Beasts of the Chinese Zodiac, More New Year…

Posted on February 23, 2015 | Leave a comment

Beasts of the Chinese Zodiac, More New Year Celebrations

—by Jinny Batterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Spring Festival in Lipu

Posted on February 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

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

—by Jinny Batterson

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

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

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

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

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

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Beach Time in Sanya

Posted on February 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

Beach time in Sanya     —by Jinny Batterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Exotic Eats in China

Posted on January 26, 2015 | 1 comment

Exotic Eats in China     —by Jinny Batterson

Whenever I’ve returned to the U.S. after a lengthy stay in China, I miss the variety of vegetable greens in my stateside diet. The typical American choices—broccoli, peas, green beans, or spinach, each boiled—can get wearisome fairly quickly if one has gotten accustomed to more varied fare.  I’ve relished the sampling of Chinese vegetables and Chinese cooking methods I’ve had a chance to experience so far, and I’m sure there are even more Chinese-grown vegetables and presentation methods that I have yet to discover.  (About the only “American” vegetable dish that I miss in China is fresh salad—because of sanitation concerns, eating vegetables raw has long been a no-no in much of China.) The diet in many parts of China is somewhat more locavore than here. Long-distance transportation of fresh produce  for all but the very wealthy has only recently become practical.  “Average” Chinese over centuries have discovered differing edibles, and different ways of cooking them, that tempt the palate and help temper the seasons.  Not only are peas eaten a la American “peas and carrots,” but snow pea pods are widely available—boiled in broths, sauteed with a little garlic, or added to stir-fries. At certain seasons, “pea tendrils,” the tender upper sets of leaves and stems on emerging pea vines, can be sautéed or added to broth for an early spring soup. Certain varieties of squash and sweet potatoes furnish not only their fruits or tubers, but also edible vines.  While winter typically limits choices more than the other seasons do, cabbage family crops abound—not just our round, bland, green, typically overcooked version. There are lots of varieties, and lots of spices that can add zest.

One of my green favorites is called (I think) “wa wa tsai.” It looks vaguely like Brussels sprouts—lots of small round protuberances around a central stalk.  I don’t remember exactly how to cook it, and would have to ask a Chinese friend again whether to eat the outside or the core. What I do remember is that the vegetable’s name is descriptive of a family with multiple infants (the round heads)—“cry-cry vegetable.”   A perennial favorite when we go to our local Chinese restaurant is “four season beans.”  This alternative to “green bean casserole with mushroom soup and onion crisps” requires two short cooking cycles—first blanching, then, after allowing a little time for the beans to dry, flash frying with garlic, ginger, Sichuan peppercorns, and a few drops of soy sauce.  When done right (which I’ve despaired of ever doing in my sensitive-smoke-alarmed American kitchen), the beans are tender but not mushy, with a slightly wrinkled exterior and a piquant taste. A version is also called “tiger skin beans.”

A favorite restaurant during my Ya’an stay was one specializing in “mushroom hot pot.” The damp, fairly temperate climate of this part of Sichuan province was good for growing mushrooms—at certain seasons, I could splurge by ordering a deluxe hot pot that included nearly a dozen different mushroom varieties, along with vegetables and variations of tofu suitable for cooking in a hearty broth.

Chinese cooks have also been inventive with street food. Most large towns and cities have one or more “night markets” where all kinds of foods on skewers can be purchased for grilling over wood or charcoal fires.  I haven’t yet been adventuresome enough to try scorpions or small songbirds, but have enjoyed varieties of seafood, pork, mutton, eggplant, and tofu.  Night markets will sometimes also have crepe-like snacks cooked on griddles adapted from old oil drums. These can be savory or sweet. The “expensive” versions (for about the equivalent of 60 cents U.S.) include a cooked egg in the filling.

The most exotic dishes I’m aware of having eaten came during banquets at my first short-term teaching assignment.  Then, I wasn’t aware that Chinese banquet etiquette dictated leaving some of each dish on a serving platter to indicate one had had enough of that particular dish.  As an American child of the 1950’s who was indoctrinated into the “clean plate club” and expected to finish every last morsel put in front of me, I found this particular lesson hard to grasp.  I also hadn’t learned that most Chinese banquets consist of many successive courses, with the most prestigious and nourishing coming toward the end of the meal.  So,  as I sat beside the Foreign Affairs Officer and across from our school’s principal and his wife at our welcoming banquet, I tentatively sampled some of the early dishes. I found one that looked and tasted somewhat like the chipped beef I was served as a child. After others had helped themselves, I took the final slice from the platter. Our school principal smiled at me, signaled the waiter (who promptly brought another plateful), and then said something in Chinese to our FAO.

She translated for me, “Principal Wu says he sees you like the donkey meat.”

I still haven’t mastered banquet etiquette. In the meantime, I’ve had a chance to sample ant-filled pastries, duck’s tongues, and elm tree buds, among the dishes whose English equivalents have been explained to me. Over time, I’ve learned that, as a general rule, one waits for a whole fish or a meat dish, followed by a final toast, then some fruit slices, to signal that a banquet is finished. I’m still learning, and you may be stages ahead of me. At any rate, I wish you many happy eating adventures, Chinese style.

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Puppies–Pets or Protein?

Posted on January 19, 2015 | Leave a comment

Puppies—Pets or Protein?    —by Jinny Batterson

First, a couple of disclaimers: 1) I have never knowingly eaten dog meat while in China;  2) No Chinese restaurant in the United States would risk serving dog meat to its customers.

That said, I have seen dog meat on restaurant menus in China. I have also seen, in meat markets in rural China, both caged live puppies and singed dog carcasses, though I wish I hadn’t.  I’ve been frightened several times while walking in the countryside by coming across an unaccompanied, unleashed dog—not sure if it was a tame dog whose owner was careless and let it run free, or a feral animal.  I’m lucky that I have not been bitten, since rabies is a serious problem in China, and most human rabies cases there result from bites by rabid dogs.

Dogs have a long and mixed history in China. Dog remains have been found in graves beside human ones in archeological excavations of Chinese Neolithic sites dating back about 7,000 years. There is a fair amount of evidence that dogs were domesticated early, used in ritual sacrifices, and also as a source of animal protein (along with pigs). China’s earliest emperors kept hunting dogs. Also since the earliest Chinese dynasties, small dogs have been used by noble families as pets. The “Pekingese” breed even bears the name of China’s capital city. There is speculation that these snub-nosed fluffs were bred to resemble Chinese fantasies of lions, which do not exist in China and were not photographed or imported to Chinese zoos until recent centuries.

Estimates of the total number of dogs in China vary widely, with most in the range of 100-200 million. The vast majority of dogs in China are unregistered. In rural areas where public health infrastructure and public health funding are limited, controlling dog populations by encouraging rabies vaccinations, administering spaying and neutering programs, enforcing fencing or leashing requirements, and minimizing exposure to feral animals remains difficult. Chinese researchers reported over 3,000 cases of human rabies exposure in China in 2006, most resulting from a child or teenager being bitten by a dog. Increasingly, major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai require the registration of pet dogs, limit the size of allowable pets, limit the number of dogs per family (typically one), impose a registration fee, and require up-to-date rabies vaccinations. In Beijing, annual dog registration is handled through the Public Security Bureau, the same agency that deals with registrations and permits for its human inhabitants.

Dog fanciers in China can be just as elaborate in providing for their canine companions as dog owners elsewhere—I’ve seen pets outfitted with bows, bangles, elaborate collars, sweaters, even booties to protect their paws from the cold. I’ve seen pet dogs riding in cushioned comfort in baskets at the front of owners’ bicycles, peeking out from carrying cases or elaborately embroidered bags, or being carried in owners’ arms across muddy streets to avoid their getting dirty.

Once we asked a Chinese colleague whether dog meat was served in the dining facilities at his school, hoping to avoid eating some by accident.

“Oh, no,” he answered.  “We can’t afford it. Dog meat is expensive.”

We were relieved, but never verified the pricing part of his response.  Other Chinese friends and acquaintances have told us that there are lots of folk traditions associated with dog meat—in some areas, dog meat is considered a strengthening, warming food during cold weather. In other places, certain organs or parts of the dog are reported when eaten to help cool the diner’s metabolism during extreme hot spells. However, as China becomes more urbanized and as its younger generations become more globally connected, the overall trend is toward vaccinating, petting, walking, playing with, and cleaning up after Rover or Fido, rather than chewing on his remains at a banquet.

 

 

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Plum Blossoms in Winter

Posted on January 12, 2015 | 1 comment

Plum Blossoms in Winter    —by Jinny Batterson

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

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

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

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

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Silent Night in China

Posted on December 22, 2014 | Leave a comment

Silent Night in China  —by Jinny Batterson  

The Thanksgiving I spent in Ala’er, Xinjiang, China as a foreign English teacher at a desert reclamation college was one of my most memorable (please see post from November 24, 2014 for more detail).  Buoyed by the good feelings that holiday celebration generated, I started making plans for Christmas. I checked with the school administration and got permission to rehearse and conduct a student winter holiday chorus as part of a larger program by the school’s English department near the end of the solar calendar year. As December advanced, many shops on campus and in town put up Western-style Christmas decorations. (You’ve probably noticed that most holiday decor these days is manufactured in China.) Because American friends with experience in China had cautioned my husband and me to avoid any appearance of religious proselytizing, I picked out three more or less neutral holiday songs for our chorus numbers:  “White Christmas” (on honor of a light snow which fell in late November and  lingered in shady areas for weeks), the Latin round “Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace),” and as a finale, a rousing version of “Deck the Halls.”  I tried scheduling four weekend chorus rehearsals—I think two actually took place, with a different set of student singers at each.

The English program, coincidentally held on Christmas Eve, found our chorus of about 60 singers, rehearsed or not, standing in uneven rows on three sets of steps at the front of the school auditorium. Most of the students owned or had borrowed red or green clothes to wear. I had a red elf’s cap from a local shop, and wielded a long chopstick as my baton. Our singing was lusty, mainly on key, and well received.  Other acts by some of the Chinese teachers of English got great reviews, especially one by a half dozen young women skimpily clad in black who did a jazzy dance to a hit English-language song in China that year, “God is a Girl.”  As a program finale, “Santa Alex,” one of the school’s best English students, explained a little of the secular part of the legend of Santa Claus. Alex was dressed in an improvised Santa costume, scrounged and adapted from one of the local shops. We’d supplied him with a sack filled with the red envelopes most Chinese children get at Chinese New Year, each containing a few hard candies and a small-denomination Chinese coin. Everyone got a small gift. No one, not even the laziest student, got a lump of coal.

Christmas Day was not a holiday in Ala’er. In fact, most students were extra busy studying for end-of-term exams, which would start soon. However, the older brother of one of our students, who lived in town, invited us out to dinner.  Asajean, whose name roughly translates as “Jesus,” was ethnically Uyghur, member of a largely Moslem group that had lived in this arid area for centuries. He ran a small private English tutoring business, and had often phoned us with questions about English vocabulary or grammar.  We joined him for a “big plate spicy chicken” evening meal at a local restaurant.  Afterwards,  Asajean walked us back to our campus apartment. It was a cold, clear, starlit night, with the stillness that only comes when most people are indoors and motorized traffic is non-existent. As we neared our apartment block, some unexpected music started playing over the campus loudspeakers—“Silent Night,”  complete with four-part harmony and English lyrics. For one brief moment, this juxtaposition of a Chinese-administered university, a Moslem dinner host, and a Western religious Christmas carol seemed the most natural thing in the world. Happy holidays, all!

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Mutton Dumplings for Winter Solstice

Posted on December 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

Mutton Dumplings for Winter Solstice  —by Jinny Batterson

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

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

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

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

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

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Staying Warm, Chinese Style

Posted on December 8, 2014 | Leave a comment

Staying Warm, Chinese Style     —by Jinny Batterson

Heating season officially started in northern China on November 15. When we lived during 2006-2007 in the area of China covered by central heating (roughly above 33 degrees north latitude along an irregular, government-decreed line), this official day for the onset of available heat was strictly adhered to, regardless of weather. In spring, heat was turned off on March 15, period.  We heard that during the 1950’s, shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic, the Chinese government, with Soviet help, began a practice of developing a single heating plant for each large area or population center.  At the time, this was a considerable improvement over the hit-or-miss heating available to most Chinese householders.  However, the policy has changed little since then, while increases in population and population density, advances in technology, and changes in fuel supplies and fuel use have made these centralized systems less and less efficient compared with other available options. Coal-generated winter heat is a substantial contributor to smog problems in major Chinese cities. Coal-fired power plants produce the majority of China’s greenhouse gas emissions, so there will need to be substantial changes to existing systems if China is to meet the ambitious emissions targets laid out in a recent U.S.-China climate change agreement.

Our faculty apartment in western Xinjiang was a recipient of central heat, as were all the other staff apartments, dormitories, offices and classrooms of our 10,000-student campus. The heat for everyone was produced by a coal-fired heating plant at the campus’s western edge, just beyond the athletic fields.  I’m not sure how the heat reached the various buildings, but once it arrived in a building, heat was delivered via hot water radiators. We had no thermostats in our apartment or our classrooms, and no valves to control the flow of hot water to the radiators, most of which were situated under south-facing windows. Heat arrived on an irregular basis, causing considerable clanking plus alternating periods of sweltering and chilly indoor temperatures. Sometimes we’d have the windows wide open on -5 degree C days; at other times, indoor temperatures would be as cold or colder than outdoors. We had no way to circulate the heat inside, either (except for drafts when the wind blew). The temperature sometimes varied by several degrees from one side of a large room to the other.

We never got totally toasty during any of our winters in China, but after a while we picked up tips from our Chinese colleagues that helped a lot:

1) Long underwear is your friend.  Nearly every Chinese friend had several pairs. Larger department stores even stocked sizes big enough for our sometimes larger Western frames. As soon as the weather got cold, everyone layered up.

2) Change your eating habits with the seasons—in most places, winter offered various flavors of “hot pot” (vaguely like Western fondues, eaten communally around a large table with a gas burner at its center—more about winter eating in next week’s installment.)

3) Huddle.  Although Chinese people we knew were generally shy about hugs and public displays of affection, they were not averse to having a lot of folks around the same table  or in the same room during cold weather, upping the temperature noticeably in the process.

4) Get and use inexpensive hand and foot warmers—the ones we were familiar with were electrically powered, filled with a sort of gel that would warm fairly quickly when the power was on, and then hold their heat for up to several hours unplugged.

5) Wear tip-less gloves for indoor work. Outside, wear many layers, including hats, mittens, and warm boots.

6) Invest in padded vests and down jackets, long enough to cover your entire abdomen, which can get chilled by wintry winds.

7) Get the best, warmest bedding you can afford or acquire (often previous foreigners or Chinese colleagues will leave theirs behind when they move to more temperate climates).

8) When you are awake during the day, stay physically active. Come evening, take advantage of the long winter nights to get plenty of sleep.

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HIV/AIDS in China

Posted on December 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

HIV/AIDS in China        —by Jinny Batterson

Today is World AIDS Day.  Estimates of the number of HIV/AIDS sufferers in China vary widely, from about 600,000 to an order of magnitude larger than that. Though the infection rate in China as a whole remains relatively low, the sheer size of China’s population (about 1.4 billion) makes it important that any outbreak there be contained.

It’s thought that the first AIDS fatality in China was that of an infected tourist during the 1980’s. By the 1990’s, AIDS had gained a foothold in local populations, primarily among intravenous drug users in southern provinces adjacent to the “Golden Triangle,” Southeast Asia’s prime poppy-growing region. Then, in a scheme in which some levels of the Chinese government played an indirect but culpable role, peasants in several rural interior provinces were infected through unsafe blood donation procedures. China had stopped accepting blood components internationally during the 1980’s (ostensibly to avoid HIV contamination of the blood supply). Local entrepreneurs began to fill the supply gaps by recruiting rural donors to sell their blood for money. These “bloodhead” recruiters promised to minimize the impact of the loss of blood by extracting only plasma and returning donors’ red blood cells to them at the close of the donation process.  In some areas, safe blood handling practices were not followed—equipment was unsanitary, blood was pooled among donors before being returned. Soon whole villages were  afflicted with the “nameless fever.”  It took over a decade before the problem was acknowledged. It is estimated that 3-5% of current HIV/AIDS infections in China originated through unsafe donations—by 2010, Chinese government sources claimed that unsafe donation centers had been shut down and that all blood products were being tested for the virus before use.

A turning point in China’s official posture toward the AIDS epidemic may have come in 2003, when large parts of the country were essentially locked down during efforts to control a more short-term but also potentially lethal virus-caused infection, SARS (sudden acute respiratory syndrome). As the global reaction to SARS slowed international travel and domestic tourism in China to a trickle and seriously disrupted Chinese commerce, Chinese officials realized that having a large population of HIV-infected citizens could become an economic and human rights disaster.

My exposure to the AIDS epidemic and to efforts to contain it in China was extremely limited: the only time I saw any AIDS-related publicity was once during a 2006-2007 teaching assignment in rural Xinjiang—at the far end of the college campus, tucked away behind a line of trees, was a billboard cautioning of the dangers of unsafe sex, listing a telephone number someone could call for additional HIV/AIDS information.  A few of my Chinese teaching colleagues had heard vague stories of a young woman student who had become infected, subsequently forced out of school and shunned by her family. China’s infected population continues to grow, fueled by intravenous drug use and men having sex with men, but increasingly through unprotected heterosexual sex among sex workers and migrant laborers. The Chinese government has started promoting condom use as a safeguard against transmission, but the effectiveness of condom campaigns varies widely from region to region, and results are hard to verify. Among officially recognized victims of the disease, about a third are receiving antiretroviral drugs.

The year 2010 was the first in which AIDS was the leading cause of death from communicable diseases in China, passing tuberculosis and rabies, the former record holders. That year, over 7,700 Chinese died of AIDS. HIV/AIDS cases have been confirmed in all of China’s provinces, independent cities, and autonomous regions. As is the case in much of the rest of the world, China’s efforts to contain and reduce the HIV/AIDS epidemic can be spotty and inconsistent. Local customs, stigmatization of those infected, misinformation, some local governments’ reluctance to admit there is a problem, and the huge proportion of migrant, mostly male, laborers in the country, make developing effective overall strategies difficult.

One of the most visible spokespeople for HIV/AIDS awareness in China is James Chau, a young British-born journalist who has lived for the past decade in China. Chau became a U.N. AIDS goodwill ambassador in China in 2009. Since then, he has attended numerous international conferences on the disease, and has worked within China to educate the public about the disease and to reduce the stigma experienced by those infected with the virus.

If you have contacts in the HIV/AIDS community in China, perhaps you can use today as a reminder to provide monetary and moral support for ongoing efforts there to contain the disease and to treat its victims. Regardless of where any of us live or who we know, each can each contribute a small part to the multitude of solutions that will be needed to reduce the toll of this dreadful disease worldwide. Check the World AIDS Day website (http://www.worldaidsday.org) for ideas, or find your own way to contribute within your community.

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