Weddings and Funerals

I'm sitting here tonight with two envelopes in front of me. One has a red exterior and is embossed with a double fu character, a dragon, a phoenix and a cheng yu reading bai nian hao he all in gold. The other is long and white with the exception of a small black ink hand-written inscription of my Chinese name in one corner and two stains at either end where the glue has allowed the red color inside to blead through and reveal itself. These two envelopes are opposite ends of the emotional specturm expressed in paper form and resulting from days of happiness and sadness. A few weeks ago the school witnessed a sudden rush of life cycle events, but these two envelopes represent the two events that affected me the most, the wedding of my old chinese teacher and the death of the foreign affiars officer's father.

Weddings in China fill a different niche than their western counterparts, and what I attended at the Jing Yu hotel not long ago was the public face of a Chinese wedding, something a couple saves for until it can be appropriately extravagant. Couples commonly exist in a middle state between dating and wedding after the civil commitment and before putting on the ceremony for the rest of us. Before I knew this I was suprised to hear various teachers refer to someone as having a husband and a boyfriend or a wife and a girlfriend. While extramarital flings aren't the most uncommon thing in the world here, it seemed a bit excessive and my Chinese teacher last year was not a candidate, being just about the sweetest woman you could imagine. Not much taller than five feet, fraily built, and the perfect embodiment of Peter Hessler's description of 'spring onion fingers', Yu Bai Yang and her husband, a teacher at Numbner 6 Middle School a few hours away to the northwest, ended the confusion once and for all on the second of January. Now, whereas a Western wedding can feel like a marathon of speeches, eating, and dancing, Chinese weddings are the hundred meter hurdles of the celebration world. They start with a bang (as do most things when you live in the hometown of fireworks), continue as the bride and groom find their stride making a series of three bows each to their parents, the guests and each other, and then up and over the hurdles of consective toasts at each table. The guests, mere spectators at this track meet who've bought their tickets with presents of cash in red envelopes, bide their time with an immense meal of the most lavish and bizarre dishes the wedding party can come up with until they take their turn in the round of toasts. Just like that, no sooner than you're settling down to seconds of the delicious doggy dish, it's over and the guests are making for the door. On this particular occasion you can throw in a bottle and a half of bai jiu with the vice-headmaster of our school who insisted on sitting with me as opposed to the parents of the bride and groom, and there you have it. A few days later Ms. Yu gave me a red envelope returning a small portion of my present to her as an acknowledgement of recieving the gift and that is one of those now sitting before me.

The other is also an acknowledgement of a gift, but it is its lack of color and decoration that symbolize its meaning. In contrast, literally, to western traditions, the Chinese associate the color white with death. About the same time that fireworks announced the joining of so many happy couples, in a small village in the west of Liuyang a different sound filled the air and dripped from the eaves of the few small houses nearby, the sonourous tones of the suo na, or Chinese funeral horn and its accompanying chorus of wailing mourners. After an extended illness, the father of my foreign affairs officer Ms. Zeng passed away in the cold last days of 2006. Although the mourning will last for several days, the family limits itself to two moments of extreme sorrow, first when the last breath leaves the body and the second days later when relatives, draped in white, bear the casket up the mountain to the burial site. Anything more than this would be too much to take.
For me, and I realize that my stake in the event is immeasurably small, the greatest difficulty was in trying to figure out the proper etiquette in this situation. I was desperately trying to find a balance between wanting to attend the funeral to support someone who's been helpful since my arrival and the knowledge that I couldn't attend without being a distraction given that everything took place in a small countryside town that has probably never seen a foreigner. The answer lay in the traditional gift of diàn jìng, or funeral money given by those who knew the family to help defray the costs of the days long wake. Just as the red envelope beside it, the white envelope before me is an way to say thank you at a time when words might not come easily.

Reminders

There are times, such as a moment sitting in one of the ever more popular Taiwan-style coffee houses sipping "Brazilian" coffee or milk tea with some other foreign teachers, that it becomes possible to forget you're in small-town China. You can, if you choose to, try to insulate yourself from the differences of life here. Some days it's tempting to try to escape the things that grate on you, but watching the way some people react to being here by retreating into the shell of the familiar makes me question why anyone would bother coming at all.

There are also so many moments when it should be clear that this is a really different place, and yet more often than not, those moments pass unmarked by contemplation. At these times, all the little things that were so different, annoying, or exciting for so long are now part of a new normality. We are distracted from some of the most fascinating events of our lives merely because they happen all the time, from some of the most fascinating places because we see them all the time and from some of the most amazing people because they're around all the time and we end up remembering only what is out of the ordinary, for better or for worse. How do we go about making sure that we notice what we should notice?

Reminders are what snap us back to the fact, to the uniqueness of the situation.
Example: Everyday twice a day, without fail the students of Tian Jiabing Senior Experimental Middle School and every other school in China take several minutes to complete a somewhat complicated series of eye exercises that involve rubbing various parts of their faces in various ways. At first I found it bizarre despite the explanation of one of the other teachers that if the students didn't have these exercises, many of them would need glasses. Unfortunately, I've never seen such a high percentage of kids who need glasses in my life so either the eye exercises aren't working or they are working and otherwise every single kid in China would need glasses. Nevertheless, I no longer find any of it note. I bring this up only because yesterday I had one of those reminder moments when I watched my students pass around a single pair of glasses between themselves as they struggled to complete the exercises on the board. I'm not sure why it stood out at the time, but in the second I found myself scribbling a note to myself to remember, it did, and I remembered where I was.

When have all the young'uns gone?

One of the biggest challenges I've found living in this place is the unfortunate lack of a significant peer group. To some extent, everybody must feel this in their first few years after university, a place where you're surrounded by people in approximately the same place in their lives as you. Suddenly (as suddenly as sudden can be when sudden is a few years now) you find yourself working in a place where most of the people around you can't even imagine your life. Most of the teachers (90%) here at school are married . They go home at the end of each day to their family which usually includes their parents, significant other and if they don't have kids, they soon will. Where oh where does a single twenty-something guy fit in? Part of finding a place here has been trying to find the places where other young people spend all their time.
The answer??? Work. In short, if you aren't in school you'd better be toiling away at something or other. Now, since I've been here I've made some friends at a place called Ka Deng Bao. It's where I (and most of my foreign friends) go on a pretty regular basis to get a hair cut or a hair wash. Since hair only grows so fast, it's usually a wash. The only problem here is that these kids work seven days a week from mid-morning until around 10-11 at night with just two days off each month. In short, they really don't have a whole lot of time. This, in conjunction with the fact that they're making about 700 yuan/ month (about $90) makes it relatively rare that we get the chance to hang out much.
All of this is a long introduction to the fact that I'm sitting around happy here at roughly 3:23 in the morning in a friend of a friend's room in town. These past couple of weeks have been a total renaissance in terms of actually having a peer group. A little while ago one of my best friends from the school had some friends start to come back for the upcoming spring festival, and now all of a sudden they're popping out of the woodwork like when you catch the early flight home from Beijing and a couple of strangers show up ready to double team... I guess a bit of the last thing you'd expect, but for the first time since I left the Hound, Cricket and other assorted animal related haunts in Denver it's good to get out most nights indulging in such extavagences as coffee, card games and conversation (chinese conversation for alliteration's sake). So, tonight's a night for whiling away the hours playing pao de kuai for chump change and giving thanks for having finally found some people that, for all their differences (and trust me that when they're speaking dialect, seem huge) really look at the world in a remarkably similar way.

P.S. I'm unblocked.

Calendar Daze

So, while trying to arrange my travel plans here for the upcoming spring festival I've been thinking for the last few days how difficult everything is to schedule here. Not only in knowing which days we'll have our holiday, but just about everything related to time, so here are some time related observations.

1. Almost nobody knows which day it is. Last night I listened to two girls argue whether it was Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Colin though, made the point that it's probably because they do the same thing everyday, so it really doesn't matter to them. Those two girls work 7 days a week, the same hours everyday and have about two days off each month, so I suppose the fact that it was the first day of the weekend to us is really pretty irrelevant. The lucky exceptions to this rule of 'what day is it?' syndrome are teachers and students whose schedule depends on which day of the week it is, although even this is not infallible as my waiban, Ms. Zeng pretty often doesn't know what day it is.

2. Two calendars is a recipe for disaster. Once the day of the week has been determined we have to figure out what the date is. This always has two possible answers, and although most things in China are on the Gregorian calendar, there are a few lunar holdouts such as holidays. This means the vacations come on different days every year. This year's spring festival is almost a month later than last years, thus pushing back the end of this term. However, the school exams are scheduled on the Gregorian calendar which means that this term will be about two months longer that next term for the grade 3's and one month longer for the rest of the school.

3. July 1st version 2.0. Multiple calendars wouldn't be that bad to get your head around if they didn't keep changing. This past year we actually had two Julys (the reason spring festival is so late). My dad made a good observation when he heard this and wondered if everybody born in July had two birthdays this year. If not, how do you decide which day is actually your birthday? One of my friends got in a lot of trouble because he couldn't remember his Chinese girl-friend's birthday because it changed every year. In another example, there were tons of weddings last week and Chinese tend to schedule their weddings for auspicious days, so I asked for an explanation to which one another one of the teachers answered "Oh, that's because there won't be a spring next year." Hmm... Worry all you want about contrasting political systems, I want to know what the Chinese have done with spring and can we please have it back for 2008?