Golden pigs

It is Chinese New Year this week (chunjie--the Spring Festival), when the great migration takes place and everyone returns to their home towns, villages, etc. I’m actually leaving for Japan to get out of China for the holiday, a fact that caused the guy who works in the café in the building where I’m staying to scold me for missing China’s most important holiday. He noted it would be like missing Christmas in the United States, and how fun it is, full of temple fairs and firecrackers and toys and general re'nao-ness (I decided to hold back on telling him that re'nao is not necessarily always a selling point).

We are entering the Year of the Pig, which means everywhere you go things with pigs on them are for sale, including all manner of adorable stuffed pig toys. I find this only slightly ironic, given that, in Chinese “meat” (rou) is basically a synonym for “pork” and that supposedly half of the pigs in the world are Chinese pigs. Apparently this year is also a “Golden Pig” year, which is considered very propitious and which means that lots of couples are trying to conceive to have babies born in the year of the Golden Pig. Schools are apparently preparing for an upsurge in entrants in six years.

Perhaps some of these people are visiting the “Beijing Tian Lun Sterility Hospital,” the advertisement for which I enjoyed so much I decided to share it here. This is an outstanding example of so many phenomena—globalization leading to the mixing of cultures, Chinese appropriation of Western cultural symbols for interesting uses, and of course, rather tolerant interpretations of copyright laws.

Also, people here can only dream of having 12 children. And I have yet to see anyone remotely resembling Steve Martin.

One note on the notorious “one-child policy”: the first products of the one-child policy, which began in the late 1970s, are getting to be childbearing age, and if both members of a couple are single children they are allowed to have two children.

Firecrackers are being sold in stands all over the place—very much like the Fourth of July. This is one reason why I’m glad I am decamping for Japan on Saturday. I’ll be there for ten days, visiting a former student, Kelly Bolen, who is in her second year there on the JET program, teaching English in a small town called Tochio. We’ll be visiting Kelly’s home turf in Niigata and Tochio (I’m excited about her friend the sushi chef!) and then her former host family in Nagasaki. After that we will visit Unzen for some hiking in the national park there. Then I’m going to spend a few days based in Kamakura, which was the 12th century capital of Japan and has lots of Zen temples. It is only about an hour out of Tokyo so I expect I’ll get a day in Tokyo as well.

So this will be my last post for awhile--check back at the end of February for more!

Formidable or terrible?

Yesterday was a fine day in Beijing—very clear, with a blue sky, and temperatures in the lower 40s. You could actually see the Fragrant Hills. Beijing is quite flat, on a plateau, but it has hills to the north (where the Great Wall passes through) and to the west, which are the Fragrant Hills, known in Chinese as Xiang Shan. That is really only significant because Hong Kong in Chinese is actually Xiang Gang, which means “Fragrant Harbor.” I guess fishiness is fragrant to someone.

I ran 13 miles yesterday, in the Yuyuantan Park, another park near here (about 1.6 miles away, according to the TOMS). I wanted to just tune out and wear my iPod but decided not to, partially due to having to deal with traffic to get to the park (fear not, parental units and other folk inclined to worry, I only turn on the iPod once I get to a safe spot) but also because I wanted to really be present on my run. That was a good choice—I had a few interesting encounters. Yuyuantan also features a lake in the middle, bigger than the Purple Bamboo Park—Yuyuantan is 2.4 miles around for one lap. At one end of the lake were people ice fishing, although I’d guess the ice is rather precarious, given all the warm days we’ve had. At the other end were people swimming! Mostly middle-aged men. Some of them started yelling at me that I should be swimming as I ran by, which leads us to today’s Chinese word. I responded to them that swimming was far too lihai for me—lihai being a fairly untranslatable word, kind of like re’nao. It means “terrible, formidable” according to my dictionary. They replied that my Chinese was “lihai.” (I’m hoping here that what they were going for was the “formidable” rather than the “terrible”!). I later stopped for a bottle of water (40 cents, in case you were wondering) and the man asked where I was from. When I replied “Mei Guo (United States),” he said, “People who have been there say it is kind of like tiantang (paradise, heaven).” I replied that we have problems of our own. In Chinese, the word for the United States, Mei Guo, means “beautiful country” and I wonder how literally they take that.

I am actually not always happy to admit being from the U.S. these days, given the lack of popularity of our country overseas, but people are generally kind. A few, lately, have said, “Oh, I thought you looked French.” I’ve been afraid to ask what that means!

Obstacles

I actually ran for five out of seven days in the past week, which is good, because I’ve received word that I am officially entered in the Great Wall Marathon. I’m not sure what the highlight is for me on the verification form I received—it may be the notice that “except free first aid on the Marathon site, we do not cover the cost of transport to hospitals and the ensuing medical treatment there.” Then again, it might be the fact that on marathon day I will have to be at the sponsoring hotel at 2:45 a.m. for transport to the marathon site. I don’t even want to admit that I’ve actually paid a fairly large sum of money for these privileges. It’s a sum close to about two months’ salary for an average Beijinger, and Beijingers earn much more than the average Chinese person.

My runs have been in the Purple Bamboo Park and on the treadmills of the King Gym. The weather here has been unseasonably warm, and so I got outside for some runs over last weekend. The Purple Bamboo Park was crowded, though not with runners. The only other runners I saw were two other foreign women. There was occasional commentary from Chinese in the park, including hearing a little Chinese child saying “Waiguoren dou paobu (The foreigners are all running!)” They probably wondered what we were running away from.

I’ve been reading a lot about “obstacles” for rural women, as in sentences like “Rural women face many obstacles to attain full autonomy.” “Obstacle” or zhang’ai is a good word to use for today’s Chinese lesson, as running in China is often akin to participating in an obstacle course. In fact, that could be the Chinese contribution as a demonstration sport in the Olympics, and they could incorporate other elements of the culture as the obstacles.

So, I think it is time for some reader participation in this blog. If you remember particularly torturous obstacle courses you’ve endured, for instance in junior high school P.E. class (inherently a torturous experience for most of us, I know), feel free to send examples of the obstacles you faced. I will try my hardest to think of the likely Chinese equivalent and post them here.

I’ll start with an easy example. Water obstacles—such as jumping over small pools, etc., would be well-served in our Chinese Obstacle Course by people spitting, and our competitors needing to evade their expectorations.

Creative suggestions welcome!

Magnificent!

I attended my first Chinese wedding today, as an invited guest of another invited guest. I’d say the experience was a cross between “Wedding Crashers” (what else?) and “Lost in Translation.” I think I was the only foreigner there—in a crowd of about 500 or so. The bride was the daughter of a high ranking woman in the military, who has been in charge of the military’s family planning unit. Family planning is omnipresent here, so that even apparently the military needs people to be in charge of it.

Today’s Chinese word is re’nao, which is a word that is very hard to translate into English. It kind of means “noisy,” but in a good sort of way. Chinese people love re’nao, which was in great abundance at this wedding. The bride and groom arrived in a flower-draped Mercedes to lots of firecrackers going off. Then, inside the restaurant, the party started with an m.c. shouting over a microphone and with a familiar tune blasted at full volume. It took me forever to place the song—is it the theme from “Rawhide”? No. “Bonanza”? No again. Wait, I’ve got it, it’s the theme from “The Magnificent Seven,” a tune we were treated to again and again through the proceedings! I don’t really understand why Americans have lacked the imagination to make this song a prominent wedding tradition.

Then, the bride and groom entered the banquet hall, through a floral arch, to a different tune, Sarah Brightman doing “This Love,” which starts with the lyric, “This love…This love is a strange love.” They proceeded to stand on the stage and do all sorts of things—stand in front of a row of sparklers going off, light candles, exchange rings, sip beverages, fill a champagne fountain, etc. Periodically a bubble machine would start up, pouring bubbles all over the happy couple. Later, we ate and listened as various military subordinates to the bride’s mother serenaded the crowd (my favorite: “O sole mio”).

A few wedding photos:

If you look closely, you too will see bubbles.

This indeed is Great Wall wine, with the bride and groom on the label!

One way of hastening “till death do us part”—provide cigarettes on the banquet tables!