bacon in the windows

We spent Chinese New Years Eve seeing who was around. Popular wisdom holds that most of China's population spends some portion of this multi-week holiday stretching the limits of the country’s transportation system, so it only made sense to see who decided to stay behind. 

It turns out we weren't the only ones left in Chengdu. There were also a lot of people who really like fireworks, some chickens not long for this world, and a lady running errands in an outfit that's best quality can only be comfort.

Walking around the neighborhood felt very festive. Red lanterns are hanging in front of every apartment building, including ours. And if your home doesn’t have its lanterns yet you can find them at the grocery store. 

You can also find the Year of the Dragon decorations that are plastered everywhere. 

A lot of shops also have hand-written signs telling you when they’ll be reopening after the holiday, some more carefully scripted than others.

There are orange tents filled to the gills with fireworks on most high-traffic corners. 

These are government sanctioned and manned by multi-generational families who nap on cots behind the merchandise. You can start with small items like sparklers and go as large as four-foot tall boxes packed with industrial strength pyrotechnics.

Each tent has at least one bucket of water and a fire extinguisher out front, so as long as no cars go careening off the road and into the tents, we're all safe and sound. This could be why one of us (guess which one) had to up the ante by purchasing his own batch of fireworks to set off later.

While we were out we also bought a bag of tiny mandarin oranges and a green pepper for Shi-Wen’s turkey chili. This didn’t come from a firework tent, but rather from a fruit shop where I got nipped on the shoe by a small dog. No one else seemed to notice, including the little girl eating oranges out front.

Speaking of food on the street, while walking around we also caught a few glimpses of "la rou" 腊肉 drying in apartment windows, like in the lower right below. "La rou" is cured meat – like bacon – and in Chinese the word for cured meat sounds a lot like the word for the last month of the lunar calendar (i.e. December). This play on words means that home-cured meat has long been eaten in Southern China to celebrate the new year. 

Regardless of this city's magical meat-curing climate I’m still not too keen on eating pork that's been hanging in a neighbor’s window for the last month. Or better yet, off their balcony. (And to think, before I got to Chengdu I thought those racks were for laundry.)

drunk on fireworks

Early Sunday evening – aka Chinese New Year’s Eve – Chengdu’s streets were nearly deserted. It was eerily quiet and there was an overwhelming sense that something was coming. Then hour by hour, with the deepening darkness, the sky got brighter and brighter.

It happened in street intersections and in front of apartment buildings. Guys would ferry large boxes into the middle of the street, then set them down. They’d stand there for a minute or two looking for the fuse, and once they’d found it you would see a quick flame and then they'd be hightailing it away from the box as fast as they could because in a few seconds the box was shooting fire into the sky. And with the fire came the shrieking and the booming and the thumps of the pieces that fall from the sky after something explodes.

For some of these bursts we were standing close. And by close I mean not more than twenty feet away from the box. So close that instead of hearing the explosions, you felt them compress all of the air around you and throw it into your eardrums with a thud.

There was just one time when a firework didn’t rise as high into the sky as it should have before it exploded. This was when Shi-wen yelled, “Watch out!” and the giant sparks were coming towards us rather than lighting up the sky. I’ve never been that close to fireworks before and it was thrilling and shocking because it felt so wild. Only when pieces of the sky fell onto my head did it feel like I might be standing too close.

For hours the streets were on fire but the only time I was scared was when some kids were lighting firecrackers without paying any attention to the people around them. Funny how a kid playing with matches is scarier than a city full of adults using them to light giant fireworks. And when I say giant fireworks, I mean the kind that large American cities use for their Fourth of July extravaganzas. But in China you can buy these on street corners and then set them off as police cars roll past. It’s definitely different here.

As we were watching fireworks that were a little too close we started talking with a Chinese guy who smelled like liquor. He was thrilled that we could understand each other and told us all sorts of things. He told us how when Chinese people look at North Korea it reminds them of the way China was several decades ago. He told us how you must support the Chinese government now because good things may happen later. And he said that the American President has a hard time doing his job because in the face of upcoming elections he has to please everyone. He noted, with zero irony, that the plans and decisions of Chinese leaders are not hampered by these kinds of concerns.

His views were different – in the same way that our fireworks laws are different – but the conversation still reminded us of how much we are the same. This is because the theme he kept returning to, the one thing he kept saying over and over, was that whatever problems and difficulties there might be between America and China, that these problems are between our two governments. Because the people, the Chinese people and the American people, like you and me, he said… the people of these two countries are friends and we understand each other and get along. Just like us. Look how we understand each other.

We were standing in a doorway as we talked to this guy because standing in the doorway felt a little safer. But even a doorway wouldn’t be safe enough if the fireworks misfired towards the other side of the street. This is because on that side of the street, like on every street corner in Chengdu, there was an orange tent filled to the roof with fireworks. The tent was the source of the boxes that were being lugged into the intersection. But don’t worry, there are safety precautions: each tent has at least one bucket of water and a fire extinguisher out front.

At first we had wandered the streets watching whatever showed up in the sky, but as it got closer to midnight we moved to a friend’s roof and watched the start of an all-out assault. Initially there were a few fireworks here and there, but then suddenly it looked like every corner was exploding and it sounded like the whole sky was erupting. It was magical. Insane and scary and magical.

We watched an hour of this storm. Watched how when one corner of town slowed, the other picked up the slack. It just kept thundering as the smoke of a million small fires smothered the city. The haze made the buildings look eerie and it intensified the light. The sidewalks and streets glowed like a midnight fairy tale, except that it was after midnight and it was also now a new year.

And in the wake of all the magic, as the booms and shrieks grew less and less frequent, the street cleaners came out to cart away the boxes that had carried all of this excitement. Every intersection had them, and in the places with the biggest bombardments whole lengths of street were littered with them.

As they broke down the boxes, the city got a little quieter. Except that the fireworks never really stopped, they just slowed. As I write this, two days later, there are still explosions and pops and showers of fire falling through the sky. And I’m still running to the window to watch them.

Happy Year of the Dragon!

bright (and belated) christmas

We wore winter coats at Christmas Eve dinner and would have kept our gloves on too if they were at all compatible with chopsticks. The entire restaurant looked ready for a winter outing, except that instead of heading out to build a snowman we were eating a meal.

That’s winter in Chengdu for you – the weather isn’t just an outdoors thing. Because of the one-two punch of appreciating the healthy properties of “fresh” air while also believing that heating is detrimental to your health, people here leave their doors and windows open. Personally, I think having your extremities go numb while sitting in the living room is bad for your health, but don’t tell that to our neighbors. In spite of temps in the low 40s they have their doors and windows open. They also have animal carcasses hanging on their laundry lines but that appears unrelated to the season.

Opening doors and windows doesn’t waste energy or inflate heating bills because people here just don’t use heat. I talked to a university student who told me that university dorms in Chengdu are all without heating, including hers. In the north, where it gets even colder, people have long depended on radiators to stay warm, but in the south they are very limited. She told me that she is allowed to use a space heater in her room during the day but at night it must be turned off. The solution: sleeping under three quilts and lots of clothes.

This makes it easy to understand why people in Chengdu wear the same clothes inside as they do out of doors. If you dress for an afternoon of sledding, but sit down to watch TV instead, then having the windows open to the January breeze just might work.

Mufflers, earmuffs and sleeveless mittens are also living a long, happy life in China and I see at least one person a day studiously clip-clapping away on their office keyboard in fingerless gloves.  Of course not everyone wears head-to-toe winter gear. There are women who run around in heels and short skirts. But before you attribute this to diehard elegance I offer up the following anecdote, which also serves as a reminder that my Christmas in Chengdu is just another day in China.

While we were walking to the restaurant on Christmas Eve, a well-dressed woman in a skirt and heels whizzed past on a motor scooter with a similarly well-dressed friend sitting on the back. They were moving at a good clip when they passed, and as they did the driver huskily worked up some phlegm  and spit it off to the side. As she did, her passenger ducked behind her and then returned to chatting as if nothing had happened.

You get that a lot here. Both the spitting and the seeing things that make you rack your brain for any thought you’d ever previously given to something like that happening. Usually, there are none. For example: eating clavicles. Never thought of that before, but after seeing this sign on the way home from dinner I thought about it for at least five minutes.

And an earlier Christmas Eve example: while we were eating dinner a man walked into the restaurant holding a pair of very worn slippers. He wasn’t there to eat. Instead, he was looking for anyone who might want to have their shoes shined while they ate. Surprisingly, he found a woman who was more than happy to let him take her high-heeled ski boots outside and shine them. As he worked, she wore his frazzled slippers and continued on with her meal.

This December I didn’t meet any locals who celebrated a religious Christmas, but there were a lot of businesses that celebrated their own versions of Christmas. Department stores hung Christmas lights at their entrances, karaoke places put up Christmas trees with Budweiser ornaments, and some of the smaller Mom and Pop shops earnestly tried to capture the spirit of the season but instead ended up writing things like “menny chismas” on their windows instead. No complaints here… in southwestern China anything remotely resembling Christmas décor is good enough for me.

Apparently, young people have also started celebrating the holiday. We’ve heard that they go out for meals with friends, hit the bars afterwards, and then close out the night by running around public squares hitting each other with inflatable sticks. This practice had become so popular that the same university student whose dorm room goes unheated told me that her school now forbids students from participating in these sorts of celebrations as injuries have increased over the years.

Aside from hitting strangers with inflatable sticks, Christmas in Chengdu looks a lot like Christmas in Chicago. This is mainly because we don’t go anywhere on Christmas Day. Instead we sit by our tree opening presents, eating heaps of teeth-rotting candy before breakfast, and listening to so much Christmas music that Shi-wen’s head nearly explodes.

This year China also gave us a gift. It made my eyes well up because the gift was a bright blue sky that burned my eyes to look at it. Chengdu’s never-ending parade of grey rainy days has turned us both into cave people who can see in the dark, but on Christmas day we had blue in the sky and shadows on the ground. There was also a woman in two-piece patterned fleece pajamas walking around the neighborhood. But I digress.

Even though our pajama-clad neighbors have almost certainly never sent a letter to the North Pole, I'm pretty sure Santa came to Chengdu anyway. Most nights the click-clacking of mahjiang tiles, the quick-fire bursts of unintelligible Chinese chatter, and the sounds of several people an hour hacking up a lung fight their way into our living room. But on Christmas Eve the mahjiang club’s windows were unexpectedly dark and the clatter was gone. 

For once it was quiet in Chengdu. And for me, this moment was as much proof that Santa exists as anything.

that last thursday in november

Thanksgiving is a smell. It’s a turkey warmth that creeps out from the kitchen, wanders through the dining room and then drifts up the stairs. It transforms a Thursday afternoon into something more and in our experience it works everywhere. Even in China. Although in China the “American Turkey” that's key to the whole transformation is going to cost you. Something in the neighborhood of $50 for a 14 pounder.

We may have been the only ones on our block watching a turkey transform into a celebration, and our Stovetop stuffing may have come with us in our suitcases back in July, but the day still felt special. It’s also hard to value your family more than when you are so far away that wishing them a Happy Thanksgiving means calling the next day. When I called Chicago the festivities were just beginning, whereas our toasts made in Chengdu to happiness and health, to our adventures and our comforts, and to our families and our friends, were long gone.

So much focus on luck and good fortune ran head-long into my Chinese teacher’s descriptions of growing up in 1960’s China. The country had nothing to eat. Food became anything a body could tolerate so she’d bulked out a haphazard diet with the grasses and leaves her mother had taught her were safe. Today’s most basic foodstuffs were so scarce that kids had raced each other for a single wild strawberry – tiny as a fingernail and cheery red – that popped to life in the schoolyard.

She says today’s young people don’t understand what it was like here before. And we both know that I don’t either. It’s been a while since gaunt figures walking along the side of the road coming to a stop, collapsing, and never getting up was considered run-of-the-mill. Thankfully.

I'm accustomed to focusing on the goodnesses I have collected along my way… the small lucks and big loves that define good fortune. But a glimpse into the list of unfairnesses that have thrashed other people’s lives makes me doubly appreciate my own normal.

I know that’s what everyone says. But we say it because it’s true.

Oh, the irony – Nanjing

Nanjing’s airport knows how to make a lady feel special. When you land there, rather than being dumped unceremoniously from your plane onto the tarmac – where you’d then have to catch a bus to your gate – you actually step directly into an airport. After making it through a domestic flight in China (where fellow passengers begin rummaging around in the overhead bins at about the same time the wheels touch ground) this is no small luxury.

Going straight from the plane into the airport also gave us a few extra minutes of clean air, which is nice because Nanjing seems to live in a glowing fog. And the higher you go, the brighter and more numbing the fog gets. From our 58^th floor hotel room, the ground below looked out of focus and diffused. If you didn’t look out the window you might be able to pretend that you were at some anonymous coast, enveloped by a rolling, misty fog. But a single glance outside and you knew there was no sea and there was no shore. There were just the invisible factories pumping out their industrial clouds.

But Nanjing (南京) is an important place and well worth visiting regardless of air quality issues. Nanjing literally means “Southern Capital” and it was first named the capital for all of China in 1368 by the Ming Dynasty. And after the Qing Dynasty was overthrown in 1911, Nanjing was the provisional capital for the new Republic of China with Sun Yatsen as its first President. Chiang Kai-shek also governed from Nanjing before the city's 1949 “liberation” by the Communists, who then moved the capital to Bejing, while Chiang’s Guomindang fled to Taiwan. It was fascinating to visit the sites where these men led China towards a modern history they couldn’t have envisioned. And it was equally fascinating to see Chinese tourists walking through these spaces.

We appreciated the irony of flying north to reach the “Southern Capital” but we were a little less enthusiastic about the irony in eating Japanese ramen our first night there. We were tired and bleary eyed and only midway through our late evening meal did we make the connection between the cuisine and the memorial hall we would visit the next day. Nanjing was the site of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre (also known as The Rape of Nanjing) when Japanese troops killed over 300,000 residents and raped more than 20,000 women after invading the city. The memorial hall is extremely moving and its English language signage is measured in its presentation of a horrific series of events. The only unsuccessful aspect of the visit was our being culled from the crowd based on our looks and made to log our citizenship in a small notebook off to the side of the main entrance. There was no introduction and no invitation – a guard pointed at us and then pointed towards a notebook. Some might find irony in this as well.

We crammed a lot of sightseeing into one day and after walking through the Presidential Palace and grounds, exploring the 14^th century Ming Palace ruins, cresting 600 year old city walls, eating a lunch of random pastries from the Commune Café, and experiencing the emotionally heavy memorial hall, we were exhausted and ready to sit down to a good meal. Our only other break in the day had come via a brief and surreal visit to Starbucks. They had the red holiday cups and the Christmas music, but they also had a sign in the bathroom saying: “For your safety please do not squat on the toilet seat.”

Nanjing is near Shanghai and like that city is known for its soup dumplings. These, in turn, are notorious for being all about the molten broth inside – making them both terribly difficult to eat and yet something that must be eaten immediately to be properly enjoyed. So for our dinner we bumbled our way through two kinds of lava-filled dumplings, one bursting with a salty and savory crab stew and another that was little more than a quivering soup holder. Both varieties suffered moderate to severe losses as we used our chopsticks to prod, position, and pivot the fragile orbs in the general direction of our mouths. Delivering all of the broth to its intended destination may not have happened (dumpling skin is more delicate than it looks) but the fact that we emerged from the meal burn-free made it an unqualified success.

Another success was finding a street that the concierge’s directions had clearly meant for us to avoid. It was slender and vivid and filled with the narratives of real life. Friends played pool in the street and children slept in the cramped spaces behind storefronts. Curtains fluttered through open doors revealing skimpily-clad women waiting behind, and the noise of mah zhong clattered from tables set out in smoky rooms.

Visiting Nanjing was also a reminder that this country is one big time zone. We’re so used to waking up in the dark of southwestern Chengdu, that opening the curtains to a bright (yet still early) Nanjing morning was an unexpected pleasure.

These simple differences have a way of showcasing how much your world has changed more than any national landmark or presidential palace ever could. It’s because these are the markers you grow used to over time… the way the world looks from your bedroom window, the sense you gain for telling time based on where the sun hits the wall…  these are the rhythms of days and weeks and months, and with enough time they accrue into a life. Or at least a few years in China.  

吃辣的吗？(Do you eat spicy food?) – Hangzhou

It took traveling across China for me to realize that without any effort on my part I have acquired a Chinese geographic pedigree. My life here may be temporary, and my Chinese spotty, but when I tell people that I live in Chengdu their eyes light up. I have given them something that needs no explanation. It’s a recognizable background they can wrap around me and all of my foreignness. Being “from” Sichuan (the province of which Chengdu is the capitol) gives us all something to talk about.

So during my week-long stay in Hangzhou, a city far, far away from Chengdu on China’s eastern coast, when I would tell people that I live in Chengdu they would immediately focus on the quality that distinguishes the Sichuanese apart from their compatriots: the food. Each would ask: 吃辣的吗? Do you eat spicy food?

And it wasn’t just idle chitchat. They really wanted to know how my western palette was weathering Sichuan’s famous chili storm. I told them I love it and that I’m used to it now. And then I stopped myself from asking them where Hangzhou’s flavor went.

Not to say that Hangzhou isn’t a great city. It is. Being less than an hour from Shanghai it shares that city’s modernity and flair. Hangzhou’s streets are teeming with fashionable folks and there are options for killing time in fashionable ways – shopping, snacking, drinking. Chengdu has these things too. It’s just that Hangzhou has way more of them. (And they’re better dressed.)

And I hope I’m not betraying my Chengdu home when I also add that Hangzhou has fewer people spitting, fewer folks out on the town in fleece pajamas and/or fuzzy slippers, and fewer children using the sidewalk as a commode. That being said, I also had a hard time finding anyone playing mah jong. Spend a minute in Chengdu and you’ll discover that the clicking of mah jong tiles is the background music for daily life -- a life that unrolls in a more traditional, and relaxed, atmosphere.

However, even with its western style modernity, Hangzhou still teems with one of modern China’s most intriguing calling cards – the art of juxtaposition. Alleys still have those “hot peppers hanging next to a bra and socks” kind of moments that I love about this country.

Hangzhou’s most famous site is Xi Hu, or West Lake, and it’s the kind of place that punches China’s reputation for rampant pollution and ugly sprawl smack in the face. Its beauty is on par with Lake Como – with layers of hills cracking the background behind sprawling and gentle waters. Along the lake’s edges are small pagodas, and bridges, and a bustling park full of attention hounds demonstrating their singing, dancing and strumming. I’ve also heard that there are more than a few Starbucks in walking distance – as sure a sign as any of a hopping metropolis.

I stopped to talk with a few people in the park and most were visitors from other parts of China. Their main observation was that the air in Hangzhou was cleaner and clearer than where they live. I don’t know if this is a credit to Hangzhou’s excellent air quality, or a nod to the fact that most of China lives under unrelenting smog.

Regardless, everyone seemed to be enjoying a beautiful day at the lake except, perhaps, for a man who seemed to be the only local who couldn’t carry a tune. He was singing along with a group of musicians under a weeping willow and he was forcing the group to repeat a part of the song where the rhythm was escaping him. I hadn’t realized anything was wrong until one of the musicians took it upon himself to sing the part. The musician’s voice, and his rhythm, and the beauty of the song… that was the way it was meant to be sung. You could feel it.

The only problem is that after the musician was done perfectly singing the part, the other guy gave it another try. And another. And then another. After each unsuccessful go, the musician would patiently re-sing the refrain with the correct rhythm and the correct notes. And each time the man would charge ahead and blunder it up all over again. At first it was a charming and quirky interchange, but after five minutes I think we were all ready to switch to an instrumental.

I’m not sure that I’ve identified what makes Hangzhou’s cuisine special but we certainly ate well while we were there. There was a chicken that had been cooked in mud and tasted of anise. Hunks of meat with fatty robes. Seafoods in soups and sauces and shells. And a dessert coated in syrup that tasted of caramel and molasses.

And the funny thing is, a Sichuan dish was included at almost every meal I had in Hangzhou. Each dish was an honest approximation of Sichuan food but lacked the real heat and thrum that I have come to expect from my food. Seeing Sichuan food from the outside – seeing it from a dinner table far away from the actual place – really hammered home the realization that this food is special. And that it is even more special in Sichuan.

So thank you Hangzhou. Thank you for being a city I would love to live in, and thank you for being a city that has deepened my appreciation for where I live now.

grey summer