China Hope Live » Photo posts

Taking a “hard sleeper” train in China

Joel — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:01:52 +0000

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.

New Photo Gallery: Ditan Park Temple Fair

Joel — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:16:29 +0000

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

The Chinese Santa Claus

Joel — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:45:03 +0000

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.

“Cats are friends, not food!”

Joel — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:55:44 +0000

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:

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.

Chinese wedding fun

Joel — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:56:19 +0000

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“。

Not all morning commutes are created equal

Joel — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:32:43 +0000

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: