3 random Easter-in-China photos

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Three photos from this Easter weekend in Qingdao that just happen to represent three different kinds of Chinese engagement with Christianity. Easter in Chinese is “Resurrection Festival” 复活节。

1. Three-Self Good Friday

At the local Three-Self Patriotic Church‘s Good Friday service. Three-Self churches can seem stodgy in many ways, as if the Party-mandated international isolation and societal marginalization has frozen in time an imported 1930′s Western fundamentalist style of Christianity by strangling its development. But things are changing, as anyone who spends time at their local Three-Self can tell you. Even if the outward forms — music, facilities, teaching, etc. — seem under-resourced at times, this little church is packed every Friday night. This last Friday, half the attendees and the preacher were in tears by the end.

I’m using this picture to represent China’s traditional, legal, urban Christianity.

2. Good Luck Crucifix

A crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror of our taxi on Easter Sunday morning, next to a typical luck charm (drivers usually hang folk Buddhist, Daoist, even Maoist luck charms). This driver had no idea at all what the crucifix represented; he just vaguely associated it with something positive, saying he doesn’t care about the meanings of any of that stuff but just hangs whatever gives him a nice feeling. (How a miniature scale model of someone being tortured to death could give anyone good vibes — especially if they aren’t aware of the greater hopeful story from which that image comes and what it’s meant to represent — is beyond me.) Have to admit, I was not expecting to see that hanging in the taxi on Easter morning.

I’m using this picture to represent the millions upon millions of Chinese who have zero background knowledge of Christianity, but who cannot avoid encountering it (at least in small, token ways) in today’s China.

3. Jesus Car

A Christian car that shows up in our neighbourhood every couple weeks, including today (Easter Sunday afternoon). What they’re trying to communicate by using English I don’t know (status, education, cosmopolitanism?). They’ve got a cross glued to the dash, where traditional charms like Buddhist prayer wheels often go. But if you look closer you’ll see a key detail that marks them as a new breed of Chinese Christian: their Chinese Bible verse is not written in the traditional, beloved, archaic-sounding KJV-esque translation that 99.99% of China’s churches are unwilling to part with (something that annoys this language student to no end, even though I sympathize). It’s written in the latest translation (Chinese Standard Bible / 中文标准译本), meaning they’re probably part of a next generation of Chinese Christians who are willing to break with cherished traditions.

Even though most of them don’t advertize on the side of their cars, I’m using this picture to represent the newer breed of Chinese Christian, who are typically urban, wealthy, educated and trendy, and whose newly-emerging churches represent an additional third branch of Chinese Christianity along side the Three-Self and traditional unregistered church legacies.

More about Easter in China:

More about Chinese good luck charms:

Learning Chinese? You gotta 趁 your 机会s

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Going to class and book studying is not enough to learn a living, spoken language. If you’re aiming for ancient Hebrew or Koine Greek then schoolwork is enough because you’re never going to speak it; you just need to read it. But not for Chinese. A living language isn’t just knowledge in your head, it’s a skill you practice and develop — something you do, not just something you know or can recognize on a page.

Of the many valuable things you can do in addition to class and book homework, two that we do just happened this morning, and it makes for a good example:

  1. Build language into your daily routines/environment, and
  2. Recognize and seize the opportunities to practice that come your way.

1. Fill Your Daily Life/Routines with Language

Maximize your exposure to the language by controlling your daily environment as much as you can. Going to class for a couple hours, doing a couple hours of homework, but then shifting mental gears into English for the rest of your day is a recipe for frustration. There are all kinds of ways you can increase your exposure to the language. Which ones are most helpful depends on what stage you’re at in your language progress. Probably the best thing you could do is get Chinese roommates (who wont try to speak English with most of the time). Beginning students often label all the objects in their apartment. Intermediate students will start listening to and learning Chinese pop songs. We found bilingual versions or translations of fun, classic children’s stories. Every night when we put our daughter to bed we have the option of reading in English, attempting to read in Chinese, or both. Anyway, the more creative (or resourceful) you are, the more options you’ll have for building Chinese into the structure of your life, into your daily routines.

2. Recognize & Seize Practice Opportunities

There are more opportunities to practice than people tend to realize. And seizing them doesn’t take too much extra effort. The problem is we often don’t recognize the opportunities that come our way. Or we think we’re in too much of a hurry to bother taking advantage of them. Every time something’s broken, or we have to run an errand, or text a friend, or whatever — anything we do that requires us to use Chinese — is an opportunity.

The default behaviour for most language students is to just rush off to accomplish whatever it is on our long list of tasks for the day, muddling through with whatever language ability we have. After all, we don’t want these daily annoyances to suck up too much study time. But these daily tasks are study time, or rather, practice time — valuable practice time. It’s worth the effort to look up the relevant vocab and grammar before you go do whatever it is you need to do. If you already have enough Chinese to get through whatever it is you need to do, you can still sharpen your vocab and grammar, using more accurate Chinese instead of “just barely enough to make myself understood” Chinese.

Example

There’s a leaky solar water heater that we don’t use on the roof of our six-storey building, but the electric control panel for it is in our bathroom on the first floor. Water is leaking down the electric wires and dripping out from inside the panel. So I started to text the landlord. I knew how to say “leaking water” but couldn’t remember how to say “down the wire.”

So I had a choice. I could write the text anyway and make myself understood by simplifying or talking “around” the meaning. But I remembered that in one of our daughter’s bilingual bedtime story books, Yertle the Turtle king, standing on top of a tall stack of turtles, looks down the stack to see who’s complaining at the bottom. So I chose to go to my daughter’s room, open the book, find the phrase, and import the grammar into my text message — “looked down the stack” became “leaking down the wire.”

When the landlord comes over this afternoon I’ll get to practice the phrase in conversation (or discover it’s the wrong phrase and learn the right one). It’s learning through an interactive real-life experience rather than by looking at a text book. By making the small effort to look up the phrase in the book and attempt a more accurate text message, I’m engaging the language more than I would have otherwise. And no matter whether the phrase is right or it gets corrected in conversation this afternoon, it’s sharpening my language accuracy, too.

So these two non-classroom aspects of language learning work together: because we’d already built language into our daily lives by using bilingual bedtime stories, I was able to seize the opportunity of the leaky water heater to sharpen my vocab and grammar. And for very minimal extra effort. It’s just a mundane little example, but a filling your lifestyle with these makes a difference in language acquisition.

Related Stuff:

Eastern Lightning/Church of Almighty God cult: How pervasive are these guys?

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Every week I hear more stories of people we know having run-ins with the Eastern Lightning/Church of Almighty God cult (东方闪电 / 全能父教会). My growing impression is that our city is just crawling with them. This past Saturday a friend (who’s unconnected to the one I mentioned last post), showed me this literature she was given earlier that day:


She’d attended what she thought was a Bible study group. She didn’t notice anything amiss until the end, when they mentioned that not only has Jesus come back but she’s living in Henan province. Even then she didn’t realize what she’d stumbled into; she hadn’t heard of this particular group despite the fact that the gov’t's Dec. 2012 crackdown made international headlines.

Just of the top of my head I can think of four unrelated circles we’re connected to in which people have mentioned running into cult — just within the last three weeks.

People who keep tabs on Christianity in China have been aware of this group since the early 90′s because they specifically (and sometimes violently) target Christians and churches. Here’s links I found helpful/interesting — some crazy stuff in here, especially the first-hand accounts:

It’s important to understand this cult within the Chinese rural house church/indigenous modern religious context from which it mutated. I found this in-depth review of a recent scholarly work on China’s modern, Christianity-influenced homegrown religious context helpful:

How to combat doomsday cults and other undesirables: China-style [UPDATED 2x]

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Hitting problems sideways goes back thousands of years in China. Wéiqí 围棋 (aka “encirclement chess” aka “Go”) is at least 2500 years old. And while they’re certainly willing to engage in head-on confrontation, using an indirect approach is the standard M.O. for Chinese authorities when dealing with troublesome, undesirable groups — it’s effective and less accountable. Here are three examples: two on-going and one more-or-less recent.

The Doomsday Cult

侧面地 — “sideways” — is the adverb a friend used this last Sunday to describe the way the gov’t indirectly combats the Eastern Lightning/Church of Almighty God cult (东方闪电 / 全能父教会), of whom his mother-in-law is a member. Everything she does and everywhere she goes is monitored, but they haven’t confronted her directly. They went instead to her husband’s employer, revealed a bunch of what they know, and pressured the employer to use his leverage to pressure the husband to contain his wife.

The result so far is that the entire rest of the family now fears for their livelihoods. All of them reject the cult and its teachings, but having a family member involved is enough to put them all at risk. It’s sufficient motivation for a family to do whatever they can to discourage the wayward grandma. Which, in their case, isn’t very much; this group isn’t called cult for no reason (links at bottom). In China, they’re officially an “evil religion” (邪教).

The Social-problem-engaged Non-Profit

A couple years ago a non-profit in our former city got the sideways treatment. They run a project that provides therapy for disabled kids and training for their parents. That project’s major event every year is a Christmas performance; they rent out a local theatre and the kids, parents and teachers put on a show. One year the local authorities decided to squash it. But instead of contacting the org directly or telling them during the monthly meeting to ‘have tea’, they went to the theatre on the weekend before the show was scheduled and told the managers to cancel the booking. The theatre refused; apparently the authorities weren’t offering to cover their lost revenue. So police were sent to the org’s office. I was told by a person present that there was a verbal confrontation between them and the Chinese staff of the disabled children’s project. Apparently one staff member got agitated: “This is not a religious event, and if you want to cancel it then you can bring your battalions to the show and cancel it yourself!” In the end there was a compromise: they could still put on the show, but they had to take out all the parts that had to do with the Christmas Story (so no baby Jesus in the manger, shepherds and sheep and angels and all that).

The Envelope-pushing Church

In the under-reported case of Shouwang, a church in Beijing that’s been engaged in a public standoff with the authorities for over a year, sideways tactics played a key role in creating the mess. They were a large unregistered church network of small gatherings that decided to begin meeting as one big group. This was breaking an unwritten rule in the gray area of illegal-but-tolerated religious practice in China; unregistered normal churches are often left alone so long as they don’t meet in large groups or otherwise draw attention to themselves. After repeatedly being turned out of venues they’d rented by landlords who were being pressured by the authorities, they purchased their own place. But when they were prevented from taking possession of their own property, they began holding their Sunday services outside in a park in protest, demanding an end to the harrassment and that they be allowed to register as a legal organization without being required to join the Party-controlled “Three-Self Patriotic Church” (三自爱国教会). These demands, however, require changes to actual policy, not just an altering of the unwritten rules of the status quo. They want an end to the “sideways” management, and they want official, legally-recognized status.

So they’ve forced direct confrontation with local authorities. Those that aren’t under house arrest are detained by waiting police every single weekend. But consider these details (emphasis mine):

In 2012 … members of Shouwang Church were detained 1,600 times by either Domestic Security Protection agents in various districts [of Beijing] or in more than 90 different police stations across Beijing (for periods of several hours to 48 hours). Sixty people were evicted from their homes and more than 10 people lost their jobs…

They’ll use legions of police to make sure a scene isn’t created in a public space on Sunday morning, and they’ll keep the leaders under long-term house arrest. But in the meantime they’ll wear down the rank-and-file, suffocating them by twisting the arms of their landlords and employers. (You can find more details of this on-going saga documented here.)

Update #1: landlords, employers, relatives

I’m adding this update because it’s a perfect real-life example:

the situation has been increasingly tense since the beginning of March. He said, the government departments don’t even bother trying to have any direct contact; instead, they go behind our backs to threaten the landlord and not allow us to continue worshipping here. Then they go to the work units of the individual church members and give them orders, telling them they do not have permission to come to our church anymore, otherwise, they must resign from their jobs or they will be fired.

The senior pastor said, “Last weekend, even my 70-year-old elderly mother was summoned by the neighborhood committee and forced to answer questions about my situation, which gave the old lady a great fright.”

Update #2: Children

I failed to mention in the above examples that children are not exempt from being used as leverage: Ten-Year-Old Girl Detained, Denied Food and Water

How to do cross-cultural transitions right: Build a “RAFT”

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Moving cross-culturally is a lot of things, but one thing it isn’t is easy. You leave behind siblings, nephews and nieces, parents and grandparents, and friends, plus places and things infused with memories and meaning, like the house where you grew up and park where you proposed.

We did that once, the first time we moved to Asia. After three years we returned to Canada to have our first child, and then we did it again. After another two years in China we returned to Canada a second time for the birth of our second child. And now we’re back in China for the third time.

The return trips to China after each birth were harder than the first time we left. Taking your children away from their grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins, Sunday school friends (never mind all the grass and trees and oceans and lakes and air) hurts.

You realize more what you’re doing when you’re also doing it to your kid.

There’re others you leave behind, too: coworkers, people you don’t like, people you have a grudge against. And there’s the nasty bonus surprise: returning to your culture of origin (like our friend Rob) after a long time away is often harder than leaving your original home ever was in the first place. Not only are you leaving behind so many friends and places and memories, but “home” has changed since you left, and so have you, and it won’t feel the same. Much of the familiarity you’re expectantly anticipating never materializes. But this post isn’t about entry or re-entry; it’s about leaving.

Regardless of which direction you’re going, the experience of leaving so much behind is huge whether you take the time to acknowledge it or not. And how you leave it can have a big impact on you personal development, on the kind of people you and your lover and your kids are becoming. This experience impacts all of you, and some ways of intentionally navigating the experience are healthier than others.

We received some great advice about how to do cross-cultural transitions before our most recent move back to China, advice we tried out a little bit in the months before we left, and we think it’s worth sharing. I wish we’d put more of it into practice than we did. It’s called “building a R.A.F.T.” and comes from chapter 13 of Third Culture Kids by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken (pages 200-204 in our 2001 edition). Below is my summary/paraphrase/riff of what they wrote.

Building a R.A.F.T.

You’ll see quickly that this process takes some forethought and planning ahead; put it off ’til the last two weeks and you’ll likely not have enough opportunities. You’ll also notice that it’s something for every family member to do, not just the adults.

Reconciliation
Closure matters. Festering bitterness matters. Making peace matters. Emotional baggage matters. Guilt and regrets matter. Forgiving and being forgiven matter, and that’s what reconciliation is all about. Reconciliation means growing up. It means attempting to communicate hurts and forgiveness, and initiate apologies.

A cross-cultural move presents a tempting cop-out: to run away and ignore strained or broken relationships. But refusing to resolve interpersonal conflicts sabotages healthy closure, and this lack of reconciliation sabotages the rest of your “RAFT” — the rest of your transition and entry/re-entry experience. You can’t really move away from these kinds of difficulties anyway; you’ll carry the emotional baggage of unresolved problems with you. Bitterness is unhealthy, unresolved relational issues can interfere with new relationships, and if/when you eventually move back, those problems will still be there, and they’ll be even harder to resolve.

A cross-cultural move also provides a great excuse, if you need one, for attempting to make peace: “Hey, I’m leaving for China for who knows how long, and I don’t want to leave a mess between us…” or however you need to do it.

You can’t always achieve reconciliation, of course, because it takes two willing parties. But you can always attempt it, and at least own up to the part of the relationship you’re responsible for. In our recent personal experience we found that the attempt is worth it whether the other side engages or not.

Affirmation
Think through your list of friends, coworkers, supervisors, neighbours, classmates. Do more than just say goodbye. Affirm people; let them know you respect and appreciate them, acknowledge that they matter. This is good for them and for you: it strengthens your relationships into the future and makes you more aware of what you’ve gained from living in the place you’re leaving. Pollock and Van Reken illustrate with some examples:

  • Make time to tell coworkers that you enjoyed working with them.
  • Tell friends how their friendship has been important, and maybe leave them some sort of memento.
  • Send a note and small gift to neighbours, mentioning positive things about your interactions with them.
  • Reassure those close to you of your love for them and that you don’t leave them lightly. Order flowers for the day after you leave.

Affirmation helps with closure by acknowledging the blessings you have in the form of relationships, and mourning their passing.

Farewells
Making farewells to people, places, and possessions helps avoid deep regrets later. Schedule ahead so that you won’t end up missing anyone or anywhere or any thing that was in any way significant, and make a real ‘official’ farewell to each. It’s a time to acknowledge all the positive things and feelings, and acknowledge that it’s sad to leave each person and thing behind.

People - this is crucial, even more so for children, who will need guidance. You want to say and do something, make some sort of gesture like baking cookies or writing a note, that acknowledges the importance of that person to you, expresses thanks, and lets them know they will be missed.

Some sort of “rite of passage” ritual often accompanies major life transitions like graduation or retirement parties. Taking the time to do something similar in spirit creates a significant memory acknowledging the importance of a person or place, and helps face and process the fact that you’re leaving them.

Places - Visit emotionally significant sites to reminisce and say goodbye. Everything from the tree you loved climbing to the park where you got engaged. Some people plant a tree, or hide some little treasure that they could dig up later if they ever return. The point is to openly acknowledge the time as a true goodbye, admitting that the stage of life these places represent will soon be in the past.

Possessions - You have to leave a lot of stuff behind in international moves. Certainly, adults and kids have to learn about letting go, and we all have too much stuff anyway, but everyone should talk over what to take and what to leave behind. It’s also important to deliberately choose and take what become “sacred objects”, a slowly growing collection of physical objects that connect the different places and stages of your life. When important objects must be left behind, try giving them as gifts to a friend and taking photographs. Jessica and I have a Christmas tree ornament (or something we use as one) from most of the significant places in our life together. Every year we can remember.

In addition to all her teachers and ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’, we had our three-year-old say good-bye to her classrooms, playground, the lake where she swam all summer, places we visited regularly, her bedrooms, toys she was leaving behind, parks we often walked in, and a bunch of other stuff. And we took pictures of it all. This gave us plenty of opportunity to verbalize what was happening then and later after we’d returned to China. It helped all of us put words to the experience and mourn all that we were losing in a healthy way.

Think Destination
During the goodbye process, start shifting gears mentally, reorienting your thinking to the near future: you’re arrival and adjustment in a new place. Think realistically: identify positives and negatives and differences about your destination. List problems you’ll likely encounter. Make a list of your coping resources, both external (finances, support people you can lean on) and internal (your ability and methods of dealing with the stress of change).

Thinking ahead and identifying these things helps make the transition much less rockier than it could be. Forming realistic expectations helps avoid disappointment (from too high expectations) and makes sure you don’t miss out on available resources (due to too low expectations). You aren’t mentally and emotionally leaving so much behind in order to go nowhere; every step away from what you’re leaving can be a step toward what you’re gaining.

Related stuff:

So you want to make a difference in China?

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Good luck. ;)

Here are four quotes from three different centuries. The first three come from Jonathan Spence‘s To Change China: Western Advisers in China 1620-1960 (1969).

Jonathan Spence on education in 19th century China:

It was particularly hard for a foreigner to enter the educational sector. To the Chinese, education was the key to social harmony and political stability: from the Confucian Classics, hallowed by a tradition reaching back over two thousand years, the young learned obedience, morality, and the norms of acceptable behaviour. On the basis of their study of the Classics, they participated in ascending levels of examinations for the civil service. Success in these examinations opened up prospects for a career in government, the major source of wealth and power. To introduce new subjects — such as Western philosophy, languages, or natural science — was to threaten the basis of the Chinese state. Innovation, accordingly, was vigorously resisted. [Spence, 129]

John Fryer, missionary/educator/translator employed by the Qing dynasty, on learning Chinese:

It was all a question of time and tenacity: “Most foreigners who come to China have the notion that in a year they will master the language. They get a teacher, and pound away vigorously for a week or perhaps a month and then give up in disgust.” Accordingly, they made ludicrous mistakes which negated all their endeavors. He told his cousin of hearing a missionary in Shanghai trying to tell his Chinese audience that “Jesus is here also”; the missionary, muddling his tones and aspirates, succeeded only in assuring the puzzled listeners that “Jesus is inside shaving his head.” “If I could have my way, not a single missionary should say one word in public till he had lived with the people and studied the local dialect of his mission station at least five years, and passed an examination. Just imagine the ridicule which such people bring to Christianity.” [Spence, 145]

Mikhail Borodin, “Stalin’s man in China,” on his failure:

I came to China to fight for an idea. The dream of accomplishing world revolution by freeing the people of the East brought me here. But China itself, with its age-old history, its countless millions, its vast social problems, its infinite capacities, astounded and overwhelmed me, and my thoughts of world revolution and the fight for freedom, in China became an end in itself, and no longer a means to an end. My task was to grasp the situation, to start the great wheel moving, and as time has passed it has carried me along with it. I myself have become only a cog in the great machine. [Spence, 202]

BBC commentator Martin Jacques on understanding China (quoted by Dr. Brent Fulton of ChinaSource.org):

Last year Martin Jacques, a BBC commentator, put it well when he said, “The great task facing the West over the next century will be to make sense of China – not in our terms but in theirs. We have to understand China as it is and as it has been, not project our own history, culture, institutions and values onto it. It will always fail that test. In truth such a mentality tells us more about our own arrogance and lack of curiosity than anything about China.”

(And of course we have lots more quotes and reviews of China Books and DVDs.)

Robert Munsch’s “I Have to Go!” in Chinese

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We translated Robert Munsch‘s classic potty story “I Have to Go!” for ourselves and had our Chinese tutor correct it.

You can download this PDF with the full Chinese and pīnyīn. Below is a mouseover-able excerpt. Buy the book to see the English.

Suggestions for improvement are welcome!

《我要尿尿！》

Page 1
有一天，安德鲁的爸爸妈妈要带他去看爷爷奶奶。他们在让他上车之前，妈妈问：“安德鲁，你要尿尿吗？”

安德鲁说：“不不不不不。”

爸爸很缓慢地、清楚地又问了一遍：“安德鲁，你要尿尿吗？”

“不不不不不，” 安德鲁说。“我决定了再也不尿尿。”

Page 2
于是他们让安德鲁上车，系上了他的安全带，也给了他很多书、玩具、蜡笔、然后上走了——呜～～。他们刚开了一分钟，安德鲁喊：“我要尿尿！”

“哎呦，”爸爸说。

“哎呀，”妈妈说。

Page 3
接着爸爸说，“嗨，安德鲁，只等五分钟。五分钟以后我们就到加油站，你可以在那里尿尿。”

安德鲁说：“可我现在就要尿尿！”

于是妈妈停了车——哧～～。安德鲁跳下车就在灌木丛后边尿了。

Download: WoYaoNiaoniao.pdf

More Chinese bedtime stories: