Over Spring Festival my parents and I took a “hard sleeper” (硬卧) train for the first time. After all the stories I’d heard I was expecting the worst, especially since it was 春运，the Spring Festival travel season when public transportation gets beyond maxed out. It wasn’t really all that bad, though I can easily imagine how it could be really bad, depending on your fellow passengers. Definitely wouldn’t want to do it with a baby. The hardest thing for us this time was getting tickets in the first place, which required some serious string-pulling by a friend of a friend — I’m afraid to ask how he got them. But if you like to chat/practice Chinese, and you bring snacks (that you can share), a book, a cup and some instant coffee, a hard sleeper doesn’t have to be a brutal experience, at least going from our recent first trip.

I put a bunch of photos into a gallery, along with details about our ride in the captions. If a hard sleeper train ride is in your near or potential future, the photo gallery will give you a good idea of what to expect, snogging couples and all. Haha, poor mom!

Click a photo to go to the hard sleeper gallery.

My folks came to see us during Spring Festival and we spent a couple days in Beijing. Ditan Park has Beijing’s biggest Spring Festival Temple Fair and it barely contains an unbelievable amount of people, noise and colour. We had a blast, though I wouldn’t recommend it for those who easily suffer from sensory overload! Click the link or the photos below to go to the photo gallery.

Beijing’s Ditan Park Temple Fair 地坛庙会 – 2010 Feb. 20

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。

For details on the story behind one particular incarnation of the Chinese money god, see Bi Gan Temple 比干庙 near Xinxiang, Henan 新乡，河南 – 2010 Feb 22.

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.

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.

Midnight on Christmas Eve 2009 in Tianjin, China (they call it “Peaceful Night” 平安夜):

If you put New Year’s, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day and the commercial side of Christmas into a blender and then reincarnated the unappetizing mush into an overpopulated midnight carnival, you’d have Christmas Eve in Tianjin. Clowns, stage shows, blowing artificial snow (soap-sud machines), a countdown to midnight (pictured above), and a bunch of foreigners performing Christmas carols (us) were all out two nights ago among the masses and their blinky, battery-powered headgear. In between our two performances on stage there was a choreographed Michael Jackson dance routine by five 5-foot tall pelvis-thrusting minors who looked way too young to be grabbing the front of their pants that way in public (pictured left).

Random strangers occasionally asked to get their picture taken with us, since we’re foreigners. We obliged, of course, and I got my revenge when I saw this line up of 90-pound Santas:

But it was all for a good cause. A local company decided they wanted to get into the real spirit of Christmas by holding a fundraiser for the Special Education Project. They aggressively hawked these LED Christmas candle things all day and night to the throngs of people on Tianjin’s two busiest outdoor shopping streets, which is Christmas Eve Central for T. The two girls pictured on the right had me and a friend cornered before we had a chance to tell them we were with the group they were raising money for.

Since we’re associates of the N.G.O. that was receiving the money, the company asked us to put together some songs for before and after the midnight countdown. We had a group of carolers, which included some of our local friends and students, two guitars and a flute. They wanted us to get the crowd into it, and below you can see the line of police in front of the stage holding back all our rabid 粉丝. Ok, maybe they’re not actually our fěnsī, but they were in a good mood and it wasn’t hard to get a response from the crowd; all we had to do was show up. They’re supposed to play part of it on TV today, so I may have finally made it on TV in Tianjin. :) Here’s our the helmeted crowd control:

It didn’t actually feel all that Christmasy, but at least it was something to mark the day. Actually, packing into an apartment with a bunch of friends (Chinese, German, Brazilian, Canadian, American) earlier in the evening to practice the songs over snacks and coffee wasn’t a bad way to spend a Christmas Eve. For two of my students it was the first time they’d done anything to celebrate Christmas, so that was kind of special. A few more photos below (none of these photos are mine; I was too busy playing guitar).

All these blobs are the blowing artificial snow soapsud bubbles (it looked cooler in real life):

These are the LED things they sold for the fundraiser:

If I can find any photos of us on stage, I’ll add them below when I get them.

圣诞快乐！

Friends who also wrote on this surreal experience:

• Lindy — Christmas is for Shopping…
• Rob (the other guitar player) — Merry Something!
• Shannon — Merry MardiEasterValentineHalloweenNewYearChristmas! Ho Ho Ho?

[2010 Jan 08] Here we are in the newspaper:

The caption says:

The other day Tianjin TV’s “Art & Entertainment Food 8 Street” news column at Heping Lu business walking street held a groundbreaking special evening party, not only was there brilliant cultural performances, also can’t count the many different kinds of interactive games spectators were invited to participate in. Additionally, foreign volunteers working in Tianjin from the USA, France, Italy and etc. countries also got on stage and sang impromptu songs for the audience. Newspaper reporter: Cao Tongshe

Of course, we didn’t have anyone from France or Italy, but hey, who’s counting?
[2010 Jan 18] Finally got hold of some shots of us on stage:

Other Christmas and Christmas-in-Tianjin 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)

To best appreciate the awesome-but-sadly-apparently-temporary powers of China’s weather gods, you must play this mp3 while reading:

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All these photos are from out our kitchen yángtái windows. The blue sky photos are from Oct. 1st; the less-blue ones are from this morning.

When we flew in to Beijing on Sept. 30 we could barely see the terminal from the airplane on account of all the kōngqì wūrǎn (空气污染). But not to worry, in China the They can change the weather. When there’s an important made-for-TV event, They make it rain the night before and… voila!:

That was Oct 1st, the even-more-important-than-the-Olympics 60th anniversary national day military parade. And this next photo was from this morning — apparently They didn’t have any photo-ops scheduled today:

Pollution is measured here in term of “blue sky days” (蓝天). True to form, since reality in China is whatever They say reality is (you really ought to read 1984), “blue sky day” doesn’t actually mean that the sky is blue or clear; it means the official pollution readings are below a certain level, which often is still thick with haze. And never mind that the cut off line for blue sky days is still considered hazardous by the rest of the world’s pollution monitoring scales, or that They don’t even bother measuring the most harmful forms of air pollution particles. In this last photo, you can see the colour starting to change in the top left corner; there were no clouds today, and if you looked straight up, you could actually see some faint blue.

P.S. – I think I’m just about done whining about the pollution, at least for now. Posts on karaoke survival, creative ways to stay connect with family back home, Tianjin’s suspiciously curvacious public statues, free One Child Policy baby accessories, and a racial Disney moment at the English school are all in the works.

Other pollution posts:

• Everything you wish you didn’t know about air pollution in China
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Chewing Tianjin’s Air
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

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!