Category Archives: holidays

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.

  

2 Comments

Posted in holidays, Spiritual musings, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

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 buy. 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.

1 Comment

Posted in holidays, Spiritual musings, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , ,

Mid-Autumn Festival and Moon Cakes

Posted on September 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

In September or October each year in China, people celebrate “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,” then 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.

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

My Father’s Afghan

Posted on June 21, 2015 | 1 comment

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.

DSCN3842

 

 

1 Comment

Posted in Everyday Wonders, holidays, Spiritual musings, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Lantern Festival in Yangshuo, 2009

Posted on March 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

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 buses for a same-day return to Guilin. Any foreign visitors, however long their 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.

 

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Beasts of the Chinese Zodiac, Chinese New Year

Posted on February 23, 2015 | Leave a comment

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” of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, so a complete cycle takes 60 years. At Chinese New Year, typically called “Spring Festival” in China, merrymakers usher out the previous animal’s year and usher in a new one.

The first time we spent Chinese New Year in China, in 2007, 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 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 2024) 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.

In 2009, we spent New Year’s in various parts of Sichuan. Our friend Jean Wang and her husband were able to meet us in Ya’an, where we were teaching at Sichuan Agricultural University. We got together a few days before the new year’s celebration. Official New Year would occur on Monday, January 29.  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 in a more urban area, 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. The New Year holiday can also be the occasion for some tourism, either once the official extended family visits are over, or in their stead if family visits are not practical. 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. 

The statue 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.

 

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Spring Festival in Lipu

Posted on February 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

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.” As the Lunar New Year got closer, we decamped to spend a few days with a Chinese friend who lived in the neighboring province of Guangxi (dubbed an “autonomous region,” home to several ethnic minority groups). Getting to our friend’s town took a short plane ride to the city of 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 our friend 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. Our friend, who I’ll call Mr. Huang, 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 Huang’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. Huang 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 Huang’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. Huang’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 Huang’s mother’s house. We ate and ate and ate. A neighbor took pictures of the dozen or so of us—Huang, his wife, his sister and brothers and their spouses, each with a single nearly-grown child.

After the feast, Huang, his wife, and we two foreigners retired to Huang’s house, while Huang’s son stayed on with his grandma, closer to Lipu’s “downtown.”  Huang 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 the dancers.  Huang 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.

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Beach Time in Sanya

Posted on February 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

When I first 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 to keep production running full tilt. 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.

In 2006-2007, some of my Xinjiang teaching colleagues in far northwest China 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 series of plane flights clear across the country.  We would spend most of our stay at an elegant 3-star guest house 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 at 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.

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Plum Blossoms in Winter

Posted on January 12, 2015 | 1 comment

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. Lotus pads, now shriveled and dormant, 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.

1 Comment

Posted in holidays, travel

Tagged , , , , ,

Mutton Dumplings for Winter Solstice

Posted on December 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , ,