Holidays in China, redux

The holidays began properly for me this year on the winter solstice, a day when, my students tell me, you must eat dumplings or YOUR EARS WILL OFF. Needless to say I went with the dumplings, and several students took over my kitchen for the morning to turn out a jiaozi feast. In the pictures students are stuffing the dumplings, and I enjoy them with my site-mate and a few of the cooks!

As soon as the feast was over, though, we had to hurry them out and start preparing for our second feast of the day: a Mexican Christmas with some other Gansu volunteers. Ben and I brought salsa and chips and beans, but there was also a full range of burrito fixings, and even homemade tamales (note: if you want to make masa from scratch, you will have to render down a really big hunk of fat). It was fabulous.

The next night the festivities continued with my English Department’s very own Christmas “Party”. Now, I know I’ve explained these parties before, but if you missed that, think of it more as a slightly bizarre revue with a whole line-up of student performances. I do love watching my students perform, and the skinny Santa who came out throwing candy, narrowly missing the English teachers’ heads I should add, and was subsequently MOBBED by the Chinese kiddies, was a highlight. His maneuvers, as he raced into the crowd, ducking and spinning away from the grasping little hands, were brilliant. The stage had fun decorations, the performers looked great, the microphones worked from time to time, and the 1800 or so students in the audience happily waved their glow-sticks the whole time. A total success! The picture is with some of the night’s performers. The guy in the corner who looks like the REAL Santa is Randy, another teacher here at the school.

The NEXT night was Christmas Eve and it was my turn to throw a party! After about 24 hours of baking and cleaning, my place was sparkling, the tree glowing, and the table set with a pumpkin pie, gingerbread cookies, apple turnovers, peanut butter-honey cookies, and pumpkin-oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies. As people began to trickle in, the other foreign teachers at my school contributed some delicious breads and cookies, and the Chinese teachers brought bags and bags of fruit, chips, and drinks. We were soon overflowing with about 30 people – my coworkers, their children, and a few of the English Association kids and graduate students that are my friends. ::whew:: It was a packed house, but the Christmas tree was the focal point (Chinese folks love a good photo op and it fit the bill as a back-drop), the kids were loud and messy and having a great time, people were mingling, and it was just plain wonderful.

On Christmas morning we tore open the packages I’d placed strictly under the tree (no peeking!), and had a lovely Christmas breakfast of noodles. That night a few of us took advantage of a free banquet dinner. A local airline was hosting a fabulous buffet (with turkey! And lamb! And sushi!), and offered free tickets to bring our foreign faces to the affair. Well the food was delicious, the company good, the ambiance very Christmas-y with candles and music…. when all of a sudden the lights went down, red lights and a bubble machine came on in the middle of the room, and out strutted four Kazakh exotic dancers. Wearing teeny bikini tops. Because, you know, Christmas is a foreign holiday, so naturally foreign performers will make it a perfect Christmas celebration. We stayed until the girls came out again in little shepherdess outfits that ended at the crotch, and 2.5 foot tall Marie-Antoinette wigs… on our way out we were told that a local night-club manager had been put in charge of the (3 hour-long!!) entertainment. That actually didn’t come as much of a surprise.

I gave my literature exam two days after Christmas, and caught a few cheaters which put a really lovely cap on a difficult semester with the seniors. I am so looking forward to going back to British Literature this upcoming semester with juniors. The students are just so completely checked out of their academics in their senior year, and not just garden-variety senioritis, but literally absent all the time, plagiarizing, cheating… ah well. It’s over. They only have their theses to write next semester and they’ll be out of here. I’ll be advising 4 of them on their final papers this year.

For New Year’s several of us went out for a big dinner in honor of our friend Lu Wei’s 30^th birthday, and then met up with most of the other Lanzhou volunteers at a laid-back club to ring in the New Year with some dancing. It was a great night, one of my favorite New Year’s Eves ever. New Year’s is always a funny moment among volunteers because for half of us it signals a year where we most likely will not be in the States at all, and for the other half of us, it marks the year in which we’ll return home. Exciting stuff in both cases I think.

Since the New Year I’ve been on a fairly steady diet of grading, finally wrapping everything up last weekend by turning in mounds of paperwork. To celebrate finishing our semesters, Ben and I and Simon (another volunteer in LZ) went… skiing! Now, those of you who know me might say, “But Kristen! You don’t ski! And also you are a big klutz! And… there’s skiing in China?” Never fear, I didn’t venture more than half way up the slope. In my jumpsuit (see photo, and please know that it doesn’t belong to me). We all had a great time though, and the boys owned the top of the slope, wowing everyone with some spectacular tumbles (mostly courtesy of the impetuous Simon) and smooth moves.

All of the above brings me to this week, in which I prepare to go traveling. Everyone around me is also preparing – for Chun Jie (Spring Festival), the Chinese New Year. It much resembles the lead up to Christmas, but actually holds meaning for the Chinese population unlike the December proliferation of Santa Clauses and arches made out of things like red cardboard beer advertisements and Winnie-the-pooh teddy bears. Everyone is buying beautiful red knots and strips of paper with blessings on them, and the whole city is filling up with gorgeous red lanterns, hung from trees, lamp-posts, bridges, and even in small strings lining the windows of buses. This is my favorite look for the city: still with all the winter time smells and sounds of the hot nut and corn and potato vendors, but with the fruit sticks dipped in glaze which signal the closer-to-springtime part of the winter, all lorded over by the brilliantly red lanterns. The holiday itself is on Feb 7, but the entire month surrounding that date involves mass-migration as nearly everyone in the country goes back to their hometowns to celebrate with their family. I love this time of year here but for one thing – the firecrackers. I have always loved fireworks, and can’t wait for the fabulous displays that will happen all over the country on the night of Feb 6, but for weeks now the booms of firecrackers have been echoing through my neighborhood, steadily increasing in frequency, and making me jump out of my skin every 4^th or 5^th unexpected boom. I blame the grandfathers – they are as gleeful setting them off as the kids that they hand them to.

Heading out of town tomorrow for the next 5 weeks or so… stay tuned.