Happy Christmas from China!

It’s Christmas Eve here. I just got back from a big faculty luncheon. Tonight was the annual Christmas show by our college students, and tomorrow I’m busy with other holiday gatherings. And we may have snow tonight.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Solstice or just a quiet time at home with someone you love, or like, or can at least put up with for a few hours. God Jul!

JISHOU, HUNAN — The fall term is coming to a close here. I gave my exams this week, and will spend the next two weeks reading and marking them, so I can return home to see my offspring with a clear conscience.

Before exams, I decided to give my students — and me — a break, and show them a movie. Of course, it had to have some educational value.

Believe it or not, Christmas, at least among our students, is a big thing here in China. They learn about the holiday as part of their English lessons in middle school, but still have only a hazy idea of what it is all about. Chinese textbook authors condense Christmas traditions from the USA, Europe and the UK into a mishmosh of ideas that serve only to confuse, not inform.

Students ask me about how we celebrate Christmas in the USA, and I give them a pretty generic description, based on my own memories of 50-odd previous Christmases. But descriptions, particularly for ESL students, do not really convey the spirit of the holiday. So, I chose A Christmas Carol as the movie I would show all my classes.

Though I did not tell my students, reading or watching A Christmas Carol is one of my own personal Christmas traditions. Frankly, I am a sap for this story. No matter how many times I read the novella or see a movie version, I never tire of it.

There are a bazillion versions of Dickens’ classic, but the one I screened was the TNT TV movie from 1999, starring Patrick Stewart. Of all the versions I have seen, this one is my second favorite, after the 1951 version starring Alistair Sim. I have not seen the Jim Carrey version recently shown in the US theaters, but I suspect it has no chance of dislodging the ones I have just mentioned from the top of my list.

One of my students told me he had seen as a middle school student a cartoon version produced in China. Instead of the three Spirits and Marley’s ghost, a Father Christmas figure appears in Scrooge’s home to show him the meaning of Christmas. Lame. Anyway, John (his English name is John Connor) told me he much preferred the version I showed.

Although the story is set in London of the 1840s, Dickens’ story captures the spirit of Christmas better than any textbook explanation, without being overtly religious. Since it also omits Christmas trees and Santa Claus, I could also use to show how Christmas traditions have changed in the 166 years since Dickens published it.

One concern I had, which was corroborated by some students’ remarks afterward, was how much of the movie the students could actually understand. The longer dialogues are pretty hard to follow for a non-native speaker, but I hoped that the visual aspects would help in their comprehension.

It turned out I was right. They got the gist of the story, and perhaps most of them got a better idea of why Christmas is such a Big Thing in the West.

One of my freshman composition students, Gloria Zhu, wrote these comments in her diary. She definitely got it.

… In fact, [Scrooge] was influenced by the people who were kind, open-hearted, optimistic and hardworking around him.

From this film, I was deeply moved by the true meaning of love. Love is not a kind of occupation. Love means giving. Give love, for in giving it you will find the power in life along with joy, happiness, patience and understanding. Anger and depression can be countered by love and hope.

I will note that she wrote this entry before we discussed the movie the week after I showed it.

After a week of screening A Christmas Carol — as much as I love it — I was ready to get back to work. I had two weeks remaining to wrap things up, so would have enough time to read my written exams before I leave for visit to the USA.

My oral English students, as part of their final examinations, had to meet with me two at a time for a 15-minute conversation. Although I told them they did not have to prepare for our sessions, they of course did. Chinese students hate surprises. Years of fairly traditional (aka rigid) schooling have given them no experience in impromptu speaking. To alleviate some of their panic, I gave them some idea of what I might ask them. Since one of the units we had covered this fall was about visiting places, I told them one possible topic of conversation would be the place they would most like to visit.

Now, my students know I am originally from the New York metro area. They also know I lived in South Africa for a year, and that my daughter has lived in France. Guess which places my students said they would most like to visit.

Not only that, many of them used the same phrases, like “New York is a shopping heaven,” which tells me they either compared notes or spent hours memorizing the textbook. Whatever. Mostly, I wanted to engage them, if only briefly, in a short conversation to gauge their vocabulary, comprehension, pronunciation and fluency. It’s easy to pull the over-prepared student out of his or her “comfort zone” by changing the subject.

[I did throw some students a curve ball, by asking them to describe their favorite movie or TV show, topics that are in the textbook but in later chapters. I am happy to say most handled it pretty well. For the most part, their spoken English skills are pretty good, but they have little confidence in them.]

I discovered in our conversations that they all want to travel. No, they yearn to travel. They ache to travel. TV, movies and the Internet have brought the wider world to even the smallest village of Hunan. But many of these college students have never been anywhere outside their own village before coming to Jishou — an admittedly podunk city — to attend university. Think about that fact for a while. It explains a lot of the acute homesickness and naivete the freshmen have during their first term.

Yet, many of these village kids want to see the ocean, Beijing, Shanghai, Tibet, Australia, the UK, the USA, Singapore, Korea, Japan, even Taiwan. They have seen the photos and videos, talked to people who have gone there, but circumstances (money for most of them, and necessary visas for all of them) largely make it almost impossible to them to travel very far from home.

Two students asked me if I could bring any students with me when I visit the USA later this month. I said I really wanted to, but getting the necessary paperwork requires a lot of time and money. I can come and go from China as my budget and time permit. Most Chinese can’t.

Sigh. Field trips in the USA are a hell of a lot simpler.

If I had a magic wand (or a portkey, or some flue powder), I would love to whisk all 330 of our college’s students (plus the faculty, of course) away to see the USA firsthand. Unfortunately, it would take magic, or a very generous educational foundation grant, to bring my students anywhere abroad. The costs of traveling are too high for their families to fund. But my fertile imagination is toying with the idea of organizing a summer trip to Beijing for them. A fair number have never been to their nation’s capital city, while I have been there twice already. It hardly seems fair. I don’t know whether I can pull it off, or how many could actually go, but bringing some of my students into part of the wider world would be the best education I could give them.

Our college had planned to have a big Christmas party/performance like we did last year, but fears of spreading H1N1 scotched that idea. Instead, each class (we have nine groups of 27-40 students each that we call classes) was to arrange for its own Christmas party. While disappointing, the lack of a college-wide Christmas event freed up a lot of time for all of us planning on performing.

Last year, the preparations for the big gala pretty sucked away any free time I had, so I was not able to plan any Christmas event of my own device. This year, though, I decided to invite people to my home for a dinner. A few friends had already offered to cook for us, so all I needed to do was to clean up the apartment and get people there.

But first, there were some Christmas Eve events. One of our classes, Sophomore Business English G2, held their party in the morning. They had four hotplates going at the same time, cooking up 火锅 huoguo (hotpot). Previously, they had decorated their classroom with three Christmas trees, snowflakes on the windows, balloons and Christmas lights (spelling out “Merry Christmas”). All the students wore Santa hats. I am not sure whether David, their oral Engish teacher, was supplied a hat. If he was, he opted not to wear it. All the faculty were invited, so between my classes I visited the four hotpots to sample their wares.

This class should write a cookbook. It could sell, I think.

At lunch, the university held a luncheon for the foreign teachers and postgraduate students, all seven of us. Besides David and I, there were Matt and Jamey, postgrads from Oklahoma, Grisha and Anya, piano teachers from Ukraine, and their son, Nik. Joining us were a few faculty from our college, the deans of the music and international exchange college, and some university officials. We ate at the Qinzhao Hotel, which is on campus and serves traditional local dishes. Naturally, baijiu was supplied and drunk, making teaching my afternoon classes particularly challenging.

The enormous meal at lunch meant I had no appetite for dinner, so after a light snack, I went to Christmas party #2, organized by the sophomore English Education class Z2. Instead of cooking, they put on their own show, with dancers, singers, a magician and karaoke. Here, I sang, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which some students had no idea was an American song.

Friday was Christmas Day, and I am entitled to a day off, but I chose to meet some of my oral English students to give them their final exams in the morning. At 10, I repaired to my home to clean up for the afternoon’s party. Three students (Helen, Gina and Ailsa) offered to help me, so we four made the place presentable in pretty short order.

Now, my “head cook” called me in the morning and told me (I swear she did, honest!) that she would bring both the meat and an extra cookpan, but could not arrive until after 2:30. No problem. I asked two other guests to bring the vegetables, and they arrived around 3 with veggies and a bottle of rice wine (baijiu) from Guilin. I neglected to go to the supermarket, because I had assumed earlier that morning that some people would bring lunch food, and others dinner food. Nope. Never assume anything, they say.

The head cook finally arrived around 4, because she had had a PE exam that afternoon. But, she came with no meat or cookpan. She swears she had told me she couldn’t possibly have brought either, because she had no time, and she had told me that in the morning.

This, boys and girls, is why foreigners need to learn Chinese, and Chinese need to learn English.

So, we had lots of veggies and no meat, and no hotpot is complete without meat. (Sort of like, “How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”) So, four of the guests volunteered to run to the market to buy meat and some ready-to-eat snacks, while the rest of us prepared the veggies and watched TV.

To make a long story short, all 15 of us worked it all out and had a great meal together, washed down with Coke, OJ, red wine and/or baijiu.

After this party broke up around 6:30, a few of us were invited to another dinner party downtown. This arrangement goes sort of like this: one of my friends is Shelldy, a music college senior; her guzheng and English student is Li, a sales rep for a local tobacco company; Li is friends with Miss Xiang, the manager of the Dolphin Coffee Bar and Western Restaurant; Miss Xiang invited me, Shelldy and some of our friends to dinner that night.

Got it? Good.

Anyway, I had a second dinner, a passably good steak (though Houcaller in Changsha does a better job of it) and some reasonably good coffee brewed with a fascinating contraption heated with an alcohol burner.

Li, Shelldy and the coffee brewer

So, it is now Dec. 26th. I was invited to the wedding luncheon for Anna Zhang, who works in the Foreign Affairs Office. I improved my local street creds by arriving with 红包 hong bao (lucky money) in the appropriate red envelope enblazoned with the double-lucky character 富富 (fu-fu)for marriages.

Chinese wedding customs are different from American ones. Here, couples get married by applying at the government offices and signing a few forms. They may, depending on their families’ traditions and desires, have a ceremony for family and close friends to attend. Some have two ceremonies, if bride and groom hail from different places. Then, there will be a luncheon or dinner for colleagues and not-so-close friends to attend. Everyone is expected to bring hong bao, and not gifts. (In the bigger cities, there are now wedding registries at the malls, but this custom has not yet caught on in the interior.)

Practically speaking, hong bao is to offset the costs of holding the banquets and other ceremonies. At Anna’s shinding, we handed our hong bao to a table of friends, who recorded the givers’ names and counted the money given. (Some couples may not have enough money beforehand to pay the caterer, so knowing how much “loot” they have taken in alleviates worry and despair.)

I asked three people how much money I should give, and checked online as well. One friend from Jishou said 200, a Shanghai website said 500 and another friend said use my own judgment. I opted for 300, so I wouldn’t seem too cheap but also not too extravagant. I don’t know neither bride nor groom very well.

The happy couple pose with the foreign teachers

My friend Nora wanted to cook that afternoon, so I invited a smaller group of student friends over for dinner, including two of my cleanup crew who could not stay for dinner the day before. There were eight of us this time. After dinner, Nora wanted to visit a girl she knows who lives at the Xiangxi Welfare Home — the local orphanage/old folks home — because it was the girl’s 14th birthday.

Yong Fu has cerebral palsy and has been confined to a wheelchair most of her life. She has no parents, either because they died or because they gave her up, I am not sure. Originally from Zhangjiajie, she knows Nora and Jack, one of my students, pretty well. Yong Fu was apparently adopted by an American couple for a while, but her needs exceeded their ability to meet them, so she came back to China to the Xiangxi Welfare Home. Jack had bought a birthday cake, and Nora was going to visit Yong Fu, too.

Six of us decided to join them,and we were met by three other students, Grace, Lily and Cindy, freshmen from my college. (The College of International Exchange has basically adopted the welfare home as a “sister institution.” Several of our students visit there regularly.)

Although it was well past 8 pm, the staff at the welfare home allowed to us to quietly visit (since the other kids were asleep) Yong Fu in her room. It is spare, but roomy, with two wardrobes and a private bathroom. She has a bed by a double window, a desk and a dresser, and a few educational posters on the walls to learn Chinese characters (I could use a few myself). The facility itself is spotlessly clean, and Yong Fu at least seems very happy, all things considered.

After some greetings — with a dozen people they take a while — we unboxed the cake, sang the birthday song, and asked Yong Fu what size piece she wanted. To our surprise, she said she only wanted a tiny bit, because she wanted to share the cake with the other children in the orphanage. (Looking at some photos in the lobby, I reckoned that Yong Fu is the oldest child there.) Nora wanted Yong Fu to call Nora’s mom in Zhangjiajie — her mom also knows Yong Fu — so we waited for the two to talk for awhile.

We all pose with Yong Fu

[Grace has a depth that I didn't suspect. At lunch the next day, I learned from Grace that she chose not to sit for the college entrance exam as a high school student, thinking she could make her way without a college education. She succeeded to some extent, becoming the manager of a floral shop for three years in her hometown of Huaihua, but at the relatively advanced age of 21 decided to take the college entrance exam. Grace said she realized finally that she needed a college degree, especially as a young woman; otherwise, people meeting her might think she is not very smart.]

At this point, we left, hailed three cabs and headed home. I was pretty exhausted physically at this point, and my living room and kitchen were a mess. We had left in a hurry to visit Yong Fu. Gloria and Gina, both freshmen, sent me messages apologizing for leaving my home in such a state, but I told both that Yong Fu’s situation was far worse than mine. So, a little mess left for me to straighten up was no big deal. 没问题 meiwenti — It doesn’t matter.

So, that was how my second Christmas in China went. I hope yours (assuming you celebrate it) was as fun, exciting and fulfilling. If not, there’s always next year.

Predictably, the outage happened while I was out of town and for the most part away from the World Wide Web. So, I had no idea anything was wrong until my buddy notified me by email. I sent a message to Planet Earth Hosting, and 24 hours later, the site was up, good as new.

The occasion for my trip out of town was the big car show in Changsha. Two of my former students were going — one to shop and one to wish — and asked me to join them.

So, Saturday morning I took the coach to Changsha. Also on board was a postgrad friend of mine and her friend. They were going to Changsha to shop and (for one of them) to sit for a qualifications exam. To my delight, the bus company has changed its normal stop — next to a swanky hotel — to a place practically next door to my usual — non-swanky — hotel. It makes catching the return bus a breeze now.

That Saturday, I shopping for some wee Christmas gifties with Tina, one of my former students from Jishou U. Her boyfriend was busy at work, and she was bored, so she squired me around the shopping district to find what I wanted. Meanwhile, she bought some stuff, too.

Maybe this kind of thing is available in the States. If it is, I missed it. So, excuse my ignorance. Here, there are shops where cell phone users can bling their phones with glitter, rhinestones and other such sparkly whatnot. After I got what I needed, we went to a little shop where a woman painstakingly glues bling on cell phones, computers and anything else with a hard, shiny surface. It took her about 45 minutes to customize Tina’s phone around the camera lens.

And yes, I waited patiently in the shop until it was finished. It’s too easy to get lost in some of those shopping malls in Changsha. And, by the way, they have Christmas shopping sales in China, too.

Tina then had to join her boyfriend for dinner, so I dumped my purchases in my room and headed for Carrefour (two blocks east) to buy some badly needed Western food items: spaghetti sauce, tomato paste and pasta, plus some snacks for the weekend.

Sunday morning, my other former student in Changsha, Isabella, called me. We met at her school, Hunan Normal U, and with her cousin took a circuitous bus ride to the car show north of the downtown.

Pretty girls and cars = car show

The last time I was a car show — or at least one that I can remember — was the 1971 International Car Show in Manhattan. My dad and I went, to ogle at the beautiful …. um … cars … yeah, that was it. That show had some concept cars as spice up the pantheon of production models. The Changsha event, while somewhat less glamorous, had Honda’s robot, Asimo, to add some pizzazz.

(I did not actually see Asimo there. The Honda exhibit was surrounded by a crowd at least eight people deep. I could only see the big TV screen showing a movie about Asimo.)

We have read about China’s new wealthy class of citizens, but seeing shiny new Jaguars, Porsches, Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Ferraris — some with “Sold” signs in the windows — brings the point home more distinctly. No car dealer is going to haul prize merchandise to an exposition center for five days without the expectation of selling at least some of them.

I did not drive it home.

Isabella, her cuz and I stayed just a couple of hours. We were all just window shopping and I had a bus to catch at 3. Tina and her beau stayed to consider which auto they might eventually buy, perhaps with their wedding money next year. Isabella’s cousin wanted to eat Western food, so I suggested Houcaller — a steak place — which I knew was somewhere near my hotel. They got T-bones and I got sirloin plates, for about ¥40 apiece (about $6 — yeah, Americans, cry your eyes out).

Fortified with this filling meal, I boarded the bus for a mercifully uneventful five-hour ride home. The on-board movies were (a pirated copy of) of 2012 and a (probably also pirated) copycat film from Thailand, 2022: The Great Tsunami. These two completed a weekend of disaster movies for me. I’ll blog about that later.

All the colleges here at Jishou University hold some kind of end-of-term/welcome-the-new-year party, reminiscent of those old movies where they say, “Hey, let’s put on a show!” Members of the colleges sing, dance, act in skits, or play instruments, and the audience plays some silly games. (I joined in on one game a week ago. Blindfolded, with a partner riding piggyback and giving directions, I had to stomp on balloons to burst them. We won a 2-liter of Coke.)

The College of International Exchange is the only one that puts on a Christmas-themed performance, scheduled suitably for Dec. 24. Our students spent weeks rehearsing their acts, while we faculty managed to cram our practice time into a few afternoons. Being a white-haired, bearded fellow, I was asked to play Father Christmas, and students also pressured me to sing a song. So I was really busy that night.

I discovered that our students are multi-talented, with considerable performing chops. We gave the College of Music and Dance a run for its money, with our dancers, singers, instrumentalists and amateur actors. We faculty managed to pull off dancing a waltz to the tune of “Edelweiss,” to the cheers of the audience, and I managed not to freeze on stage to sing “I Wonder as I Wander” and “The Christmas Song” — a cappella — passably well.

I had been given two cakes for Christmas, so after the extravaganza and the requisite one-gazillion photos, I invited some English Corner friends to help me eat them. Our three Ukrainian exchange students, who live above me and across the hall, also shared in the tasty treats. Harry, a freshman who played another Father Christmas, was starving and had takeout but no rice to eat. Shelldy and I prepared the rice, so by the time we three were alone, the rice was cooked.

Harry had skipped lunch and dinner to help manage the Christmas play, so he was famished. Then Shelldy dove into the food, and after watching her eat with gusto, finally I did, too. (Yeah, I know, we were eating Chinese takeout for Christmas Eve dinner at 10:30 pm … in China. It just seems so appropriate.)

The next day, I had to give a final examination to my senior English majors. China does not stop for Christmas Day. With that done, all I needed to do was wait for my postgraduate friends to pick me up for Christmas dinner. So I took a well-deserved nap.

We went to a downtown restaurant that serves local food in a traditional setting. The party included my postgrad friends, Smile and Rain, Rain’s colleagues at the cultural affairs office, and two other postgrads. We had a great dinner, lubricated somewhat with the local firewater.

One of Rain’s colleagues is Miao, a local ethnic minority. It is their custom, when dining with an honored guest, to drain their cup when toasting, even if the guest just takes a sip. Trouble is, he had already started drinking rice wine before dinner, so he was feeling pretty good after three cups.

Afterward, we all adjourned to a karaoke place, where we drank beer and ate even more food. More friends came, and we spent the evening dancing and singing. Emboldened by too much beer, I asked one of my dancing partners to dinner the following night.

On Friday morning, I hauled my sorry ass out of bed to video-conference with my kids using Skype. They were all in one place for once, so we spent more than an hour chatting. Afterward, I had to navigate the delicate waters of protocol, since I had invited my new friend to our college faculty dinner without first asking if I could bring a guest. Fortunately, the dean was amenable, so that night I had another terrific meal amply lubricated with local firewater. (I ate turtle for the first time. Yeah, it tastes just like … alligator.)

On Saturday morning, my friend, former student and cooking instructor, Kasurly, came over to help me cook lunch for us and her seven roommates. The two of us whipped up a six-dish luncheon in no time flat using a saucepan, a wok and a microwave. I am still amazed. I feel like a cross between Martin Yan and MacGuyver. (We’re doing it again on New Year’s Eve; the girls want to watch a five-hour, end-of-the-year concert bash on TV. I am providing the sparkling wine for the New Year’s toast.)

That evening, I sang once more in the English Club performance/party, participated in another silly game (stand back-to-back and pop a balloon) and danced in the Chinese version of the Bunny Hop (left, left, right, right, forward, turnaround, hop, hop, hop). [I will have some thoughts about these games in a later post.]

But, wait, there’s more! At 9 am Sunday, the new officers of the English Club invited me and David, the other English teacher, to lunch at another local eatery, where we dispensed with the local firewater and just drank beer and tea. On the way back home, I turned down a dinner invitation for that evening so I could spend the rest of the day marking compositions. I do have to work once in a while!

That was my first Christmas in China, and I’ve got to say, it was one of the best in my life.

I had a great Christmas Eve with friends, students and colleagues today, and I hope yours are all just as wonderful.

圣诞快乐 to all! Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!