Category Archives: holidays

Beasts of the Chinese Zodiac, More New Year…

Posted on February 23, 2015 | Leave a comment

Beasts of the Chinese Zodiac, More New Year Celebrations

—by Jinny Batterson

Anyone who’s ever been given a place mat at a Chinese-American restaurant likely has seen pictures of the animals of the Chinese zodiac:  mouse/rat, ox/bull/buffalo, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep/goat/ram, monkey, rooster, dog, pig.  Unlike the roughly monthly zodiac familiar to readers of American newspapers, the Chinese zodiac works in lunar year increments, generally running from mid-January-to-mid-February of one year to mid-January-to-mid-February of the next.  To further complicate matters, the Chinese zodiac also cycles through five “elements” (some claim it’s really the “ten heavenly stems”) of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, so a complete cycle takes 60 years.

The first time we spent Chinese New Year in China, we ushered in the “Year of the (Metal) Golden Pig,” an especially auspicious year, according to China fortune tellers. When we returned two years later, we experienced the transition to the “Year of the Earth Ox,”  a more middling kind of year. Fortunes have been made and lost over the interpretation of the various Chinese zodiac signs.  Some years are reputed to be luckier than others, and slight ripples in the overall birth rate can be attributed to parents working toward having a child born in a “good” year. A chart of a 20th century cycle of years, with their attributes, is part of the China travel website http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/astrology/60year-cycle.htm.

Most of the animals of the Chinese zodiac are familiar to anyone who’s ever spent time on a farm or lived in the countryside.  One exception stands out—the dragon.  For Chinese, dragons are good, rather than the evil creatures portrayed in much of Western mythology.  Chinese mythology credits dragons with inhabiting and taming major rivers in China, the northernmost being “Heilongjiang,” or “Black Dragon River.” Being born in a dragon year (which most recently occurred in 2007) is considered lucky.  Emperors of China’s dynasties often had dragons embroidered on their clothing. Only the emperor’s residence was allowed to have dragon symbols on its rooftops.  As a guide explained to me on an early tour in Beijing, a dragon is considered to have the attributes of nine different animals:  the head of an ox, the horns of a deer, the eye of a tiger, the teeth of a leopard, the antenna of a shrimp, the mane of a horse, the scales of a fish, the body of a snake, and the claws of an eagle.  A royal beast, indeed.

Our New Year celebrations in 2009 were spent in various parts of Sichuan. Our friend Jean Wang and her husband were able to meet us in Ya’an a few days before the year’s new year celebration, which would occur on Monday, January 29.  Jean was just getting over a bad cold, and I seemed to be coming down with a similar infection.  Despite health and weather concerns, we all went to see the pandas at nearby Bifengxia, then spent the night in our Foreign Teachers’ Guest House, where there was a spare apartment for Jean and her husband due to the holidays.

At New Year, we spent a couple of days visiting lots of Jean’s in-laws, necessitating most of a day’s journey by bus and then taxi. One contingent of relatives lived in a compound high enough in the hills to be off a car-friendly road.  We carpooled in an uncle’s van as far as we could go.  Afterwards, several of the younger cousins roared the remaining half mile on the motorcycle one of them had parked at the foot of the last hill.  The rest of us walked. The noise level and the smoke density from firecrackers were less intense than what we’d experienced two years before, but we got to see more of the traditions of a Sichuan countryside Spring Festival—curing and cooking sausages, sweeping out the house and family compound, burning paper money to bring good fortune, visiting first the male relatives, then the female side of the family. What did not change from our previous experience was the quantity and variety of food. A Thanksgiving feast may be the closest American equivalent.  Any notion of vigorous physical activity during the day or two after Spring Festival is pretty much a lost cause.  Sadly, we did not get a chance to meet Jean’s family at the holiday. One of the casualties of the increasing mobility of younger generations of Chinese may be the chance to see everyone’s relatives each year.

We made up for the fact that we could not visit Jean’s family by visiting one of Sichuan’s best tourist sites, not far from where her in-laws lived.  We spent a day in Leshan, Sichuan, home of the world’s largest pre-modern statue, a seated Buddha. Even in midwinter, the “Big Buddha” of Leshan is impressive. It is over 230 feet tall, overlooking the confluence of several rivers of southern Sichuan.  It was built more than a thousand years ago at the insistence of a Buddhist monk who had seen a vision of a Buddha to protect sailors, many of whom were drowning in the treacherous currents where the rivers joined. So much stone was moved and thrown into the river during the lengthy process of excavating the site and carving the statue that the river currents were changed, so the area did in fact become safer for boats. On the blustery day when we visited, few other tourists were in sight. We took pictures of the four of us at the fence overlooking the Buddha’s massive head,  then threaded our way carefully down the cliffside stairs to the Buddha’s base. There we took another picture—Jean beside the Buddha’s big toe, which was taller than she was.

 

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Spring Festival in Lipu

Posted on February 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

Food, Food, More Food, Firecrackers, Dragon Dances: Spring Festival in Lipu

—by Jinny Batterson

The first time we spent Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) in China came at the end  of a long mid-winter break during our year of teaching in far northwest China. We’d lounged away most of our holiday at the beach resort town of Sanya on Hainan Island, the “Hawaii of China” (see post from February 2, 2015),  but a Chinese friend who lived in the neighboring  area of Guangxi had invited us to spend New Year’s and a few days surrounding it with him and his family.  Getting to Liang’s town took a short plane ride to Guilin, then a slightly longer bus ride on a comfortable long-distance bus.  One of our fellow bus passengers lent us her cell phone to alert Liang to our arrival in his town, Lipu.

We pulled in on the evening of Valentine’s Day, several days before that year’s actual New Year. Liang and his brother met us at the bus station, and loaded us and our luggage into his brother’s pickup. The brother, despite a bit of alcohol-induced weaving, managed to drive us without major accident to Liang’s new townhouse, where we hastily unpacked. We then hailed a “tricycle taxi,” a motorized partly open conveyance, distant cousin to a riding lawnmower, for a brief ride to a dumpling feast. Classmates of our mutual former student had gathered at “Mark’s” aunt’s house to celebrate his 21st birthday. The occasion was a chance for the high school chums to spend some time together—most were now enrolled in universities far from Lipu. We ate delicious homemade boiled dumplings, drank tea or beer, swapped stories of student days and of everyone’s adventures since they’d last been together. Finally we were too stuffed and tired from feasting and travels to stay awake. Liang phoned for another taxi, we shoehorned the three of us into its single seat, and sputtered our way back to his house, where all of us fell into a satisfied sleep.

The following days were crammed with New Year preparations.  We bought red envelopes for money gifts for the children. We bought lucky couplets, large-character Chinese calligraphy on long red paper streamers, to paste beside and above the doorways of homes. The day we put up couplets at Liang’s was windy. Our exertions with couplets, ladders, saw horses, glue and brooms were worthy of the best slapstick comedy. Luckily, no one fell off a ladder and got hurt. We bought local delicacies. Liang’s wife cooked pork with taro, a regional dish—rich and a bit greasy. We bought or made pyramid-shaped envelopes of sticky rice with fillings, fried tofu, fresh water chestnuts, several varieties of winter greens, eight treasures rice pudding. On New Year’s Eve, the extended family gathered in early evening at Liang’s mother’s house. We ate and ate and ate. A neighbor took pictures of the dozen or so of us—Liang, his wife, his sister and brothers and their spouses, each with a single nearly-grown child.

After the feast, Liang, his wife, and we two foreigners retired to Liang’s house, while Liang’s son stayed on with his grandma, closer to Lipu’s “downtown.”  Liang told us it would be good to take a nap before it got too close to midnight. We awoke about 11, just as the first of the fireworks went off.  We turned on the Chinese television New Year’s Eve gala, broadcast from Beijing.  By midnight, the local fireworks were so deafening that we could no longer hear the sound track of the televised gala, nor could we hear each other.  Though it was a clear night, the sky was obscured by a thick haze. Periodically, the steady din of strings of firecrackers bursting nearby was punctuated by a louder burst of overhead fireworks from downtown. We got a little sleep between 1 a.m. and 6, when the fireworks started up again.

Toward midmorning, dragon and lion dancers maneuvered along the streets outside, bobbing and weaving amid the heaps of red paper detritus from the previous night’s spent firecrackers. Still more firecrackers went off around them.  Liang and his wife presented us with matching piggy banks in honor of the advent of the “Year of the Golden Pig.”  Too soon it was time to start the succession of taxi, bus, and plane rides that would return us to our teaching posts. Our ears would eventually recover, but subsequent fireworks displays on American Independence Day would always seem muted by comparison.

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Beach Time in Sanya

Posted on February 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

Beach time in Sanya     —by Jinny Batterson

The first time I traveled to China, in 1980, there was little concept of vacation or of visiting distant natural wonders among Chinese workers, many of whom had survived the famines and upheavals of previous decades by the skin of their teeth. Most were happy then to be alive, reunited with family members, and not starving. The industrial workers I saw during that visit worked six days each week. Days off were staggered. There was no such thing as a weekend. If the weather was pleasant, groups of workers from the same factory or work unit might visit a nearby urban park together on their one day off—anything further afield was unimaginable. Transportation infrastructure was minimal. A basic national rail passenger network existed between major cities, but getting around for long distances in the countryside was difficult to impossible.

By my more recent visits, much of that had changed. China’s booming economy had created a huge middle class—more than the entire population of the United States. Road, high-speed rail, and airport infrastructure was being built out at a breakneck pace. Many middle-class Chinese now owned private motorcycles or cars. Trips to exotic locales, along with advanced education, were the two luxuries most sought after by Chinese with newly available discretionary income. Nearly every middle class Chinese urbanite has a dream vacation spot, either in-country or overseas. The increasing in-country tourism infrastructure in China has made it possible for them and for me to see regions that were previously off-limits or just too hard to get to.

Some of my Xinjiang teaching colleagues in far northwest China in 2006-2007 were the Chinese equivalent of “snowbirds” (a term used to describe people in the northeastern U.S. or eastern Canada who spend at least part of the winter where the weather is warmer).  I discovered, as our long winter holiday break approached,  that  several teachers at our college had previously been to Sanya, a former fishing village on Hainan Island in the South China Sea now dubbed the “Hawaii of China”  and “Forever Tropical Paradise.” Their recommendations that I travel to Sanya, too, fell on willing ears—the chill winds blowing around our edge-of-the-desert campus and through cracks around our windows and doors made this tropical resort sound especially appealing.

My husband and I arrived in Sanya late one night, very tired from a long set of plane flights clear across the country.  We would spend most of our stay at an elegant 3-star guest house that was built into a hillside several blocks from a public beach.  Over the course of our several week holiday, this seaside town became one of my all-time favorite locales for “beach time.”  Our visit started with a first night’s sleep lulled by gentle warm breezes. The following day, I went shopping for a bathing suit—not generally needed in Xinjiang at any time of the year.  I found, though I am of average height and fairly slender size for an American woman (5 feet 5 inches tall, size 10), in Chinese sizes I’m an extra-extra-large. Nearly everywhere we went, we saw cascades of bougainvillea, most often in vibrant shades of pink, red, and purple. Twenty different varieties of the trailing shrub, with its three-sided blossoms, grow in the area, I was told. The flowers have become a symbol of Sanya, whose Chinese character name starts with “san,” or three.

We met other native English speakers in Sanya, but by far the largest international group in late January were Russian tourists. Most hotels, restaurants, and tour locations had signage in Chinese and Russian, with occasional English.  One was just as likely to hear a rendition of “Midnight in Moscow” in a local nightclub as a version of Elvis’s “Love Me Tender,”  as likely to find beef Stroganoff on the menu as hamburger. Sanya tourism officials had encouraged the influx of Russian tourists and their tourist spending, providing on-arrival visa services and several weekly direct flights from northern Russian cities.

Of course, Sanya was not totally paradisiacal —there were occasional signs of urban blight and of the boom-and-bust cycle of construction that seems to plague tourist destinations even more than other cities and towns.  Parts of town were off-limits, home to an extensive naval base. Some fishing boats of the former fishing fleet lay at anchor, gradually rusting and/or rotting away. Shops and attractions could be just as kitschy as beach towns anywhere else on the planet. Still, the town had all the amenities to provide a comfortable, welcoming, affordable stay.

A little east of the main part of town was an area of curving white sand beach called Yalong Bay. Site of the poshest resort hotels, the neighborhood was mostly gated and somewhat beyond our tourist budget. However, partly courtesy of a local government official who’d lived with us in the U.S. many years previously, we had a chance to visit one of the luxury hotels briefly and to share in a complimentary lunch on the terrace of the Sheraton Sanya.  Its widely traveled general manager plied us with excellent food and drink and regaled us with stories of famous guests he’d had and crises he’d averted. The view of the bay, the wide pristine arc of the beach, and the graceful rolling waves beyond was as beautiful as any I’ve seen.

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Plum Blossoms in Winter

Posted on January 12, 2015 | 1 comment

Plum Blossoms in Winter    —by Jinny Batterson

One of the pleasures I most enjoyed during the school year I spent in Ya’an, Sichuan (2008-2009) was taking solitary walks along paths through the upper reaches of our campus and the surrounding small villages and farmland. The school where I was a foreign teacher had over 20,000 students, so solitary walks would not seem to have been practical. However, much of the activity on campus took place around the dorms or classroom buildings, or in the adjacent commercial areas in the flat land near the river that bisected the town.  At certain times of day, especially in cold or foggy weather, the paths and trails further uphill, near the campus tea plantation or up beyond the graduate dorms, were nearly empty.  During part of the Spring Festival holiday that year, my husband and I stayed on campus, awaiting the arrival of Chinese friends whose transportation challenges made them several days later than originally expected.  The campus had pretty much emptied out—students had gone home to be with their families at this most important of Chinese festivals. Some faculty members were also away visiting extended family; most of those still around were indoors hosting extended family meals at apartments or restaurants.

As I remember it, one chilly early afternoon in mid-January I walked up toward the complex that included several graduate dormitories around a central courtyard.  The gate to the complex was shut and locked, but the small manmade lake just below it was still accessible.  The lake area had been lovingly landscaped—there were pebbled pathways, a small island, a rock face adorned with a recirculating waterfall, and lotus pads, now shriveled and dormant, that had put out blossoms earlier in the year. Trees had been planted on the island and around the perimeter of the lake. Most were leafless—willows and gingkos that had turned yellow and then shed a month or two before. When I looked more closely at some smaller trees I didn’t recognize, likely fruit trees os some sort, I noticed buds on their branches. By the time our friends arrived and we walked together to the lake, the buds had become blooms, small yellow “suns” amid the winter gloom.

Our friends explained that these were one of many varieties of Asian plum trees (Latin name: prunus mume; over 300 cultivars exist in China alone). Most of the time, blossoms came in white, pink, or red, so these yellow ones were somewhat unusual, perhaps specially bred at our agricultural school.  Representations of blossoming plum branches abound in Chinese paintings. These hardy blooms that brighten short winter days are a beloved symbol of persistence and of overcoming adversity. They are planted everywhere in China. In most locations, the blooms appear sometime between early January and late February, so they often overlap the timing of Spring Festival (known in the U.S. mostly as Chinese New Year). People welcome them as the first harbingers of spring, a little like pussy willow buds in northern parts of the United States.

Images of plum blossoms are easy to find in popular Chinese culture—painted on scrolls or fans, photographed and featured in exhibitions, sketched onto teacups, embroidered into clothing. Good reminders when it’s cold outside or conditions seem bleak, that spring always follows winter, and that adversity never lasts forever.

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Mutton Dumplings for Winter Solstice

Posted on December 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

Mutton Dumplings for Winter Solstice  —by Jinny Batterson

The first time we spent the winter solstice in China, we were in far western Xinjiang in northwestern China.  By December, it was really cold in our small town of Ala’er. The temperature in the central ground floor area of the campus market near our apartment block was often at or near freezing. All fall, multiple small vendors had arranged their fresh vegetables, fruits, and meats for sale on trestle tables in this large open area. There was a wide doorless entryway at one end of the cement-floored market, and the roof, though covered, was more than two stories up. As winter approached, a few of the fresh market vendors persevered,  lighting small fires between market stalls to help keep their produce from damage, covering their products with quilts and blankets at night. Most vendors, though, just gave up for the winter.  In contrast, the restaurants along the edges of the market nearly all stayed open. Most were only big enough for a few tables, with a kitchen at the back—glassed-in single story enclosures with the sort of plastic flap doors that drop back into place once someone goes through them. When the heat in our apartment was dicey, even if we had enough food on hand to cook at home, we’d sometimes head for an evening meal at a market restaurant just to stay warm. Many of the restaurants specialized in dumplings and dumpling soup. Both steamy variations got more appealing as the weather got colder.

Early on December 22, the day of that year’s winter solstice, our Foreign Affairs Officer, Mr. Ma, brought a surprise gift to our apartment: two large bags of frozen mutton dumplings, to be stored in our smallish freezer, then reheated batch by batch for as many meals as we could make of them.  He explained in somewhat halting English that we should boil some of the dumplings that evening, and also eat our fill of the dumplings throughout the winter to help keep warm and to protect our ears from freezing.  He said that since the dumplings were shaped roughly like ears, people had come to believe that eating dumplings would help prevent chilblains or frostbite on one’s ears.   As it happened, we didn’t try our dumplings until a bit later in the winter because that evening, the head of the English department invited us out to a huge meal of mutton hot pot.

Since our arrival in Ala’er several months earlier, we’d found a number of local restaurants that specialized in mutton dishes.  We’d sampled lots of mutton kebabs and several varieties of mutton stews, sometimes invited by students or in-town friends, other times on explorations of our own. Our experience in Xinjiang was the first time in our China travels up to then when we were keenly aware of dietary differences between Han Chinese and some of China’s other ethnic groups. Much of the local Xinjiang population is Moslem.  Many of the inhabitants of rural Xinjiang are sheep-herding pastoralists of the Uyghur nationality, one of 55 non-Han groups officially recognized in China.  Moslems do not eat pork, which plays a substantial role in the traditional Han diet.  Han and Uyghur restaurants in Ala’er were distinct.  At the Uyghur restaurants, the menus were always pork-free. A few Han students and faculty (including the chair of the English department) would occasionally eat at a Uyghur restaurant. The reverse never seemed to be true.

Some of the less tolerant Han students and school officials, including the Foreign Affairs Officer, looked askance at our eclectic restaurant choices.  So a gift of mutton dumplings from someone who did not seem to us to be very sympathetic toward Uyghurs seemed a little odd.  Why not pork dumplings?  We did not ask, chalking it up to just one more local Xinjiang custom that we might never understand.

Two years later, after a year’s interval back in the U.S., we were again teaching in China as the winter solstice approached. This time we were in a small city in Sichuan province where there were almost no Uyghurs—the proportion of Han Chinese was likely above the national average of over 90 percent. It was quite rare to find a mutton dish on any restaurant menu, and we never saw mutton for sale at any of the local markets near us. So it was a surprise when our Foreign Affairs Officer at this second school invited us out for mutton dumplings on the winter solstice. When I did some later research, I found that mutton is one of the meats most closely associated with “yang,” or warming energy, in Chinese medicine. An early Chinese physician is said to have cured peasants in his village from winter chills with a hearty soup laced with mutton dumplings. In much of northern China, mutton dumplings or mutton hot pot are traditional dishes at the winter solstice. I’m not sure how much truth there is to the legend of the physician’s cure. My Western mindset has not yet fully absorbed the concept of food as medicine. However, any excuse to eat dumplings, especially mutton ones, in cold weather, is fine by me.

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Flickering Lights, Scary Stories, and Round Pumpkins

Posted on October 27, 2014 | Leave a comment

Flickering Lights, Scary Stories and Round Pumpkins: Halloweens in China

—by Jinny Batterson

Boo!  Holidays are one of the most potent vehicles for teaching about language and culture.  I spent two Halloweens teaching English and American culture in China, each in a different part of the country. In both places, students were intrigued by the customs surrounding this holiday of ancient Celtic origin. Many had seen some of the spooky movies that Hollywood typically churns out around Halloween. Some had heard of “trick or treating;” others had seen Internet images of lighted jack-o-lanterns.

To teach about Halloween, I boned up a bit myself—the original holiday, Samhain, celebrated the end of harvest and the start of winter in parts of Ireland and Scotland. The separation between the living and the dead was thought to be thinner at this time of year, so small gifts of food and wine were left on doorsteps in the evening to appease roaming spirits.  As Christianity spread in Europe, the holiday got a make-over with a Christian overlay—November 1 became “All Saints’ Day,” and the evening before, “All Hallows Eve,” became an excuse for various kinds of deviltry and trick-playing. The tradition of pumpkin carving arose from an Irish folk tale about a con man, “Stingy Jack,” whose bargain with the devil went sour. After death, Jack wound up roaming the earth as a spirit, his way lighted by a small hot coal carried inside a carved-out turnip (or “Jack’s lantern”). Irish immigrants brought the custom to America with them, abandoning turnips for larger, easier to carve local pumpkins.

In Xinjiang, where I first spent Halloween in China, I created a small evening Halloween celebration with students at our weekly “English corner,” chased indoors earlier that month because of rapidly chilling weather in this outpost not so far from Siberia. Several Chinese colleagues, also teachers of English, picked out spooky stories in simplified English to read to participants.  I crafted a scaled-down version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” as the final story of the night. A week or so earlier, a student had brought me two fairly decent pumpkins from one of the local markets.  We’d carved them into basic jack-o-lanterns to adorn the front of the meeting room. About ten minutes into the hour-long program, the celebration got spookier when the electricity suddenly went out. Power outages were not a rare occurrence in Xinjiang, but the timing of this particular outage was interesting.  We continued by the light of the jack-o-lanterns, a couple of candles, and students’ cell phone flashlights (becoming more common everywhere). Just as I finished “Telltale Heart,” the electricity came back on. I suspect I was not the only person on campus who checked behind doors, under the bed, and in closets before going to sleep that night.

Two years later, I approached Halloween in Ya’an, Sichuan, envisioning a group pumpkin carving bonanza. I thought pumpkins would be plentiful and easy to find in this rainier, more fruitful part of China.  However, my mid-October search of local vegetable markets failed to turn up a single pumpkin suitable for carving.  There were lots of tubular pumpkins in this province noted for its fiery cuisine and wealth of winter soups and stews. It turned out that the idea of growing a pumpkin for purely decorative purposes was almost sacrilege in this heavily populated area. Tubular pumpkins were thinner skinned and could easily be sliced, then sold in appropriate family-meal sized chunks. Local wisdom went that “everything in the pig got eaten except for the squeal.”  Likewise, pumpkins—skin, pulp, seeds and all—were meant for eating, not for making jack-o-lanterns.

Eventually I enlisted the help of my students in the round pumpkin search. A couple of days later, several of the young women returned triumphant with a large round pumpkin—the best one of only three in the whole town, they swore.  We carved it carefully, saving the seeds, later awarding it to the student who’d earned the highest score on their recent mid-term exam. Instead of using a wax candle for light, we opted for a cheap LED, which also put out light. More importantly,  it didn’t put soot or smoke into the pumpkin’s flesh. After a short interval as parts of dorm Halloween decor, this mutant “Westernized” pumpkin likely served its intended Chinese purpose: a nutritious part of someone’s November dinner.

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Born After the War

Posted on August 6, 2013 | Leave a comment

Born After the War

(“Hiroshima Day”, August 6, is not much celebrated in the U.S., though  I’ve been told that in Japan it is the occasion for solemn remembrances. In 2000, I had a chance to visit Hiroshima and see the A-Bomb dome, the Peace Museum, and the millions of paper cranes, symbols of peace and hope, sent there by school children from around the world. This musing was prompted by that visit.)

On its anniversary a decade ago, I gave a short commemorative presentation about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima–the first use of atomic weapons–on August 6, 1945.  My audience was attentive.  We all squirmed uncomfortably. After the subsequent silence, people began sharing their stories. Some older attendees had known A-bomb survivors personally.  Most remembered exactly what they were doing when they got news of the bombing–like those of my generation remember the JFK and MLK assassinations, or my children remember the Challenger spaceship disaster.

I’ve sometimes felt both gifted and cheated by the timing of my appearance in 1947, when the worst of  World War II damage was starting to be hidden beneath sprouting weeds and aid programs, although the aftershocks were felt in the growing belligerence among former allies that later came to be called the “Cold War.”  During a 1950’s period of postwar U.S. uneasiness,  hunts were carried out for Communists, domestic and foreign. Perhaps their existence would help explain why, after our recent great resounding victories, so many felt so empty.

One of my grandfathers, the Rebel one, was also born not long after a war, in 1869. His early childhood was spent in a house occupied by Union troops who’d temporarily expropriated a Southern landscape almost as desolate as postwar Hiroshima.  As his brain softened with age, he sometimes relived that childhood, becoming again the scared white boy who dreaded the “n— down the road who carried a pistol for me.”

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of those of us born after wars.  We are often the pampered progeny of parents determined to keep us out of harm’s way. They don’t want us to suffer through what they did.  Laudable as their efforts were and are, there are downside risks. Absent at least some suffering, we are all too apt to blunder through life, expecting all obstacles to be removed, planting the seeds of the next wars by blaming each other when stubborn boulders of prejudice, ego and ideology refuse to budge without great effort.

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Christmas by the Desert

Posted on December 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

Christmas by the Desert     –by Jinny Batterson

(Originally written in December, 2006, as we completed a first term as foreign English teachers at a smallish desert reclamation university in far western China.)

On bad days, the weakening sun blinks slowly over a bare landscape.
The students who bother to show up at all
drowse or exchange text messages on their cell phones.
Life seems brittle; our small attempts to make a difference, to enjoy ourselves
While doing it are dry as the dust that, folks tell us, will fill the air in April.

Uyghur, Han, Mongolian, American–
each of us wanders with little sense of direction
In this polyglot excuse for a university,
where misfits and refugees from “inland”
mingle but do not very much mix.
It is cold, and sometimes, even in December,
The wind blows.

Good days predominate.
An older student respectfully inquires
about differences among Western religions.
A few stalwart undergraduates continue to attend classes even
After their prescribed seven listening sessions are up.
An abundance of kitschy but sincere
holiday decorations festoon the shops,
Spreading a message of peace and goodwill that needs no language.
Wintering birds twitter.
Faraway friends send emails.

A little clean snow lingers in the shadows and on hedges from the dusting
That fell nearly a month ago.
Adults and children who do not know us say an English “hello,”
The children accompanying their greeting by giggles and running away.
Crews gather leaves and prune the dormant trees
to prepare for the next warm season.
The desert nearby covers us all with a sort of stillness,
Scouring away the unneeded cares of more “settled” life.

Our family and a not-quite-grandchild send pictures and greetings.
Life is resilient.

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