Category Archives: holidays

International Day of Peace, September 21

Posted on September 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

International Day of Peace, September 21    —by Jinny Batterson

For nearly a decade, I’ve received annual reminders of a celebration of an “international day of peace” on September 21, around the time of the equinox (autumn in the northern hemisphere, spring in the southern).  I relish these reminders to refocus during what too often can be a harried and hurried time, with back-to-school events, work crises, health check-ups, omnipresent political campaigns.  So this year’s reminder was especially welcome—2016’s politics in my home country, the United States of America, appear even more ugly than usual. The timeframe for this year’s peace celebrations has expanded, I learned, now encompassing the eleven days between September 11 and September 21. This year’s celebrations focus on global development goals. 

As nearly as I can tell via online search, the United Nations began issuing annual proclamations for a day of peace in 1997 as part of a broader global effort to advance a transition to a culture of peace. Their initial resolution called for a “transformation from a culture of war and violence to a culture of peace and non-violence.” The resolution defines the culture of peace as based on “respect for human rights, democracy and tolerance, the promotion of development, education for peace, the free flow of information, and the wider participation of women,” in addition to disarmament efforts. This year’s events include several in the area of central North Carolina where I live. I hope to attend at least some of them: http://www.paceebene.org/event/cnv-actions-raleigh-areanc-peace-week/.

My understanding of peace continues to evolve from an initial aversion to my fiance’s draft status in 1969 near the height of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Over time, I’ve come to believe that peace is much more comprehensive than the absence of armed conflict, whether among nations, among non-national groups who use violence to try to further their aims, or between individuals. It seems increasingly clear to me that peace needs to exist at all the same levels in which violence can incubate, from a single person to the entire global community. Peace grows best in an atmosphere of abundance, based partly on sharing, and partly on our inner conviction that we have, and, more importantly, ARE enough. 

One group that I support whose peacemaking involves a transition to abundance is Heifer International. First started in the wake of World War II as a way to restock farm animals to war-ravaged areas of Europe, the program now exists in 30 countries on five continents. Heifer conducts long-term efforts to alleviate poverty and promote peace through both donations of farm animals and education in sustainable farming practices. The autumn 2016 issue of their magazine, World Ark , includes an extensive interview with author/activist Frances Moore Lappe, first known for her seminal work on global food resources, Diet for a Small Planet (published in 1971). Lappe has gone on to publish fifteen more books, and to become a global activist for peace and development. Her take on what may be needed to transition toward peace and abundance resonates with me:  “While scarcity can be a lack of the physical resources that we need to thrive, such as food, water and energy, it can also be a presumption of the scarcity of goodness in human beings. Unfortunately, our media largely offers the most frightening and horrifying news, reinforcing this sense of lack of goodness in us. As you know, there are many fewer stories about our nobility, humanity, and our natural desires to help, to share and be compassionate, than there are about our brutal side.” 

Part of my individual effort this season to cultivate peace is to minimize my media exposure, while at the same time staying informed enough to function in our increasingly interconnected, interactive world. Another practice has been inspired by one of the more heartening reactions to September 11, 2001: a musical setting to a breathing meditation by a Georgia-bred songwriter who reacted to the airplane-mediated suicide bombings by creating a melody and chorus:  “When I breathe in, I’ll breathe in peace, when I breathe out, I’ll breathe out love.”  (The entire song, including verses, is online at http://www.sarahdanjones.com/music-1.html).

It turns out that the equinox here this year will not be until September 22. Peace activities in my town won’t culminate until Saturday, September 24. Still, I urge all of us who breathe to try today, as the simplest, smallest step toward peace, to take at least a couple of breaths using the “breathe in peace” refrain.   

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The Firebrand and the First Lady

Posted on May 7, 2016 | 2 comments

The Firebrand and the First Lady     —by Jinny Batterson

The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship, published early in 2016, was written long after the deaths of its protagonists, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt and Anna Pauline Murray. Eleanor Roosevelt was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt and the activist wife of her distant cousin, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She continued in her own right after her husband’s death. Pauli Murray was an activist, organizer, lawyer, writer, and eventually a priest. She dealt with the double whammy of discrimination for being black and female in a time that undervalued both.

Just after the title page, author Patricia Bell-Scott introduces the two women through quotations taken from their extensive writings and correspondence. The first listed entry, from Pauli Murray, was published over 20 years after Mrs. Roosevelt’s death in the journal of Murray’s university, The Hunter Magazine:

“For me, becoming friends with Mrs. Roosevelt was a slow, painful process, marked by sharp exchanges of correspondence, often anger on my side and exasperation on her side, and a gradual development of mutual admiration and respect.” 

Mrs. Roosevelt’s initial quotation came from an article, “Some of My Best Friends are Negro,” published in the magazine Ebony in 1953:

“One of my finest young friends is a charming woman lawyer—Pauli Murray, who has been quite a firebrand at times but of whom I am very fond.”

Over three hundred well-researched pages chronicle their developing friendship during the years when the two women’s lives intersected, and then the years after Mrs. R.’s death when Murray continued to write, speak, work for social justice, and honor Mrs. R.’s legacy.   

The two were born a generation apart—Roosevelt in 1884, Murray in 1910–to economic and social circumstances that could hardly have been more different. However, the emotional traumas of their early lives were similar. Both lost parents at a tender age. Both were shunted among relatives and schools throughout their teens.

Mrs. Roosevelt first encountered Pauli Murray on a visit to an upstate New York camp for unemployed single women in 1934 or 1935.  Murray had gone there during the depths of the Great Depression to help regain her strength after a couple of years of intermittent employment in New York City. Mrs. Roosevelt had helped finance the camp. She had insisted that it be racially integrated. During the first lady’s visit, Murray hung back and said nothing, later getting scolded by the camp director for her lack of manners.

The two women next interacted when Murray copied “Mrs. R.” on an impassioned 1938 letter to FDR criticizing his spotty civil rights record, especially his recent speech praising “liberal” University of North Carolina, which repeatedly rejected Murray’s graduate student application on racial grounds.

By the early days of 1940, Murray was executive director of a non-profit highlighting the problems of sharecroppers. She and several colleagues had a chance to meet with Mrs. Roosevelt in Mrs. R.’s Manhattan apartment. From then on, the two women carried on an irregular but spirited correspondence for the rest of their mutual lives. Mrs. R. helped when she could with some of Murray’s causes, but cautioned restraint, occasionally even upbraiding Murray’s brashness.

When Murray graduated from Howard Law School in June, 1944, ER sent a congratulatory note and a bouquet. When FDR died in April, 1945, Murray sent Mrs. R. a lengthy condolence: “…There is not one I’ve seen who has not expressed a physical illness over the disaster which has befallen each individual American today. …I pray for your strength and fortitude, because we all need you more than ever now.”   

ER went on to chair a U.N. commission that developed and got General Assembly approval for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. She worked at the U.N. for several more years, then continued writing, speaking, and humanitarian work until her death in 1962.

Murray offered this public tribute at a 1982 conference celebrating Mrs. Roosevelt’s life:

“I learned by watching her in action over a period of three decades that each of us is culture-bound by the era in which we live, and that the greatest challenge to the individual is to try to move to the very boundaries of our historical limitations and to project ourselves toward future centuries. Mrs. Roosevelt … did just that.”

Murray attended a 1984 conference celebrating the centennial of ER’s birth, but was hospitalized soon afterward with serious health problems.  She died in 1985.

If the delay in publishing The Firebrand and the First Lady partly resides in the meticulous scholarship to track down sources and verify quotations, it seems to me that the timing of the book’s release is providential. It comes as this year’s U.S. Presidential campaign intensifies. One of the chief actors is a former first lady with extensive qualifications of her own. It comes at a time when LGBT communities, of which Murray was a closeted member, are becoming more insistent on full citizenship. It comes as we approach this year’s celebration of Mother’s Day, when we acknowledge both our physical mothers and those who have nurtured and challenged us, in the best tradition of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt and Anna Pauline Murray.

  

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The Whole Earth Generation(s)

Posted on April 27, 2016 | 2 comments

The Whole Earth Generation(s)   —by Jinny Batterson

April 22, 2016 was observed in many countries as “Earth Day.” This annual event, first celebrated in the United States in 1970, has gone global, drawing attention to environmental challenges and the need to cherish this planet, the only one we know can support human life.

By the late 1960’s, the excesses of unchecked industrialization and conspicuous consumption were starkly evident. Our generation, then coming of age in the U.S., had experienced less global armed conflict or material deprivation than our parents’ cohort. Instead, we’d been shaped by the political assassinations of the era, by proxy wars, by the rise of the civil rights movement, and by a growing awareness of the drawbacks of gender inequality. We had a youthful desire for meaningful change—sooner rather than later. Teach-ins were a popular tool on a variety of issues. A Wisconsin senator, Gaylord Nelson, hatched the idea for a national “teach-in” about the environment after viewing the massive 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Twenty million Americans participated.

A little before the first Earth Day was celebrated, a low-cost, no-advertising catalog appeared: The Whole Earth Catalog. Editions were published about once a quarter during the years 1968-1972, and somewhat less regularly thereafter. Many editions carried on their front cover an image of planet Earth as seen from space. The tone of the early catalogs’ introduction was somewhat defiant: “So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. …(A) realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his(/her) own education, find his(/her) own inspiration, shape his(/her) own environment, and share his(/her) adventure with whoever is interested.” 

The catalog listed its function as “access to tools,” specifically tools that were: 1) useful; 2) relevant to independent education; 3) high quality or low cost; and 4) easily available by mail. 

It may have been through the catalog’s pages that my husband and I were introduced to the work and lives of Helen and Scott Nearing, a professional couple who left city life in Philadelphia during the 1930’s and homesteaded successfully, first in Vermont and later in Maine. The Nearings lived off the land, growing their own food, building their own shelter, writing books and articles about their successes—getting about as far from the “rat race” of corporate culture as one can. Unfortunately, when we tried a similar move in the early 1970’s, we soon learned that we lacked both the homesteading skills exhibited by the Nearings and the stamina to endure the periods of off-land unemployment that are often part of rural life. We retreated to a mid-sized urban area where jobs were more plentiful and the worst excesses of the rat race were less in evidence. We never gave up on the dream of a more sustainable lifestyle. 

Culture and technology have changed a good bit since 1970—the biggest threats to global health and stability can now be more diffuse and harder to tackle than the nation-state wars of preceding generations; civil rights and gender equality have made patchy, uneven, progress; telecommuting has made it more possible to locate in rural settings while still earning a living using mostly urban skills; the Internet has outstripped postal mail as a communications medium. However, some of the basics of human interactions have not changed all that much.

In the Next Whole Earth Catalog, put out in 1981, I found an entry that spoke to me, part of a sidebar called the “Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter”:

“If you notice that all the leaders who might make things better get shot you can:
1) Assume their deaths were no coincidence and give up;
2) Spend years proving their deaths were no coincidence and convincing others;
3) Need leaders less.”
When our 2016 crop of putative leaders leaves me unenchanted, I remind myself to need leaders less–some global changes require large-scale interventions, but many more can be carried out at an individual or small group level.

 The “boomer” generation I’m part of is the first to have spent our entire adult lives with images of Earth in all its splendor and fragility as seen from space. The generations coming after ours were born with these images available. I hope they have recognized both their beauty and their vulnerability.  Though we all need leadership at times, I hope that future “whole earth” generations will mature and find their paths realizing that we are all both followers and leaders, and that we need external leaders less.

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My Cousin Bill

Posted on March 24, 2016 | 1 comment

My Cousin Bill       —by Jinny Batterson

This time of year I often think about my cousin Bill. Bill was a cousin-by-marriage, wed for nearly thirty years to my mother’s second cousin Jen. Before I remember meeting Bill, I met the small “gentleman’s farm” that he and Jen owned in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. One summer in my young teens, I spent nearly a week at their place on a return visit after their only daughter Grace came to stay at our much smaller homestead in the suburban fringes of Washington, D.C.   Bill and Jen’s place wasn’t near any large city. Their farm of a hundred acres or so had a small herd of beef cattle and was way out in the country. The closest town of any size was the college town of Lexington, Virginia, about twenty miles away. What I mainly remember of that visit was not Bill or Jen, but how scared I was of Grace’s two horses, huge animals compared with the dogs and cats at our house. Over the course of my visit, I managed only one brief ride on the gentler and smaller of the two mounts.

Several years later, Bill and Jen came to Maryland for my grandmother’s funeral. As they gave me a ride from the cemetery back to our house in their car, I got my first direct exposure to Bill, who regaled us with stories about Granny and how much she’d enjoyed racy anecdotes, despite her somewhat stern Presbyterian upbringing.

A couple of years after that, as Grace went off to university in Atlanta, I began attending a small women’s liberal arts college near the Shenandoah Valley. Once I got access to a vehicle at school, I went to visit Bill and Jen, driving my little car through the verdant countryside of a Virginia spring to their front gate. Bill welcomed me and gave me a house and garden tour while Jen fixed lunch. He’d filled the walls in their parlor with “ancestors,” a portrait collection of Indians and Africans decked out in ceremonial dress, plus assorted other individuals that were no biological relation, but struck Bill as having character.  He’d made up stories about each one. Outdoors, in one of their several flower beds, Bill pointed out the “night-blooming enuresis,” a yucca to which he’d attached the label for childhood bedwetting as a joke on some of the snootier but vocabulary-limited ladies of the local garden club.

Later, when I began seriously dating a young man who was a student at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, I brought Jim with me to meet my sensible cousin Jen and her eccentric husband Bill.  Bill and Jen would invite us to their place every couple of months. Bill entertained us with more stories, while both he and Jen plied us with home cooked meals more varied and nutritious than we’d get at the cheaper town restaurants that were our typical date-night fare.  I began noticing the extensive collection of fine china and cutlery that filled a long wall of cupboards in their remodeled kitchen. Only gradually did it slip out that Bill had inherited a large fortune from his now-deceased parents. It also gradually slipped out that Bill was a gentleman alcoholic as well as a gentleman farmer. He was generally good at staying away from drink, but every year or two his disease would get the best of him. Neighbors knew to phone Jen and to manage to get Bill home from wherever he’d fallen off the wagon.

When Jim and I got engaged in the spring of 1968, Bill wanted to throw us an engagement party. The party didn’t happen—coordinating schedules for our out-of-town families proved too complicated—but Jim and I continued occasional visits to the farm. Early that December, I completed my undergraduate schooling and moved home to Maryland to begin graduate work and start planning our wedding. We’d get married in the chapel at Washington and Lee the next spring. Of course we’d invite Bill and Jen.

In January 1969, we got word that Bill was seriously ill.  He’d been feeling a little rundown when we’d last seen him in the fall. Jen eventually nagged him into seeing a doctor. The diagnosis was dire—acute leukemia. At first I was sure Bill would bounce back, his wealth giving him access to the best medical care money could by. However, later news from the farm was not good.  About ten days before the wedding, I talked by phone with Jen, who explained that Bill was quite weak and no longer able to drive, but that she’d do her best to arrange a driver to bring them to the small college chapel where our ceremony would be held.

Our Saturday wedding day dawned clear, but brisk and windy. Once or twice during the early afternoon ceremony, I looked around to see whether Bill and Jen had slipped in at the back of the chapel, but they never appeared. Our simple wedding was followed by an equally simple reception at the college’s alumni house. By mid-afternoon, the festivities were over. Our best man retrieved our car. Despite his best efforts to hide it, it had been festooned with shave cream slogans and peppered with jelly beans. We drove back toward Maryland at a leisurely pace, with no extensive honeymoon in prospect, but no work or school until the following Monday. At the turn-off to Bill and Jen’s, I hesitated. Would they welcome a short visit?  We decided to try it—Bill and Jen hadn’t come to the wedding, but the wedding could sort of come to them.

We knew by now to ignore the “Unruly Dog” sign at the gate. We went straight to the front door and knocked. Jen opened it. We could see Bill, wheelchair bound, behind her in the parlor, along with a neighbor who’d come to help with nursing and provide support for Jen.

“Howdy,” Bill croaked, his voice weak and slightly slurred. “It’s so good to see you. I’m sorry we couldn’t make it to Lexington. The powers that be (here he nodded at Jen and the neighbor) forbid me to go out into the wind.”

He had a small tumbler of whiskey in one hand—one side-effect of his disease was the capacity to absorb alcohol without the likelihood he’d do any further damage to himself or others.  We chitchatted for a few minutes, but could see he was very tired, though glad we’d come.

“Y’all go on now,” he said. “I expect you have other things on your minds than visiting with your old cousins.”

We left.  A few weeks later we got news that Bill had died. When we first learned of Bill’s leukemia, Mom told us that Bill had lost his first wife to a different, but equally aggressive cancer, a number of years before he met Jen. He was no stranger to death.

It’s early spring again. Easter and our wedding anniversary are not far off. The slopes of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia will soon be filled with redbud and dogwood blossoms, and the pale, almost iridescent green of newly sprouted leaves—nature resurrecting herself. I don’t reflect all that much about death, afterlife, or resurrection, but I often remember Bill, especially at this time of year. I think perhaps it’s enough that Bill, and others like him, live on in the memories of those whose lives they touched.

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Mid-Autumn Festival and Moon Cakes

Posted on September 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

Mid-Autumn Festival and Moon Cakes    —by Jinny Batterson

This past weekend in China, people celebrated “Mid-Autumn Festival,”  whose closest U.S. equivalents may be various localized harvest moon celebrations.  The Chinese festival falls at the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox. Mid-Autumn Festival is a time when families will reunite whenever practical. As if to help encourage the custom, the Chinese expressions for “round” (yuan) and “reunion” (tuanyuan) sound similar and share their main character.

At Mid-Autumn Festival time, I’ve sometimes gotten gifts of “moon cakes” from Chinese students or colleagues.  The recipes for these mostly round confections vary from place to place.  All the ones I’ve tasted have been greasy, heavy, and sweet.  Commercially made moon cakes are most often sold in decorative boxes with elaborate wrappings, eight or twelve or even twenty to a box. Moon cakes frequently have decorations or sayings stamped into their tops, with fillings of sweet bean paste, green tea paste, or fruit preserves. They remind me a little of the traditional dense fruit-and-nut-laden cakes that sometimes accompany U.S. family gatherings at Christmas time. People are reluctant to discontinue the tradition, but may be just as reluctant to eat large portions of the rich cakes. An anecdote I heard during one China stay was that gifting boxes of moon cakes to co-workers used to be nearly obligatory, but that “regifting” was widespread as well—people told me of one Shanghai office worker who placed an inconspicuous marker on a box of cakes before giving it to a colleague.  Sure enough, several days and giftees later, the marked box made its way back to him.

Various stories and myths are associated with the holiday. Historians trace the offering of moon cakes during the festival to the beginnings of the Yuan Dynasty, whose army was victorious during the 13th century in part because it passed secret messages back and forth imbedded in moon-shaped cakes. One popular legend tells of ancient hero Hou Yi and his lovely wife Chang E.  Chang E was forced by the queen of heaven to drink an elixir that caused her to leave earth for the heavens beyond. Because she loved her husband and did not want to leave him, Chang E stopped at the nearest heavenly body to earth, the moon. When the moon was full and round, Hou Yi could sometimes see an image of his wife in the patterns on the moon’s surface. He began offering Chang E’s favorite foods as a sacrifice at a local shrine. The custom was later taken up by others, who offered sacrifices of moon cakes at Mid-Autumn amid prayers for peace and good fortune.

The one time I was in China and paying attention at the Mid-Autumn holiday, I missed an invitation to some students’ moon viewing party because I wasn’t fluent in “QQ,” a widely used social networking tool in China.  Students later consoled me for missing their gathering—it had been impossible to see the moon, anyway, they said, that misty evening in Ya’an, Sichuan. At a recent mid-autumn gathering in the U.S., I saw a video of a traditional Chinese family Mid-Autumn festival evening. The hostess for the extended family gathering had made a homemade moon cake about the size of a large pie. She carefully cut the cake into enough pieces for everyone, offering the first slice to the oldest family member. At Mid-Autumn celebrations, someone often recites the Su Shi poem, “Shui Diao Ge Tou,” or performs its musical version.  It tells of the poet’s longing to be reunited with his faraway brother.

In this season when nostalgia comes easily, as summer’s heat gives way to the occasional chill, as the first frost looms, we can all remember family, friends and loved ones, even those separated from us by great distances. All of us can view the same moon.

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My Father’s Afghan

Posted on June 21, 2015 | 1 comment

My Father’s Afghan   —by Jinny V. Batterson

A friend asked a group of us last fall to write a poem or lyric about a favorite memento. Before his memory was badly damaged by Alzheimer’s, my father in retirement took up knitting and crocheting, making scarves and blankets and afghans, giving at least one to each of his children. He also used his carpentry skills to make furniture out of pieces of wood he’d found on beaches and in woodland walks. Dad’s spirit persists, and we cherish the mementos he left us.

My father’s afghan’s worn, a loop pulled here and there,
But when I shrug beneath it, it envelopes me like prayer.
Dad’s gnarled hands were large, his knitting needles clicked–
They timed his slowing rhythms in a world obsessed with quick.

My father’s lamp burns bright, its bulb and shade are new,
Its base a set of gifts from autumn forests he walked through–
A branch entwined with vines, an interesting grain,
Within the lamplight’s glow I see those autumn woods again.

As his memory gradually died,
Confusion mocked Dad’s earlier pride–
His steps grew halting, his eyes grew dim;
By the time his body quit, there was little left of him.

My father’s spirit rests, his good and bad days done,
His ashes fondly buried near the house he last called home.
His legacy lives on, in loving songs like mine,
In crafts, and in concerns he shared with those he’s left behind.

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The May 4 Movement

Posted on May 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

The May 4 Movement—Beginning of China’s Modern Evolution?

—by Jinny Batterson

This post lags May 4 by a week,  but may have some relevance even so.  What has come to be called the “May 4 Movement” was a series of demonstrations by students and workers in China, starting on May 4, 1919. It was part of a broader “new culture” movement that arose in China during and just after the First World War.  Both New Culture and the May 4 Movement played out during the ferment in China after the fall of the final dynasty of Chinese emperors, the Qing, in 1911.  The immediate trigger for the May 4 protests was news that during international negotiations in Versailles, France, to establish treaty provisions at the close of World War I, China had been denied the return of portions of Shandong Province that were occupied by Germany during the war. Chinese claims were dismissed despite China’s entry into the alliance against Germany in 1917 with the express claim of regaining German-held territory.  Instead, the territory that many Chinese thought was rightfully theirs was temporarily ceded to Japan (which had also fought opposing Germany, and was more advanced industrially than China). The Chinese students felt this was a betrayal, and demanded that China refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles. According to the Wikipedia description of the May 4 movement, the students, gathered the morning of May 4 in Beijing, also wanted:

—to draw awareness of China’s precarious position to the masses in China.

—to recommend a large-scale gathering in Beijing.

That afternoon, several thousand students assembled in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) in central Beijing, shouting slogans denouncing the terms of the treaty and demanding the resignation of three Chinese officials that they felt had sold out China during the Versailles negotiations.  Some of the students marched to the home of one of the despised officials and set it on fire.  They were later arrested and severely beaten.

The larger context for the protests and movements was a sense that China had fallen behind Western powers and Japan in its industrialization and economic growth, and that basic changes needed to be made in Chinese society and culture if China was to resume a central role in the world order.  Some Chinese intellectuals and writers talked of needing two “doctors” to help cure China’s ills: “Doctor Science” and “Doctor Democracy.”  As May turned to June, protests spread throughout the country, with workers and merchants joining in.  The Chinese government of the time eventually dismissed the three reviled negotiators. China also refused to sign the Versailles treaty, though Japan retained de facto control of portions of Shandong and some Pacific islands.

Some historical sources claim that the ferment of the May 4 Movement, its short-lived partial success, and the eventual rejection of many of its broader demands were factors leading to the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921. Others indicate that the behavior of the Western powers at the time of the Versailles Treaty in 1919 helped persuade many Chinese to reject Western-style democracy as self-serving and hypocritical.

The debate about the appropriate balance of tradition and of change has never been resolved, either in China or elsewhere. Perhaps it cannot be. Subsequent Chinese political figures as diverse as Mao Zedong and the student leaders of protests in 1989 have claimed the May 4 Movement as part of their inspiration.

This May, demonstrations have continued in some American cities to protest low wages for fast food workers, the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore, and other police violence against civilians. Are we all, in a sense, inheritors of the May 4 Movement?

 

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Lantern Festival in Yangshuo, 2009

Posted on March 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

Lantern Festival in Yangshuo, 2009    —by Jinny Batterson

Lantern Festival marks the end of the formal Spring Festival holiday. It occurs on the night of the full moon, two weeks after Chinese New Year (Spring Festival).  In 2009, for me it came near the end of a travel-filled interval spent in various parts of Sichuan, Chongqing, and Guangxi.  Lantern Festival in Yangshuo would be my last hurrah before retracing my steps to return to my teaching post in Sichuan for second semester.

Yangshuo, Guangxi is a “backpackers’ paradise,” a formerly smallish town along the Li River south of Guilin that has over the past couple of decades gotten a huge influx of tourism.  The town sits among lovely karst formations that have started to attract serious rock climbers. Having benefited (or suffered, depending on your perspective) from successive sets of outdoor-oriented expatriates who came, saw, loved, and settled in it, Yangshuo has a much more international flavor than most Chinese towns its size. While wandering its streets one afternoon, I even saw and heard at a distance a dark-skinned American man, a most unusual sight in any Chinese town I’d been in before.

My husband Jim and I spent the night of Lantern Festival in Yangshuo, at the West Street Hotel, a wooden structure with balconies overlooking the main tourist street. The previous spring, Jim and a hiking companion had lodged there briefly and found it adequate and reasonably priced.  It was sort of a “Trapp Family Lodge with Chinese Characteristics.” Our room came with a Western-style bathtub, with exposed pipes running to it from the solar hot water heater on the roof. Yangshuo, in addition to its rock climbing appeal, is also the site of several backpackers’ hostels and a center for area hiking and bicycling. It is the southern terminus of most Li River cruises. Cruise passengers may opt to stay overnight and get a “Western” breakfast at one of the local restaurants catering to tourists, but most board busses for a same-day return to Guilin. Any foreign visitors, however long our stays, got to run a gauntlet of souvenir hawkers and local craft shops. We could view a staged demonstration of the early stages of silk production. We could attend concerts or dramas. Nearly everywhere, there was an abundance of English signage.

As dusk fell on Lantern Festival Day, the streets filled with revelers, the sky once again filled with fireworks. Nearly every building had decorated lanterns hanging from its eaves. Some were plain spheres of red paper. Others were decorated with riddles, or crafted into animal shapes. We watched from our balcony as two small “wishing lanterns” rose amid the fireworks displays. They were not attached to anything, and were dwarfed by the other displays as they drifted skyward.

Later in the school year, a student would present us with such a lantern as a gift, so we got to see one close up.  Our gift lantern was collapsible, with thin metal rings at the top and the bottom. Each ring had several slots where straight pieces of metal or wood could be inserted to form something like a lampshade. The exterior was made of shiny red paper, which covered the sides and the top. The bottom ring was open, with a smaller ring at its center, into which the wisher would insert a stubby paraffin candle. To use a wishing lantern, one first made a silent wish, then lit the candle and held the lantern up to the sky.  After a little while, the air inside the lamp would heat and draw the lantern upward.

During our Spring Festival travels, we’d seen other wish lanterns here and there. The greatest concentrations, though, came closest to the evening of Lantern Festival. I’ve heard that use of the lanterns has lately been discouraged because of fire danger and the dangers to structures and livestock—no one can ever be sure where a lantern will come down, or whether its candle will have burned out by the time it does.

Had I lit a wishing lantern in Yangshuo, I’d have wished for a peaceful end of life for my mother-in-law, who was in her late 90’s and suffering from a variety of illnesses and ailments. Earlier in the holiday, my brother-in-law had emailed us that she was suffering from pneumonia and had again been hospitalized near their New England home. Perhaps some benign spirit heard my wish anyway—she died peacefully a couple of weeks later.

 

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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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