China Hope Live » Cute

Chinese love pumpkins

Joel — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:27:28 +0000

One of my bathhouse buddies got engaged the day before his birthday, which happens to be Halloween. So for his birthday/engagement party/Halloween we carved Chinese love pumpkins! (and one apple):

The 双喜/喜子 (“double happiness”) one took forEVer. If you’re really sharp, you’ll notice where we messed it up (see real examples here). Since they just got engaged I thought it’d be nice to give them a Chinese love pumpkin, even if I left out a couple strokes. Someone else carved the smaller pumpkin, which says “爱” (love). These little Chinese pumpkins are so hard they’d bounce, not splat. When you flick them with your finger they go “tok tok tok.”

And for the record, Halloween is not All Saints’ Day, no matter what all my students’ Chinese-English dictionaries say (some online ones make this mistake, too). Halloween is the night before All Saints’ Day: 万圣节前夕 wànshèngjié qiánxī (“All Saints’ Day Eve”). So annoying. And if you’re curious, Jack-o-lantern in Chinese is “pumpkin lantern”: 南瓜灯 nánguā dēng.

P.S. – About the title: that’s “Chinese love-pumpkins” as in a kind of pumpkin (adj. n.), not “Chinese love pumpkins” meaning what Chinese people love (subj. v. obj.). I’m not so sure they feel one way or the other about pumpkins…

Tianjin, we missed you

Joel — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:28:14 +0000

I walk into our old neighbourhood to get my bike out of the bike park where it’s been stored the last eight months, and Dàniáng is sitting outside our old stairwell just like she always does. The Chinese gourd vines she’s planted cover the entrance and reach up to the third floor. She doesn’t recognize me until I smile and wave.

“Oh, it’s you! You’ve come back!”

“Yeah, we’ve come back!”

“Ha, at first I didn’t recognize you; you have a beard now, and also foreigners all look the same.”

“Yeah, I know, we’re all chàbuduō…

Ah, Tianjin. It’s good to be back.

Woman, man, or East Asian pop star?

Joel — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:22:06 +0000

I was babysitting ESL study block at my old high school yesterday morning when I saw the desktop background on a Chinese student’s Acer Netbook.

“Is that a girl?” I asked.

The student, a teenager from Guangdong, looked slightly shocked and annoyed. “No! Of course not!”

“Are you sure?” I smiled and she and her friends knew I was just joking. But honestly, I was only half-joking. Here’s the photo:

It’s Korean pop star 金范, but I don’t know his Korean name.

Sometimes my northern Chinese friends mention how they think southern Chinese males, especially Taiwanese, are too feminine. They laugh at the way they talk and they way they look. Sometimes they say that Western (white) women are too masculine. I had an American co-worker in Tianjin who smoked, and she was constantly told that this made her too masculine.

Now, I’m not saying men can’t 打扮打扮 if they want. But I’d be lying if I pretended that young urban Chinese masculinity ideals — or at least Chinese pop media masculinity ideals — don’t sometimes appear a little feminine to my Western sensibilities. And the women, at least the young and trendy relatively privileged urban ones and their pop culture role models, seem like they’re trying to embody an extreme femininity: anemic, weak, passive, desperately in need of a male’s strength and assertiveness (there’s even a term related to this: “little birdie leaning on a man”/小鸟依人). It’s like gender identity in general plays out a little more toward the feminine side of the scale in China.

Westerners have been getting this impression for generations, as have the Chinese themselves (“feminine” is one of many adjectives Lin Yutang uses to describe Chinese masculinity). There are lots of reasons why Chinese and Westerners perceive each other as too masculine or too feminine — some of it’s biological, but a lot of it’s cultural. And this post is really only talking about the thin slice of Chinese society that foreigners interact with the most: the urban, educated, relatively privileged with enough disposable income to enjoy a consumerist lifestyle. (If foreigners in China spent most of their day-to-day lives with peasants, I wonder how our gender impressions might be different.)

Ever since my first major cross-cultural experiences in rural Uganda and Tanzania, where my language teacher and new friends explained in all sincerity that fat women are more attractive than skinny women, and then laughed so hard (once they got over their disbelief) when we told them that in America it’s the opposite, I’ve been aware that a lot of the specifics of what we “naturally” find attractive (fat/thin, dark/pale, tall/short, muscular/weak, smooth/scruffy, manicured/”man-hands,” etc.) have a lot to do with the families and cultures we grow up in.

Other posts about Chinese/Western beauty ideals:

Please stop paying attention to my… (by Jessica)
Beauty is all in the eye…lid? (by Jessica)
White is beautiful… (by Jessica)
The Men and the Boys
小鸟依人 (“little birdie depending on a man”)

Karaoke Birthday Party!

Joel — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:34:48 +0000

For Jessica’s birthday we had a karaoke party with a bunch friends:

If you haven’t been to a good Chinese karaoke party yet, you’re missing out! Here’s some photos and fun video clips.

Piao Laoshi’s Korean boyfriend gives Jessica a “Happy Birthday Jessica!” shout out in the middle of his song, and elicits praise from some of the ladies who start chanting his name:

Liu Wei, Greg, Dingle and Zhou Jun give a heartfelt(?) rendition of Air Supply’s All Out Of Love:

Cute (they’re engaged):

Jessica got some cute stuffed cows as gifts, since 2009 is the year of the cow.

The cake says, “Happy Birthday, Lin Yi An” (生日快乐林怡安；shēngrì kuàilè lín yí ān). Yí-ān is Jessica’s Chinese name.

While hanging out with the sex ed students, Tianjin gets snow!

Jessica & Joel — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:23:35 +0000

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.

Giving “Ao Yun” his freedom

Joel — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:46:16 +0000

Click the photo to see Ào Yùn the Chinese cricket up close.

Every summer we get a pet cricket, and each summer we let it go before autumn.

This year’s cricket was named “Ào Yùn” (“Olympic”) in honour of the thousands of Chinese kids who were born this year and given the same name.

These are “100 day bugs,” so we only kept him a few weeks before letting him go.

They’re really weird because they breathe through their bellies.