A Snowy Spring Festival

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I take a glance out the window, and it feels like we are floating across the winter-worn countryside—defying space, but not too immodestly; this is one of China's slower trains after all. The snow, beaten hamlets and open land look like sliding pictures from our floating tunnel, where sore bottoms, chattering Mandarin, and hot, smoke-filled air make up the most immediate reality. It's so warm, in fact, that a man in front of me just rolled up half his T-shirt to cool off. A kid behind is complaining "it's too hot" over and over to the half-agreement, half-annoyance of those around him. Many, including me, are waiting for the next stop, not because we'll get off, but because the open doors will flush some this sweltering cramptness out, and bring some of that cool country in.

The 33 hour yingzuo (hard seat) train ride is an experience, to say the least. At 50 USD for some 1300 miles, I cannot deny it appeals to my frugality. If you've got a penchant for thrifty travel and are spartan enough for the bottom-soreness and occasional wafting cigarette smoke, I recommend highly recommend such a journey. Of course, for nearly every other passenger besides me, this ride is hardly novel. For them, this must feel like the long, familiar morning commute after yesterday evening's merriments. On their faces is a well-worn tolerance for discomfiture, as well as boredom, a sense of things passing—but no express desire to rush them along. From sunflower seeds to card games to ubiquitous smartphones, people are letting themselves sink as far as they can into these hard seats before rising up to fully meet the new year.

It's more than a week after Spring Festival, and this train is facing away from laojia (old home) for most on board...ahead is work, school, city-life, normalcy, and a whole new spin of the seasons wheel. Here the festival tide is receding, and already it feels quite distant from where I was several days ago, where the tide was at its peak....




On the 19th of February, 10 days ago, I was on the 14th floor of a cozy apartment overlooking the Songhua River, welcoming the year of the goat (or sheep, or ram, or even alpaca, depending on however you want translate the Chinese yang) with my friend Ding Yi Ma. She is Reed's former Chinese language scholar, and has been a close friend of mine since we dated and got to know each other last spring. We'd been talking about my coming to visit for Spring Festival for some time, and this spring, on the eve of my year in Fuzhou, we had the chance.

This meant that my stay here in China started in Jilin city, which is a few hundred miles north of North Korea—cold, to say the least. Ding Yi and I had standing dare, that I would go swimming in the Songhua in the middle of winter. Needless to say the dare is still standing. Ice lines the river and all its vegetation, and frost, called wusong, gathers in beautiful inch-wide molds around tree branches during winter. Snow blankets the entire city. Such weather is a thing of recreation to a California kid who lives four hours from Tahoe; to these people, it is a way of life—for half the year anyway.

Most of Ding Yi's family live in the Northeast; so many, indeed, that I quickly lost track of who was related to who. Cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents...in Chinese there are actually specific names for "grandmother on my mother's side" or "older female cousin," but I've procrastinated on actually committing them all to memory. In any case, they hardly ever call each other such names, as they are too formal. When her female cousin isn't there, Ding Yi still just calls her 'little sister'—totally common in a Chinese family (and poignant, too, when you consider the unique challenges of the single-child policy). Even I have a nickname in the Ma household: kunsile, which phonetically is not too distant from Chris, but which actually means "tired to death." Names, as I would find over and over through the holiday, were one of many ways flocks of relatives and guests could leap over formalities and cultivate a sense of intimacy.

The laid back tact of the household contrasted nicely with the excitement. From the moment I set foot in the apartment, all the way up to the golden hour, a sense anticipation was everywhere converging—slowly at first, to be sure, but soon with supreme fervor. Inside the house, it was palpable in the hurried preparations of my host family, and the near endless stream of relatives dropping in, eating food, gift-giving, gossiping. For some family members, this is the one time a year they get to see one another. For me, who could hardly keep track of the various relatives, much less when they would arrive, the front door seemed like a membrane ready to receive or see off anybody at will. This feeling of perpetual openness, and ample exchange of bodies and booty, was definitely one of my favorite aspects of the stay up north.

Outside of apartment, the rising anticipation was palpable in the shuffling masses of cars, the swelling shopping centers. Nothing, however, more vividly betrayed the gathering moment than the fireworks, a truly indispensable part of Spring Festival. The festival asks to be compared to our Christmas in certain aspects—the family, the food, the gifts—but here is one aspect that diverges wildly between them. It's not exactly Silent Night. The great part about the fireworks is not that there is some grand show, but that the 'show' (if you could call it that) is ubiquitous and without any apparent start or finish. That is for the simple reason that it's common people who sell, purchase and set off the fireworks, not the government or any other organized body. Rows of fireworks stands line the icy streets of Jilin selling everything from little firesnakes to the real deal: fireworks that shoot 200 feet in the air and explode with a thud into colors and light. Collectively a thousand little 'shows,' put on spontaneously by all manner of people across the whole city, settle into the periphery of one's senses, as if they were background heartbeat of the entire festival. Occasionally, a few fireworks explode right outside our window—literally meters from the glass—one of the few times I'll think I'll see fireworks ona direct side-view.

There were the fireworks, the red hanging lanterns, the countless posters wishing "福," "good fortune" to passerby's...there was also me, an ornament all unto myself, albeit of a different sort. No hard feelings about it, but if there was a Christmas tree, I might have been hung in Ding Yi's living room and labeled 'American guest,' left to spin and shine in all my otherworldly glory. This is par for the course when you've come from so far away and are entering a culture that is homogenous compared to our melting-pot standards. In fact, experiences of being the feature guest at the dinner table seemed much more profound three years ago, the first time I was in China by myself. In part, this is because I was younger, but chiefly I attribute it to this pretty reliable equation: your fluency with the language and culture are inversely proportional to the degree to which you will be ornamentalized in a setting like Ding Yi's apartment. At this point, I feel like I've struck a balance: I'm half fluent, half ornament, sometimes talked to, sometimes talked of, regardless if I am right there myself. In any case, the broad "foreignness" offered by my mere presence, the speculations that buzz around "the American," the doses of shameless attention: I take these things as part-and-parcel to the guest-host exchange. Myself as the foreigner sitting with us at the dinner table is, actually, much of what I have to offer as a guest in their house. They give me warm floors, entertainment, food; I give myself, or the idea of myself, as food for their conversation and imagination.

Anyways, I could always chat with Ding Yi in English if the need came.

At the crux of the festival, the last day of the year on the Chinese lunar calendar, the food, rice wine, and toasting were all in full swing. We had two big dinners, the first with fish, pork feat, beef, lamb, chicken, shrimp, crab and the occasional vegetable (to be sure, vegetables actually make up a far greater portion of the Chinese diet than the American diet, but nothing, I'm afraid, will dislodge the scarcity-born Chinese fascination with meat, particularly during celebration times. It used to be a delicacy that families could only have once a week or during festivals, but now it's something that most families have regularly and with extra helpings when celebrating). For the second dinner, we had the traditional dumplings with peanuts lodged in a choice few. Whoever chanced upon the hidden peanuts would get money from one of the adults (in this case, Ding Yi's father). I was fifty RMB richer and more full than I can describe by the end of it all. The dinners were gay, garrulous and as I have already emphasized, utterly informal. For the big meaty dinner, I'm pretty sure Ding Yi's mom was in her PJ's. For the dumplings, it was so hot after all the cooking that Ding Yi's uncle ate without a shirt and in his long underwear—nobody bat an eye.

It is symptomatic of China's curious and ever-evolving intersection with modernity that in the hours leading up to the moment the Ma's, and countless other Chinese families, sit ceremoniously to watch chunwan. This is the Party-hosted television special broadcast every Spring Festival since the early 80's to celebrate the new year with skits, songs and dancing. After watching chunwan, the cell phones fly out—particularly among younger family members—to wish friends Happy New Year on the Chinese equivalent of Facebook, WeChat. WeChat is smart enough to have included a hongbao feature this year--hongbao being a traditional gift of spending money given to kids, usually in little red bags. Now, friends can send friends digital hongbao one by one, orthey can send blanket hongbao, or they can even set up groups in which hongbao are distributed in mini-lotteries. I found it all a little anticlimactic as means to welcome the new year, but perhaps I had undue attention on the moment myself. In any case the fireworks outside did not fail to disappoint—from about 11:00 onwards one saw, one felt, one could even smell one long string of explosions going off everywhere....



Post-festival was remarkably chill. Relatives spend the night, many for several nights on end. Everybody eats just two meals a day, because everybody sleeps in. Nobody bothers to get changed out of their PJ's. If you can imagine a family sprawled out on the living room floor playing poker and mahjong, or watching reruns of chunwan wrapped in blankets, you'll about have the feeling—at least in the Northeast.

Such repose represents the long, slow slope down from New Years high, easing people out of the festival-sphere and back into work life. The holiday doesn't officially end until 15 days after New Year Days, but most have to head back earlier. I myself am caught in that ebbing tide, as I'll be starting school in just a few days.

Here in Fuzhou...it's palm trees lining the local river, hardly wusong. In a few months, the memory of snow will be distant, or perhaps taunting, knowing this area's legendary heat. The season wheel is spinning anew—but let's not rush it along too quickly!—Spring, as the Chinese seem to know well, should be savored.



A Happy Year of the Sheep (or goat, or ram) to all those back home,

-Chris

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Photos

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On the train

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The Songhua

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View from Ding Yi's apartment

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Pre-New Year's shopping

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Selling Fireworks

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Chinese poker with the family!