It’s been a full month since I returned from my trip to Changde, and what a strange month it’s been. As things gradually start opening up again and the world starts to feel a little more normal, I want to share a little more about what I’ve felt living through the past month in Beijing. The truth is, it’s been uneasy. The quietude, in a city that is normally so noisy, is something hard to describe. It’s like the feeling of walking into an empty classroom ready to teach, before you find out that classes were cancelled that day. Where is everyone? It’s like the feeling of learning that your favorite local store is going out of business and you don’t know where you’ll go for your favorite treat anymore. What will come next? It’s like the feeling of meeting up with someone after they’ve gone through a health crisis that has changed them physically, and you don’t know what to say. What can I do?

These are only the things I’ve felt, as an expat, far from the actual crisis. I cannot imagine what it’s been like for others in Wuhan and anyone directly affected by the virus. Now is a time for everyone to show compassion towards China.

In another respect, though, this seems to have been a long period of reflection for many Chinese people. They so rarely get this much time with family, or have so much time to discover new hobbies and interests. You may know that Spring Festival is one of just two week-long holidays in China. However, you might not know that most workers have to “make up” the holiday time by working on weekends before and after the holiday, reducing the actual number of days off to only about 3 or 4. Over the holiday time, many people travel long distances by train to return to their hometowns, further diminishing the amount of time left to relax.

The minimum number of annual leave days required by Chinese law is also one of the lowest in the world. If you’ve worked more than one year, but less than ten, you’re only entitled to five days of annual leave. Add to that the fact that many people in Beijing have long commutes to work to cut down on high rent prices in more central locations, and you can understand why, when I ask my colleagues what they plan to do over the holiday, their most common answer is “sleep.”

Hobbies

Over the past month, I’ve seen some amazing and hilarious videos of what China’s shut-ins have been up to, including dancing, improving their karaoke skills, and playing games. One article from the Chinese social media platform Weibo mentioned that citizens of Wuhan have been searching for new cooking recipes after receiving unfamiliar new foods from other provinces as donations (I’ve lost the original source for this, but I’ll try to find it again later). A friend of mine joined a virtual acapella choir of 150 people to create this moving rendition of the song “Stay with You” for the citizens of Wuhan. Another of my favorite videos that has come out of this month is this cute “Cheer Up 2020” video put together by a dancing group. It’s especially worth a watch if you enjoy swing music!

Over my holiday, I didn’t practice my dancing skills, but I did download a new app for practicing singing, called 全民K歌 (Quánmín K gē). The app lets you choose a song and sing along, while showing you how you’re doing, Guitar Hero style. Even if you don’t speak Chinese, the app has a wide selection of English songs and it’s easy to search within it. Since karaoke is so popular in China, this is a good app to practice with before visiting here.

Of course, it’s impossible to stay indoors all the time, and the most common activity I see people doing within my apartment compound these days is badminton. Along with table tennis, badminton is very popular in China, as a simple, inexpensive physical activity. I hadn’t played badminton for over a decade before Spring Festival, so it was fun to take up this sport again with Melissa and her family.

Another traditional activity here is playing mahjong. Since moving to China, I’d wanted to learn to play, so I was glad Melissa’s family had the patience to teach me. If you are like me, “mahjong” might make you think of the virtual solitaire-type game that first came out with Windows 7. As it turns out, the only thing that games shares with the original mahjong is the name and the colorful tiles. The real mahjong is similar to rummikub (a game actually derived from mahjong). The goal is to make sets of 3 or 4 tiles by either groups of the same tile or sequences. Normally, it’s a gambling game, as you play with poker chips, and someone wins chips at the end of each round. Like poker, the game only ends when one person has won all the chips.

Since there was no central heating in the homes, we played around a special kind of table. This table doesn’t have a special name in Chinese, so I’ve dubbed it a “cozy table” in English to differentiate it from other kinds of tables. Underneath the table, there’s a heating element (burning coal or electric), and it has a heavy blanket skirt around the sides of it. This allows everyone to put the blanket on their laps and keep their legs warm while sitting around the table playing mahjong. I really loved this design concept, and I think it would work well at some outdoor patio bars in the U.S. Perhaps someone reading this will be the first to introduce “cozy tables” to the U.S. (but please don’t use coal burners)!

As a linguistic aside, I did find that there are equivalents to “cozy tables” in other cultures. In Japan, it is called a “kotatsu” (炬燵), in Spain and portugal, a “mesa camilla,” in Afghanistan, a “sandali,” and in Iran, a “korsi.” I guess my real fascination with this table is not so much how the same idea appeared in several different countries, but how this design never developed in other countries. To me, it’s ingenious.

Art

I was really lucky to have been able to spend Chinese New Year with Melissa and her family. Melissa studied art and taught Chinese calligraphy, so she was able to share a lot of cultural insight with me. She also took the time to give me a little calligraphy lesson. I spent a lot of time learning to make straight, even strokes with my brush, and found it a meditative practice. When making a stroke, you have to breathe slowly and evenly, and apply just the perfect amount of pressure. You need to hold your brush straight and turn it at just the right time. I’ve always been a bit clumsy, so practicing slow, careful movements was a struggle for me, but I enjoyed the practice.

I’ve never thought of myself as much of an artist, but I’ve always loved photography. I dusted off my DSLR camera for my trip to Hunan, and found an opportunity to practice during a walk around the local reservoir. Along with Melissa, one of her uncles, and her cousins, we explored some abandoned buildings and nature’s reclamation efforts. To me, there’s something very beautiful about things that are cracked or broken, and embraced by nature. Nature isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t mind imperfection.

As I’m starting to write again, I can feel all the mistakes in my writing. At this point, I want to just start, and not be afraid of embarrassing myself. There’s too much that needs to be said, and I know I won’t say it correctly for a long, long time, so I’ll just start speaking, and hopefully I’ll have it right by the end. Even from just one week of staying mostly indoors in a small town in Hunan, I found that I had three posts worth of things I wanted to write about. In the future, I want to travel more, and I expect I’ll have even more to share then. It’s going to come out wrong, so I hope you can take nature’s approach to reading my blog.

During Spring Festival, I started a project I’ve been dreaming about for the past year. I interviewed a teacher about her  experiences for a book I plan to write. I found that she also had so much to say, but didn’t always have the right words. I think we all feel that way, and we can feel afraid to speak because of it. I was so glad that this teacher let me listen to her, and I hope that I can do justice to her passion and perspective.

If you liked what I’ve shared here, I hope you continue to read my stories over the coming months. This post concludes my writings about my Spring Festival holiday. Stay tuned for my next series! 🙂

I’m writing from my home in Beijing, as the neighborhood settles into another eerie and unusual silence. Although I don’t live in the busy city center, most days my compound is full of people, dogs, scooters, and their respective noises. The past few days have been another story. As fear over the Coronavirus mounts in the city, everyone is staying indoors. So far, though, there’s little apparent danger.

The virus isn’t the only reason it’s quiet. It’s the tail-end of the Spring Festival holiday, also known as Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year. About a week ago, Beijingers made a mass exodus from the city, most returning to the hometowns they grew up in (老家 – lăojiā) to spend the new year with their families. Since the government extended the holiday until Monday, most are only just returning to the city.

It’s not my first experience with Lunar New Year, as I spent three years in South Korea and now almost two years in China. In addition, I’ve enjoyed the celebrations in the Chinatowns of the U.S. and other countries. This year, though, one of my friends invited me to spend the holiday with her family in their town close to Changde, China. It was a new kind of experience, and one I’d like to share here.

Family

Spring Festival is a family holiday, so I considered it an honor to be invited to spend it with Melissa’s family. A lot of people live in big cities like Beijing, where they can find better-paying jobs and more opportunities than in their hometowns. Before the holiday, everyone needs to get home. Getting a ticket at this time of year can be difficult, and it’s important to plan ahead. Luckily, Melissa arranged all the tickets for us and we flew directly to Changde. Her parents’ home is about 40 minutes from the airport, in the smaller city of Qihe.

Qihe has some of its own traditions. Although most towns celebrate with a big reunion dinner on the eve of the lunar new year, Qihe families have a big breakfast that day. It was important that we arrived the night before Lunar New Year’s Eve, so we could share breakfast with her family.

Before we ate, Melissa’s parents prepared three bowls of rice and three cups of wine for their ancestors. After saying a blessing, the rice is put back in the pot with the other rice, or given to elders. Ancestors are also honored with candles and incense.

Tomb-sweeping is another ancestral tradition. On the eve of the new year, it was raining heavily and bitter cold, but Melissa’s dad still took the trek to his mother’s tomb to burn paper money and incense. The paper money (纸钱 – zhǐqián) is not real money, but symbolic money for those in the afterlife. Around this time of year in Beijing, don’t be surprised if you find piles of ash on sidewalks or at intersections.

Over the next few days, I met more of Melissa’s family — uncles, cousins, grandparents and an aunt. Despite not speaking much, or any, English, they all welcomed me and found ways to make me more comfortable. Like many Chinese families, Melissa calls her cousins “brothers,” and was comfortable being the bossy big sister! On the other hand, her 22-year-old cousins implored their “big sister” to buy them wireless earbuds. Although I grew up with a pretty rigid concept of “immediate” vs. “extended” family, I can appreciate the inclusive nature of family member words in Chinese (especially when they included me, too).

Food

What’s a holiday without lots and lots of food? Being a vegetarian, I didn’t try everything on the table, but I did learn some of the superstitions around different kinds of food. For example, one staple item for a Spring Festival meal is

taro. Everyone needs to eat at least one taro ball for good luck in the coming year. When I asked why, Melissa thought taro’s round shape might signify “reunion,” a common theme during Spring Festival. Another story, not necessarily related to the holiday, was about eating chicken feet. Though it might seem like a bizarre dish in the States, chicken feet is a normal dish for Chinese. Melissa’s family advised us that eating chicken feet will help with messy hair (perhaps because they are like combs??) or getting more money in your career (because the claws can grab more money!)

When I told her parents I eat fish, their response was “We have fish, but you can’t eat it!” One fish is always included in the Spring Festival meal, but it’s not eaten. The saying, “年年有余” (niánniányǒuyú) means “Year after year, may you have surplus” but contains a character that is a homophone of 鱼 (yú) meaning “fish.” Therefore, the tradition is to leave some uneaten fish on the table for a plentiful year. Many Chinese traditions and superstitions are based on similar wordplay.

Between meals, there were always plenty of snacks. In Qihe, I found a snack (lianousu) that tasted like a cross between Honeycomb cereal and a Rice Krispie Bar. Later, I discovered how amazing this honey-flavored snack is with peanut butter, but no one else quite shared my enthusiasm for lianousu. Another snack, tang yuan (汤圆 – tāngyuán), reminded me a lot of Korean songpyeon (송편). Both dishes are made of glutinous rice balls or cakes filled with a sugary filling such as sweet sesame. The main difference is tang yuan is served as a soup, so the rice ball is softer than songpyeon.

One night at Melissa’s aunt’s house, we attempted “home barbecue.” As an aside, I have to explain how it’s possible to have a barbecue indoors in that part of China. These homes have large front doors, which are kept open even in cold weather. The first room you walk into is a spacious living room with a hard floor. To me, it was a strange juxtaposition to see the TV and couch in this room rather than somewhere cozier (and more secure) upstairs. In my hometown, the TV would be stolen pretty quickly and no one would feel secure with large, open doors. Here, though, with family living down the road, it makes sense to have such an open place to gather, and no one feels worried.

Back to the barbecue. We set up a fire in a small grill in the middle of the living room. We put some vegetables on sticks and sat around the fire like kids waiting for their marshmallows to brown. That plan didn’t work out so well, so we wrapped the food in tinfoil and set it on the grate. All-in-all, we weren’t terribly successful, but we had fun trying.

I believe these two words, “family” and “food,” are closely connected, not just in Chinese culture, but in all cultures. It’s something we have in common. Spring Festival is as important a holiday in China as Thanksgiving or Christmas is in the west, and they share common values. The heart of it is taking some time to spend with family and share meals with them. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

In my next post (part 2!), I’ll share more about Chinese traditions and entertainment, including snapshots from my calligraphy lesson with Melissa.

Thanks for reading, and stay healthy!