Lona Manning's blog

Cold Snap

4/16/2015

Chinese colleagues have told me that Zibo doesn't have spring or fall, just winter and summer. The transition between the two is brief. They've also told me that the winter of 2014-15 was pretty mild, as winters go. There was hardly any snow. I felt the cold because I was here without a winter coat, and I had to layer up for class with sweaters covered with a raincoat. This is because the huge building where we teach was barely heated. I even sometimes played a video of crackling fire in the language labs to help create an illusion of a heat source.

Speaking of winter coats, here's a story I haven't told on myself here in the blog (it's been posted at internations.org, a website for ex-pats).

Stores closed during winter break

The hospitality and helpfulness of my Chinese friends and students is sometimes overwhelming. I once was with three English students – not kids, mind you, but adults, high-ranking professionals in their field, who decided to help me find a winter coat. Two of them linked arms with me and escorted me through the stores, while another insisted on holding my jacket and purse for me, like I was a celebrity with three personal assistants.

Them: (to the shop owner, in Chinese) Do you have any large size coats?
Shop Owner: (in Chinese) How large are we talking about?
Them: (gesturing to me) (in Chinese) That large.
Shop owner: (in Chinese) Oh. Wow. Well, maybe. Just a minute.

We repeated this four times at four different stores. Finally I said, "I'm going to teach you a new word. Futile."

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What says family togetherness?

4/15/2015

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Okay, maybe "glutinous rice ball" doesn't sound very appealing or interesting to you. It didn't to me, either, but I thought I would try some, because it is the thing that you eat during Lantern Festival. It's not just their round shape, symbolizing unity, that makes them symbolic of family holiday gatherings, their Chinese name, tangyuan, sounds like the Chinese for "union."

A Chinese friend brought me some to try. The white outer part is made of glutinous rice but the inside is stuffed with various fillings -- peanut paste, sweet potato paste, even chocolate. This batch went into boiling water in my new cooking pot. These are actually made with tapioca paste so that as they heat up, the white outer case becomes transparent and you can see the color of the filling inside. They looked like big fish eggs...

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Lantern Festival

4/9/2015

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Vegetables like a Spring bouquet

You can't see it clearly in the video, but it seems that all the local villages enter a float (carried by people) which features a pretty girl dressed up in bright silks like a heavenly fairy maiden. There's a picture of one such maiden at the bottom of this post. As you can see, the exuberant noise and the colors were great.

There were lion dancers, dragons, drummers, cymbals, horns, dancers waving fans and scarves, people on stilts and on and on for a good two hours. I think some of the marching groups were the older ladies that we also see dancing on street corners at night. They march and dance like they haven't a care in the world.

Like most, if not all, Chinese festivals, there's a special food associated with Lantern Festival -- the glutinous (stuffed) rice ball, or tangyuan. Tried it, loved it. I'll post some pictures of it.

The Lantern Festival was a month ago. Sorry, I'm very behind-hand in my blog posts. It marks the end of the New Year celebrations.

Street vendor selling sugarcane

Girl (in blue) carried along parade route

Wooden toys make quite a racket

Oh, wow.
I'm going to intersperse some of my posts about how much I love it here, with posts about the difficulties of internet access, the pollution, the [economic] pressures on me to teach children's classes rather than adult classes -- but just know that if you are reading a post from me that is critical of some aspect of China, that's mostly me playing junior reporter. In my daily life I am very content.

Who wouldn't be, when one is privileged to watch the local Lantern Festival parade after eating yet another epic lunch at a great restaurant? It was another great hot pot, or hua gua, meal, where we cooked our meat and vegetables in broth right at the table, then dipped it in sauce.

Our friends rented a private room and we watched the parade in comfort from the second story windows.

I did get some street-level snaps of the vendors selling food, these noisy clacker things, below, and the pretty red candied jujubes (a fruit, not a candy) on sticks. The sticks are in fact sturdy two foot long wooden skewers with a pointy end.

I think the Western world, with its health and safety concerns, could not accommodate boiling pots of broth on sterno lamps at a family restaurant, nor could we countenance giving children large wooden skewers that you could take somebody's eyes out with. But that's China. Maybe they still have lawn darts here.

In addition to the parade, we visited an evening display of lanterns and illuminations. My phone camera doesn't do it justice. But the magic of colored lights at night, just as with the Harbin Ice Festival, makes one feel like a child again.

Lantern Festival falls on the 15th day of the first lunar month, so it's not strictly speaking associated with the winter solstice, the way that Christmas is. But it's not surprising that different cultures light up the long nights of winter with beautiful colors.

Lantern Festival pagoda

Update: Below, I've added a pic of the "boats" that bobbed along the street and the post-parade army of cleaners.

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China's internet crackdown

4/1/2015

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Hi folks. Are you old enough to remember the world before internet? I do. Now many of us want to have it available everywhere and every moment and at lightning speeds. That's not what Ross and I get in China, unfortunately. We share an internet network with thousands of students. The service slows to a crawl in the evenings, which makes it difficult to work on this blog. The best time for connectivity is early in the morning. But that's not best for my writing coherence.
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The main China internet issue, of course is that the Chinese government actually has the quaint idea that you can censor what people see. The 'Great Firewall of China' is intended to prevent the citizenry from seeing many western internet sites, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the New York Times. As a teacher, I really rely on YouTube for getting little video clips that underscore the topics of my lessons. And of course, the bare idea that someone is telling me what I can and cannot read is risible. Not all news sites and blogs are censored, and probably the list is always chopping and changing. Apparently the Chinese don't mind if I read England's Daily Mail.

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Cold Snap

What says family togetherness?

Lantern Festival

China's internet crackdown

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