China for the Holidays

Class Christmas Parties!

As one might imagine, the Holiday Season was a bit different for us this year. This was our first time to be away from home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year. While we were sad to be away from our friends and family, the wonders of Skype and email helped make the distance feel not quite so far (we even got to watch our families open presents on Christmas morning!). We had a good time bringing a bit of our American culture to China for the holidays and were overwhelmed by our Chinese friends’ efforts to make us feel at home here during that time. Below is a description of how we celebrated the Holidays in China. While it was different, it was still a festive and fun time that we won’t soon forget!

Thanksgiving:

Our contract with our school states that we will not work on the American holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’m pretty sure that no one at our school (other than us) has actually read our contract, so they were surprised when we approached them the week before Thanksgiving to “remind” them about the upcoming holiday. At first, they seemed a bit confused as to why we needed the day off in the first place. However, once we explained to them that this was a holiday that all Americans celebrate (and that they’d contractually agreed to let us celebrate), they happily let us have the day off. One of our friends, a Chinese English teacher at our school, worded it best when explaining to our school’s leadership why we should have Thanksgiving off. She simply told them that “It’s the Law.”

Free to celebrate Thanksgiving as we pleased, we were then confronted with our first challenge: What to eat on “Turkey Day” in a country where there are no turkeys? After some deliberation, we settled on a menu of Chicken and Dumplings, Green Bean Casserole, Stuffing, Mashed Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, and Dinner Rolls. Instead of Apple Pie for dessert, we had Fried Wontons and apples sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar on top (luckily, we’d received a package from home which included cinnamon that day – Thanks, Mom!). We bought most of the ingredients for our Thanksgiving Dinner at the local outdoor market. It was no easy task pulling all the necessary supplies together for such a western feast, and there were many substitutions that had to be made. In fact, as we were preparing the meal, we realized that what we’d thought were sweet potatoes were actually a strange mystery fruit that we’d never seen before (but once we put enough sugar and cinnamon on top it tasted just fine!).

Above: Mashing Potatoes, China style!

Above: Thanksgiving Dinner!

Above: Thanksgiving Party!

We celebrated the day at our apartment with the entire American population of Zhuzhou: The 9 other American English Teachers living around our city. Thanksgiving turned out to be a beautiful day in our city, so we were able to spend the afternoon outdoors playing football, Frisbee, and badminton on one of the outdoor fields on our school’s campus. It must have been a strange sight for our students to see so many strange foreigners at their school. At first, many of our kids stared at our American friends in amazement, confused as to how so many foreigners had wandered to their school. Eventually, they got over their “awe” and eagerly joined in our games. It was quite hilarious watching our students attempt to throw an American Football. I don’t think many of them had ever held a football before and really didn’t know what to do with it. Most students’ first instinct was to “shoot” the football to their friend like they’d shoot a basketball into a basket, which struck me as strange. I guess they thought that since both Football and Basketball are American sports, you must throw both balls the same way. After awhile, they got the hang of how to throw the football properly and many were quite good at it!

What is this strange person showing me?

A card from one of David's students:

Dear Joe:

Happy New Year. Happy evrey day. Merry Chistmas have a very good family.

Yang Xinlong (English Name: Jarck)

A card from one of Tiffany's students:

To: Mrs. Joe:

Happy Every day! Every day has a smile face.

Your student,

Carol

However, none of the cards we got compare to a card that one of our friends at another school received from her student. The card read as follows:

Merry Christmas! Day Day Up. You could do better.
I’m pretty sure the letter was meant as a “well-wish,” but it sounded an awful lot like an insult to us! I’m still not sure what the “Day Day Up” part is all about.

So you don’t think our English teaching skills are totally inept, we’ll also share a well written card we received from one of our students:

Dear Mr. Joe,

Merry Christmas and happy New Year! Wishing you happiness and prosperity in the coming year.

Best wishes,

Shirley

I’m pretty sure she had a bit of help writing that one, but I was impressed!

During the month of December, we had a good time incorporating some Western Christmas Traditions and songs into our lessons. Our students especially loved singing “Jingle Bells” and “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” It was a lot of fun explaining how Santa flies around the world by sleigh and reindeer to all the “nice” children’s homes, comes down the chimney, and puts gifts under the tree. Santa had never made it to any of our student’s homes, so this was a totally foreign concept to them. We also put up a Christmas Tree and Christmas lights in the window of our apartment, which the students enjoyed looking at from their dorm room windows (although we put up our lights right after Thanksgiving, so our students initially thought they were Thanksgiving lights!). Also, Tiffany incorporated an activity using the word “Hope” into one of her lessons. She made a big Christmas tree out of green poster paper for each class and cut out small red and green paper ornaments to give to her students. She then explained the word “Hope” to them and had them write what they hoped for on the ornament. The students then glued their ornaments to their class’ tree. The end result was a really neat tree with all her students hopes hanging on the classroom wall. It was interesting to see what the students were hopeful for. Surprisingly, many were not hopeful for things for themselves, but for their best friends. They wanted their friends to be happy, do well on exams, etc. It was really neat to see them expressing such selflessness!

I did feel like our school made quite an effort to get into the Christmas spirit this year. One way they did so was in the form of Christmas / New Years parties held in each classroom on the night of Christmas Eve. The parties were sponsored by the English department and were quite festive affairs. All classes had plenty of food (fruit, preserved tofu, dumplings, and even KFC!), candy, and drinks. The more advanced classes had prepared poetry readings and plays in English. The other classes’ parties were less “educational” and primarily included karaoke-style singing, dancing and other games. We enjoyed moving from class to class to observe the festivities. The students really seemed to be having a blast and it was fun to watch! However, I made the mistake of entering one class right as cake was being served. By this point in the party, the students were pretty wound up and several of them had started shoving cake in each others’ faces. I thought this was funny until someone shoved cake in my face, too. Before I knew it, the entire class was attacking me and I had an entire plate-full of cake stuck to my face. The students thought this was hilarious (and really, I did look hilarious). It was a bit of an embarrassing walk home that night, and it took me quite awhile to clean myself off. Still, it was a great Christmas Eve and one I will not forget!

So, that is how we celebrated Thanksgiving 2008. No Turkey, but we still had good food, football, and a great time with our American friends in China!

Christmas:
China is not a Christian country. In fact, most of the population has no religion at all (many superstitions, but no “religion” per se). So, before the Christmas season we’d expected that we’d see very few of the traditional symbols of Christmas around our town. However, we were a bit surprised to see many pictures of Santa posted in stores and restaurants. In fact, many Chinese were well-aware of Christmas’ existence. Still, despite that the fact that the literal English translation of the Chinese word for Christmas (shengdanjie) is “Holy Person’s Birthdate,” most Chinese people do not know much about the Christian traditions of Christmas. From what I gathered, in our town most people’s understanding of Christmas is limited to the following:

1) It is the Western World’s biggest holiday.
2) Westerner’s exchange gifts and Christmas cards on Christmas
3) We have put Christmas Trees up in our homes (although many of our students mistook pictures of the red and green spherical Christmas ornaments for apples and thus thought that westerner’s decorate the Christmas Tree with apples).
4) For some reason, we hang socks over the fireplace.
5) Santa is the primary symbol of Christmas. In fact, many of the pictures of Santa we saw around town seemed to indicate an understanding that Christmas was Santa’s birthday.
6) “Santa” is not a word that many people know. His Chinese name is “Sheng dan Lao ren,” or literally, “Christmas Old Person.” Thus, most of our students refer to him fondly in English as that or something similar. “Merry Christmas Grandpa” seemed to be a popular name.

A local store getting into the Christmas Spirit. Happy Birthday, Santa? (notice Santa blowing out candles on the left and the sign on the right says "Good Luck Christmas!)

Thus, we came to the conclusion that the people in our town have somewhat of a confused understanding of Christmas. Still, they get excited by the “Christmas Spirit” and the people at our school thought it was really special to have us westerners in town for the holiday. The school store sold small artificial Christmas Trees and Christmas cards. Some students even hand-made cards in art class. We were pretty touched that many of our students bought cards to give us with nice notes written inside. Given our students’ limited English skills, some of the notes were pretty hilarious. Below is a sampling:

Above: A student reading a speech in English at his Class' Christmas Party

Above: David at a Class Christmas Party

Above: Tiffany at a Class Christmas Party

The teachers at our school really went out of their way to make sure we felt at home during Christmas as well. On Christmas Eve, the Junior 2 English Teachers came by our apartment to give us an extremely nice Christmas gift – a fancy Chinese teapot! Also, our liaison with our school, Mr. Zhang, organized a Christmas dinner for us on Christmas Day. The dinner was quite impressive. The school provided the money to buy food and drink and the Senior English Teachers did the grocery shopping and came to our apartment and our fellow foreign English teacher Janet’s apartment to cook. All of the Senior English Teachers, a couple of the Junior English Teachers, and 2 of our school’s Headmasters attended the dinner. It was quite a feast – definitely more food than all of us could possibly eat. I was amazed at the efficiency with which the teachers prepared, ate, and cleaned up the meal though. There were no fewer than 6 people cooking in our small, 2-burner stove (and zero oven) kitchens with minimal counter space. Yet, they never seemed to get into each others way and it took them just about an hour to prepare an enormous amount of food. The cleanup was equally impressive (especially considering we have no dishwashing machines in China). Each person took a job and executed it to perfection. Our apartments were clean in no time. It made me feel bad for taking so long to clean the minimal amount of dishes we have after dinner on a nightly basis! These people are machines!

Above: Chinese English teachers preparing Christmas Dinner

Above: What a feast! This is only a small percentage of the total number of prepared dishes. They like to eat sunflower seeds and peanuts as appetizers here.

Above: 2 of our school's headmasters came to the dinner.

To show our appreciation for their help and kindness to us this year, Tiffany and our fellow foreign English Teacher at our school knitted scarves for each member of the English department for Christmas (my contribution was helping to wrap the scarves as I am not able to knit). The teachers really seemed to enjoy the scarves – in their competitive fashion, one of the first things they did was compare whose scarf was the longest!

Above: Tiffany and Janet presenting our friends with their gifts

Above: Opening the presents!

Above: What beautiful scarves! Tiffany and Janet are excellent knitters!

After Christmas, we celebrated Christmas with the other foreign English teachers in our town by having a jiaozi (dumpling) and wonton-making party. I’m not sure what all of us foreigners were thinking making and wrapping our own dumplings and wontons withoutnk any Chinese people there to supervise, but they turned out really well and tasted great!

Making Dumplings

All in all, it was an extremely unique Christmas. While we really missed being home and being able to celebrate Christmas the way we’re used to doing in America, it was still a really festive and special time that we won’t soon forget.

New Year: Despite the fact that China does use the western calendar for official purposes, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day is not really celebrated here. We did have a school holiday and banks were closed, but other than that the calendar New Year is no big deal in China. There were no celebrations of any kind, no fireworks. It was as if nobody really cared. On New Year’s Eve, we just went for a low-key dinner with a couple of other Chinese teachers at our school. We were back at our apartment well before midnight (maybe 9:30?) and didn’t even notice when the clock struck 12:00 to ring in 2009. It was definitely one of the quietest New Year’s I can remember, and it was strange that in the country that invented fireworks (and can find a reason to set them off on virtually every day of the year) there were no fireworks celebrations on New Year’s Eve. I guess the Chinese people were just far more concerned with the Lunar New Year, (by far their biggest holiday), which came about a month later on January 26 to bother with the calendar New Year. Anyway, the semester ended for us right around New Year’s Eve and shortly thereafter (on January 2nd, to be exact) we headed off on a 5-week trip across southwestern China, Thailand, and Cambodia. More on that in the entries that follow. Well, congratulations if you made it to the end of this long entry. We hope you found it interesting! We’re looking forward to the New Year and are excited to see what it has in store!

As an aside, my birthday was squeezed in between all the activities of Thanksgiving and Christmas. In case you’re wondering, mine wasn’t quite as eventful as Tiffany’s, which I was okay with. We met the other foreign teachers for dinner, where we ordered this particular restaurau Thanks for all the well-wishes!nt's specialty, frog legs! My friends surprised me with a basketball so I could play with my students (once it warms up outside). Then, we splurged on a bowling game at the pricy Huatian hotel (the only hotel in town catering to western businessmen). Thanks for all the well-wishes!