every day. If you’re Facebook friends with either of us, then you can see photos.

We’re aiming to move back to China in September, but blogging will be less frequent (but not totally absent) until then.

P.S. – Chinese name suggestions most welcome! But we make no promises. Her family name is 陆。

P.P.S. – As tempting as it is, we wont be turning this into a baby photo blog. We’ll keep writing China stuff here, and just make a different blog for the baby photos! :)

Maybe this technically doesn’t count since we usually don’t all live together. But at least for the few days surrounding 大妹妹‘s wedding we’re playing “four generations under the same roof” (四世同堂), a traditional Chinese ideal where four generations of a family all live together in peace and harmony in one house.

But being a bunch of Canadians and Americans, I’m not so sure that the idea of everyone living all together in one big house has ever seriously crossed any of our minds. Though I have to admit the last couple days have been really 热闹。

I google-image searched “四世同堂” and found both old and recent Chinese examples of four-generations-under-the-same-roof photos (here and here), if you’re into looking at other peoples’ family photos. The last one is from the TV drama adaptation of a novel by titled “四世同堂”.

现在怡安的烤箱里有了一块饼！ / xiànzài yíān de kǎoxiāng lǐ yǒu le yī kuài bǐng!
“Now inside Jessica’s oven there’s a bǐng!”

Joel和怡安的猫从袋子里逃出来了。 / Joel hé yíān de māo cóng dàizi lǐ táo chūlái le.
“Joel and Jessica’s cat escaped out from inside the bag.”

Neither of those idioms make much sense in Chinese. The Chinese way to say this is “She has happiness!” (她有喜了！/ tā yǒu xǐ le), or just “She has!” (她有了！tā yǒu le).

We told our families on Christmas (so glad for Skype!). As of right now we’re just about at 12 weeks.

(You may now commence with the “Made in China” and homemade Christmas present jokes.)

End of the semester for the Bright Future sex ed class
The same weekend as the bath house/octopus wrestling adventure, we also spent an afternoon playing games, baking Christmas cookies, and having fun with local university students that attended the sexuality class Jessica’s been volunteering with this semester. Jessica’s actually been volunteering regularly every semester, and this weekend was sort of the end-of-semester party. The students are fun and the cookies are good. For more on the sex ed class, see here, here, and here, or see the links at the end of this post. Jessica has a million interesting stories from observing these classes each semester — the class is for many students their first time to have any real sexual education. Kristi, our friend who heads up the whole project and teaches the classes (in Chinese!), could (and should!) write a book.

SNOW!
After Joel’s eventful evening at the bathhouse, he returned home…at that time, around 10:30 pm, the ground was still dry. However, when I left my friend’s house at about 11:15, there was already about an inch of snow on the ground and it was falling fast. By the time I got home about 20 minutes later, I was covered from head to toe with snow…and had icicles in my hair. Since it hardly ever snows in Tianjin, it wasn’t difficult to convince Joel that we should go out for a nice romantic midnight walk in the snow. He put all of his stuff back on, we strolled along the canal and down to the TV tower. The snow was still falling pretty heavily, and it was so peaceful and still outside, aside from the occasional whoops of joy from the other few people out playing in it.

Tianjin is so dry that last winter we basically didn’t get any snow. Our local friends say that when they were little Tianjin used to get decent snow every year, but no these days. We’ve seen only two “big” snows since we got here…one two days after we arrived back in Feb. 2007, and the one this weekend. I did see a few flakes fall on my birthday last year, but I was the ONLY one that saw them…so they must have been a special gift just for me. One local friend speculated that the dryness has to do with the deforestation and desertification in Inner Mongolia, which is where Tianjin’s weather blows in from. Either way, we weren’t expecting snow for Christmas, so this is extra special.

Once we got to the TV tower, we found some untouched areas of snow…fell backwards into them and made some snow angels. We would have made a snow man too, but we didn’t think about it until after we were already soaked from making the snow angels. Note to self for next time we get this much snow in Tianjin: Snowman first, and THEN snow angels. It was an awesome walk…we finally came home around 1:30 in the morning…but were so excited that it took quite a while to fall asleep.

Unfortunately at this point two days later, there is very little white snow left…and the slush on the roads is BLACK.

There’s no getting around the ankle-deep icy muddy slush that’s covered Tianjin’s roads for most of the last two days. Tianjin city deals with the snow by sending out saltwater trucks and legions of migrant workers who shovel all the ice and slush into three-wheel carts.

The worst of it had melted away by the time I took this photo this afternoon. I (Joel) spent two hours biking across town and back yesterday; bald road-bike tires (what most people have) weren’t made for this stuff. Navigating major intersections full of taxis, buses, bikes, and three-wheel carts sure is a lot more interesting though, especially when you don’t want to lose momentum and have to put your foot down.

Vote for us!
It’s time for the annual Christmas post! But first, in an apparent act of holiday goodness, some warm-hearted soul has gone and nominated us in the personal blog category for the 2008 China Blog Awards. We don’t know what happens if you place, but this is your chance to help us find out by taking the next 5 seconds, going here, and clicking the plus sign (+)! =)

Christmas!
And now for Christmas. To set the mood, behold! the photo on the right: this church in Tianjin has Santa and reindeer painted on the side… in August.

Two December’s ago, we brought you some disarmingly cute Third-Culture Kids from Africa making their point in a Target store.

Last December you just got a nice poem, though I was sorely tempted to post this video of a guy who crucifies Mickey Mouses and tries to exorcise the demons of out WalMart signs.

This year, it’s a slick little video from the Advent Conspiracy. Thank God your Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China, or any other nation’s sweatshops:

Having a “christmas” that is Made In China and making Christmas in China — and everywhere else — are two different things. Thank God. And Merry Christmas!

(Thanks Miller and Steve for digging this one up. And for you Canadians: we’re not off the hook. Here’s the Canuck version.)