30 December 2013

christmas without christmas



Celebrating Christmas in China is a bit of a self-made operation. Santa and other decorative elements are seeping into popular culture here, propelled mainly by stores that want shoppers to do more shopping, but in general you’re on your own. 

Admittedly, some joy can be found in the local interpretations of Christmas decor. For example, I might prefer not to position my Santa so that he spends the holiday season oogling the lingerie models, but the lingerie store had other ideas. 


Despite this growing number of Christmas signs and songs, the real issue for those of us that actually celebrate the holiday is that there's no Christmas Day follow-through. For all the visual hype you’d expect at least a little December 25th hullabaloo. But there’s nothing.

We didn’t even get the gift we wanted … a day with air we could breathe. This gift was meant for the little guy celebrating his first Christmas and for his grandparents who were stuck in our house breathing filtered air and watching the Chinese world go by. 

Instead, Chengdu Santa gave us the coal that keeps on giving – a thick chunk of pollution sitting on top of the city.


Regardless, on Christmas morning Shi-wen and I donned our winter caps (aka PM 2.5 filtering face masks) and walked the dog just to pretend our lives are like they used to be. This Christmas walk was perfect for Chengdu. There was everything you’d expect: pollution, several unmarked open manholes with varying levels of fall-in ability, and a maintenance man who perched on an air conditioning unit two stories up because there wasn't enough room on the bamboo ladder for two.


[Extra special holiday tie-in: The man standing on the AC unit was also the man that walked into our house unannounced one morning. He opened our front door and leaned in to say that our stove hood had arrived. I told him, in Chinese, that he was not allowed to walk into our house without knocking. He repeated his news about the stove hood. I repeated my complaint. He then turned to our ayi and said, “Tell her that her stove hood is here.” Either he was super excited about the stove hood or he mistook my Chinese for English. Either way it took us a long while to convince him that we were more concerned about his entry than the stove hood’s arrival.]


Our Christmas walk included a bicycle pass by a neighbor who is still living around here somewhere although not in his apartment which is under construction and has no walls. Then later, as if to remind us that his apartment is really under construction, several stacks of twenty foot-long metal strips strapped to a bicycle cart arrived for use in the space.

There was also a parked motorbike whose rear basket was piled high with plastic sacks of upside-down plucked chickens, some of which were unceremoniously dropped on the ground as the delivery man wrestled with the load. 



There was a street cone with a sad panda and an ad in which a newly svelte woman marveled about the loss of her "belly butter." 


The watchman resting in the convenience store didn’t seem to know it was Christmas and I wouldn’t have known either if I hadn’t come home to a warm house with a lighted tree and pumpkin waffles for breakfast.


There was also a first Christmas baby, his grandparents, Christmas pajamas, a tiny rocking pony, and a fleet of wooden cars made by Grandpa. We had Christmas music and candy canes and cookies baked from my Grandmother’s 100 year-old recipe. We ate pan d’oro made from scratch and pecan pie with a wonky crust.

We even had a ham that was brined and glazed and ready to be baked as soon as the gas came back on. 

Because, of course, the gas was turned off. This was our special stocking stuffer from Chengdu and it hammered home the fact that December 25 was special to no one but us. In fact, it was so un-special that you didn’t need to cook anything at all, let alone a large glazed ham.

In the end, I suppose being in China for Christmas was like being anywhere. You made your own day with your love and your tree baubles and the large box of Trader Joe’s holiday sweets that your parents put in the mail for you several weeks before boarding an around-the-world flight so they could celebrate with you in a city where you can’t go outside.

Tis the season! 

08 December 2013

so many shades of green


We almost didn’t go to the Chinese farm.

You’d think with the way we complain about food safety and fresh air that we’d have run for this organic farm at a sprint. But, alas… organic farms in China have the same problem as normal farms in China: they’re outside. And going outside here tends to be bad for your health.

But this time we got lucky. The night before the farm visit, well after we’d decided the air quality was too bad to go, the winds took a swerve for the better and we woke up to discover that going outside wouldn’t kill us.  It wouldn’t be good for us either, but we’ll take what we can get.



So to the farm it was. It was drizzling and grey out but we were so thrilled to be leaving the house that we had no complaints.

The farm was a small one that raised wonderful organic vegetables and had real broccoli growing right out of the ground. It also smelled a lot less like livestock than I'd expected despite raising cows, goats, and chickens on the grounds.

Take the chicken coop that didn’t smell like chickens – you’d hardly know it was there. This was especially impressive since it wasn’t a coop so much as a chicken-filled building.


No matter what you called it, the most entertaining part of the trip was standing next to this nearly odorless chicken-filled building and watching peoples’ reactions to what they saw inside.

It usually started with “Holy” and ended with language a little less pure. You couldn’t help yourself. There were just so many chickens and no reason to suspect they were there.


But if we’re making a list of farm shockers, let’s skip ahead to the giant spiders. 

These are not the spiders you find in your house and leave in the corner/blinds/whatever to eat other bugs. No, farm spiders are the spiders that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up as you calculate how fast something with eight legs, each several inches long, can run in your direction.

And have I mentioned they’re toxic?

I was admiring the farm’s reconstituted wetland, which looked a lot like a grove of apple trees, when I noticed webbed sheets of spiders stretched between the trees. Giant green- and black-striped bodies hung in midair and repeated row upon row into the distance. The scale of spider domination was fairly horrifying and made me wonder if I would run through the field to escape a murderer in chase. I was thinking this question through when the farmhand next to me asked, “Did you know they’re toxic?”

He went on, “They’re worse in the summer. In the summer they’re much fatter than now. And if you’re riding your bike,” he continued, “they’ll definitely jump on your face and bite you. The bites will hurt at first, but the poison will make it numb and you’ll be okay.”

The look of disbelief on my face asked the question that he answered. “Yes, it happened to me. But I got used to it.”


And this was pretty much when I decided that not only wasn’t I ever going to run through that field, I also wasn’t going to live on a farm. Bad air is a problem but when your skies are filled with spiders and you think it’s normal, that’s a nightmare even organic broccoli can’t solve.