January 28 - Winter Solstice Festival

They have a festival here in China called 冬至 (dong zhi; winter's arrival), which is their name for the winter solstice. There doesn't appear to be any real folkloric aspects to celebrating this festival, but a requirement is that everyone must make their own 饺子 (jiao zi; dumplings) for themselves and eat them in massive quantities. Some restaurants will accomodate large groups and some will provide the filling and dough for the dumplings in addition to boiling them for you, while others make you bring your own food which they will boil for you once you've put them together.

I was invited by some of my students to take part in this festival which I am tempted to dub 'Dumpling Day', but will refrain from doing so since I think it devalues the real happiness Chinese people in the North derive from this special day (in the southern parts of China, they don't really experience winter, so they don't celebrate the festival).

The students who accompanied me there made us arrive a bit earlier than the rest of the group, so we arrived to three massive, empty tables with various fillings and bags of jiao zi pre-cut dough circles on them. The pictures accompanying this post will give you an idea of the kind of dumplings I am talking about.

We had been waiting there a few minutes when suddenly everyone else arrived in one huge group. It was incredibly amusing, and glaringly obvious, when all the girls clustered around my table to eat with me and all the boys and girls who arrived too late went to the other two tables. There were about 25 students in all, equally divided between genders, and all but 3 of the girls went to my table and exactly zero of the boys were able to snag a place (and not for lack of trying! the girls simply elbowed them out). I didn't think that was a fair arrangement, and since we were all standing to

make the dumplings anyway, I decided to circulate around the tables and hang out with all my students.

Making a dumpling is both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world. The only complicated part is making sure you get an appropriate part of filling (too little and the dumpling is droopy; too much and it squicks out the sides as you try to seal it). However, just accomplishing the sealing of a dumpling is not enough. No matter how you do it, everyone looks at everyone else's dumplings and adjudges them to be the worst and ugliest dumpling they have ever seen. Furthermore, it is unclear what the perfect dumpling is actually supposed to look like, since there are as many varieties of style as there are regions in China. Regardless, mine are apparently pathetically ugly, which is normal for an ill-practiced foreigner.

Once the restaurant cooked all our jiao zi for us, the feast began. I stuffed my face with dumplings to the point of bursting, eating almost 70 of them at that one sitting. My students kept giving me more and more, and they were eating a similar amount. It was with a certain amount of relief that I bade them farewell a bit early in order to get to my final Chinese class of the year on time. (By the way, for those of you pronouncing "zi" as "zee" and I know some of you are, it's actually pronounced more closely to 'dzzz' like a bumblebee, but abruptly cut off - start to say dzzz then cut it off as quickly as you can).

This Chinese class was a bit unusual because my usual teacher had a medical appointment, so instead of my usual one-on-one affair, I sat in on one of the introductory Chinese courses that Marco, Bissah, Peter and Peter's newly arrived girlfriend, Anna, were taking together.

They were pretty tickled to have me along and welcomed me to the class immediately.  I had already been on friendly terms with Bissah and Marco, but didn't really know Peter all that well. His girlfriend, Anna, was embarrassingly interested in me however, spending much of the class twisted around to ask me a bunch of questions about myself. It was a little bit disruptive to the class, and though I didn't really get the impression she was attracted to me or anything, I felt a little bad for Peter too since he seemed to withdraw into himself as the class progressed.

The class itself was really interesting. I learned that I should have a lot more self-confidence in my Chinese abilities than I actually do. My level of knowledge, pronunciation and fluency appeared to be light-years ahead of theirs. Nevertheless, I learned quite a few new things during the class, both in terms of grammar and vocabulary. I also learned that if I really want to progress quickly in Chinese, I will enroll in a course like this. The free course that the university is offering to me is just not cutting it. The teachers have no clear program of study for me and I think I'd be better off just taking a course with many students in it so that I can follow their set curriculum in addition to advancing quickly on my own. My teachers appear to be unsure about how to teach me at the individual level because of the unevenness of my knowledge.

After the class, I invited Bissah and Marco to come with me for dinner to have even more jiao zi with a completely different set of students, but they demurred by saying they had other plans. So, I got back on my bike and headed back again to my students' apartment complex.

This time we headed to a different restaurant where we had to bring our own jiao zi materials, and the lunchtime process repeated itself. This time, however, there was a more orderly seating arrangement. We were seated at two tables by whoever drew red or black cards from an evenly divided, limited deck of playing cards.

After grossly distending my poor belly with another 30 jiao zi, they asked me for an idea for a game, so I taught them a version of charades. This being China, however, they weren't satisfied with the fun of watching people perform actions weirdly. Instead, they had to add punishments for guessing incorrectly. Punishments are invariably embarrassing acts, and they didn't lack for imagination. Some people were asked to go say embarrassing things to members of the opposite sex, or go declare undying love to a member of the same gender. I was required to go pick up a little guy and carry him across the threshold as if we just got married. I thought it was hilarious.

As the night wore on, however, the punishments began to get out of hand. At one point, they made a guy kiss his girlfriend in front of all of us (a big taboo in China) and the worst one, which ended the night, was when a boy was told to transfer a peanut from between his teeth to another girl's teeth without the use of his hands. The girl in question was extremely shy, and because of peer pressure, you could see her mentally breaking as he moved towards her. When I realized what was happening (they were speaking in rapid fire Chinese), I got up to go stop him, but arrived too late before he thrust his face at her. When he pulled away, tears were streaming down her face. I tried to comfort her, but she said very quietly that she didn't need help, but gave me a heartfelt "thank you..." I've never felt so sorry for someone as I did right then. I've heard of worse things happening to people, even those I care about, but it's different when you see it happening right in front of you...