January 31 - Christmas and New Year's

I spent my first ever Christmas away from my family this past holiday, which was quite sad. I did manage to get on Skype and give them a call to spend some time with them, but it's not the same. I think my parents must have been very lonely too. My brother was also away in Europe at the time on a last-minute vacation, so they were hit with their first ever empty-nest Christmas.

圣诞节(sheng dan jie; holy birth festival) is the Chinese name for Christmas, and they celebrate it exactly the same way we do in the West, albeit far more commercially and no pretense at all of any relation to religion. 圣诞老人(sheng dan lao ren; Christmas Old Guy) is their name for Santa, which I completely cracked up about when I first heard it. My friend couldn't understand what was so funny, so that was a bit awkward, but I couldn't stop smiling. I think it's cute.

Since Christmas is not a main festival for them, the Chinese only give a one day holiday for it, but in my case that wasn't really an issue because I am on winter holiday. In Canada, the university holidays are usually about 3 weeks in winter and close to 3 and a half months in summer. In China, the winter holiday is 2 months and the summer holiday is 2 months. The main reason for this is that China has a major holiday early in the year known as 春节 (chun jie; Spring Festival) that many of us in the West know as "Chinese New Year". I'll talk about Spring Festival again after I experience it (it's currently 4 days away!).

What was most interesting to me about Christmas in China were all the misapprehensions Chinese people had about how we westerners celebrate. The biggest thing they got wrong is the relative importance of Christmas Eve compared with Christmas Day. I know many people do in fact celebrate on Christmas Eve, but Christmas Day is definitely the day most people mark on their calendars. My Chinese friends, one and all, believed that Christmas Eve was the more important day by far. They call it 平安夜 (ping an ye; peaceful quiet night) and on that day, they always give each other apples, since 平 looks very similar to and is pronounced exactly the same as 苹, which forms the word 苹果 (ping guo) which refers to apples. The really interesting part of this apple-giving tradition is that they believe it is a western tradition. They think that we go around on Christmas Eve giving each other apples. Another amusing side effect is that, magically, the price of apples rises about 10000% in the two days preceding and on the day itself. I saw an apple on sale for 350rmb at an upscale supermarket, which is roughly $50!

So this is pretty much the one day in China where, as a teacher, you can expect to get apples from your students.

I was promised a Christmas tree, but it never materialized. We foreign teachers were also promised a lunch with the president of the university, but he turned out to be away on business, so we were treated to lunch by the vice-president instead. He was a personable fellow, who seemed quite at ease dining with us even though he didn't speak a word of English and made his lackeys translate for him.

We didn't have to go far for lunch. We ate at the hotel immediately adjacent to the foreign teachers' apartments, in a large private dining room on the second floor of the restaurant. It was a relatively good meal, though not particularly memorable for the food. The wine, however, was interesting.

This Christmas meal appears to be orchestrated solely for the purpose of public relations, since for the majority of the year we have absolutely zero contact from the higher administration. In fact, for my first couple of months, I hadn't met anyone in the administration at all apart from Vincent and Xu Xin, who handle foreign relations. So the vice-president chatted away affably as if we were all the oldest of friends. I smiled inwardly when the other teachers united to confront him and ask for a raise. They get paid the equivalent of less than a third of monthly Canadian minimum wage for full-time workers. I wasn't included in this push for a raise because I get paid more in a separate deal. My contract is with a Canadian school and not directly with the university like theirs. A third of Canadian monthly minimum wage? I'd have trouble accepting that too, though it's way more than enough to live very comfortably in China since we live here rent free in these apartments.

At the end of the meal, they gave us all a thank you present for our service. It is traditional at year end holidays to give a bonus to employees in China. We got a paperweight. 

Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful paperweight, but I have never used a paperweight in my life. I am also sure the teachers on salary with the school would have appreciated money far more. A bonus would be nice for me too, but not as important as for the other teachers and I wouldn't be eligible for one anyway, since I am not employed by the university directly. I can't help but get the nagging suspicion that this is just another way to give the appearance of caring for the teachers while secretly disdaining us for our ignorance. One Chinese person i know got a bonus of 5000rmb, which is close to $1000. She doesn't earn any more than those foreign teachers. We get a paperweight.

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During Christmas Day, about 7 of my students came over to my place to make me feel welcomed in China. Whatever is lacking in hospitality from this school's administration is more than made up for by the warmth and generosity of my students. They brought tons of things with them, including plates, utensils, and all the ingredients they needed to make a large, traditional home-cooked Chinese meal for me.

Prior to their arrival, I spent several hours cleaning my apartment, but that turned out to be totally futile. I learned that, in the process of cooking, many Chinese people are totally unmindful of making a mess. They make the mess first, and clean up later, with no attempts to be careful. My kitchen floor and counter tops went from pristine white to streaked almost black with muddy, oily footprints all over the floor and spills all over the counters. It was like a hurricane hit my kitchen. They graciously cleaned the counters afterwards, but left the floors untouched, so I had to clean them again.

It wasn't a huge deal for me, just an eye-opener about how Chinese people cook (I have never seen anyone cook so messily before), and I wasn't about to complain when they were making me such a great meal out of the warmth of their hearts.

Anyway, my students each made me at least one dish, so by the time we were done, my little dining room table was groaning under the weight of food, as were our bellies. We couldn't even finish half of what they made, so my students brought the rest home with them in bags. We had two varieties of fried eggs, fried rice, many varieties of fried vegetable plates, one fried beef plate and (sensing a theme here) fried peanuts. I didn't get any pictures, which is a shame, because the food was wonderful.

Pei Pei and Max came over to take me out for Christmas dinner later on, but I was still feeling a little bit full so I was unprepared for our destination which turned out to be Golden Hans, which is a chain here in China that is owned by a German dude in Beijing and is one of the only all you can eat buffets in China (the problem with this kind of buffet is that many Chinese people are so poor, they will just bring a garbage bag or something with them to the restaurant and clear the place out - or so I've been told). Apparently the one in Beijing has better quality food that is more frequently refreshed, because the self-serve buffet part of our meal was awful, though it should be granted that we came on one of the busiest days of the year. Max told me the Beijing one was better, anyway.

The meat on the other hand, which is what Golden Hans is known for, was really tasty.  However, the serving method was rather novel, bringing large skewers to the table and plopping slices down inelegantly at a rapid fire pace so that we couldn't finish the meat we had on our plates before the next variety arrived. The buffet menu gave us unlimited food from the self-serve buffet side dishes and 24 samples of different varieties of meats and sausages (first real sausages I've seen here) that are checked off from a list as the waiter passes.

Max ordered a 2-gallon serving of beer to go with the meal. We ended up finishing most of the meat, though Max ate more than me and Pei Pei, since I had already eaten and Pei Pei doesn't eat as much as we do. We also managed to drink all the beer. However, I wasn't even tipsy since I had consumed such incredibly vast quantities of food. It didn't save me though. I drank my last glass of beer a little too quickly and I made a show for all the staff (we were the last people to leave the restaurant late at night and the staff had already started cleaning up). They stood around about 15 feet away and watched in fascination as the foreign guy puked his guts out all over the floor.

I immediately felt hugely relieved as I had thrown up because of eating way too much food. Pei Pei and Max misinterpreted it as alcohol related at first, but as I said, I wasn't even tipsy. They insisted we take a cab back to my place anyway. Sigh.

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I met up with Ian and his wife on December 30 for a little catch up. I hadn't seen them in a while. This time around, we biked over to the restaurant Ai De, a place I went to with Yan Yi Shu shortly after my arrival in Zhengzhou. It's on the corner of the first street exactly one block east of the Zi Jing Shan traffic roundabout (the geographical centre of the city) and I recommend it to anyone who visits this city. The food was good, the company was good, the traveling between destinations was not so good.

It was bitterly cold that evening, particularly on the return trip as the wind was no longer in my back, but pummeling me in the face and impeding my forward progress. We took a slightly different route back and made a turn to early onto the wrong street at one point. My clever companions zoomed ahead on their electric scooter and they must have made a turn somewhere without me seeing them do it, because I kept going happily straight ahead towards what I thought was our college, but turned out to be rather different. The once broad and well-lit street narrowed, and the lights that lined the street suddenly disappeared as did the sounds of the city. It was ominous, dark and quiet. I pedaled my way cautiously forward, certain I was headed the right direction, but suddenly not so certain if I would have to backtrack or not.

A couple of men stood in the shadows of a tenement entrance watching me and talking in low tones. A little dog skittered across my path, tail between its legs. A woman laughed shrilly as she burst out of a side door, nearly colliding with me and blinding me with the light from within. I dodged and kept moving forward as the road got narrower and narrower. I realized I was entering a hu tong, but figured I might as well see if there were a way to navigate through to the other side. I managed to get in another couple of hundred feet, but then I hit a dead end. It was a little unnerving to be in a hu tong at this time of night, but I wasn't worried since I felt I didn't look particularly like a target with my rustbucket of a bike and the darkness of my hood obscuring my western features. I backtracked and as I was pulling out of the hu tong, a man stepped out from the shadows and asked me something loudly (though not angrily), but I wasn't about to wait around to see what he had to say. I found the turn that Ian and his wife must have taken and made my home. I was very glad to get back into my heat-blasted oven of a home.

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On New Year's Eve, I had planned to have the foreign students (Marco, Bissah, Peter and Anna) come over to my place to have a few beers as we watched the countdown on TV, but they all had other plans and canceled last minute, so I had a sad and lonely New Year's, thinking of a special someone. Even my plan to watch the countdown right to the second was ruined when I picked the wrong television channel to watch and instead of fireworks and festivities, I got Mr. Long-Winded, aka the president of this country, delivering a speech about how great China is and how Chinese people must accept hardship and work hard in order to make China better than anyone else, and peace and harmony this, and uncharismatic blandishments that! Gah! It was not a good night.

P.S. Still got two more posts to write after this.