Christmas in Jinzhou
Or: The Yellow Rose of Texas and Other Holiday Favorites
by Alan Perry
And it's been quite a Christmas season indeed, if not quite what we or you would call "Christmas." It has been a busy time, what with the last few weeks of English classes and Dana being down with the North China Flu.
Her flu, or whatever it is, has been one of the two "down sides" of December, the other of course being separation from near and dear family and friends. Students often ask us if we miss our families, and of course, of course, of course we do.
Jeez, Dana has had six IV sessions at the college clinic. I'd gone over there more than a month ago when a sore throat had been troubling me for many weeks. Some "watermelon" cough drops and mystery pills took care of whatever was ailing me, but Dana was coughing and feeling poorly, seemingly without end. So over she went to the clinic, where they slapped her down on a bed and after checking for any penicillin allergy proceeded to drip some sort of a penicillin solution into her. And the next day, and the next, for six sessions. It seems to have done the trick, though she still tires too easily and the shoulder of the arm where they put the IV is persistently sore.
But whatever good the medication may have accomplished paled before the uplift of the last day, when two of her students came storming into her clinic room laden with gifts, good wishes, and sunny smiles. Better therapy one couldn't wish for.
The clinic visit by Dana's students leads naturally to reminiscing about other such campus events that can only be called heartwarming and have gone a long way toward easing our seasonal homesickness. The one I found most moving happened one evening when we met one of Dana's students in a campus restaurant. She was so pleased to see Dana that she quite literally hopped straight up several inches. One of the funniest, and nicest, sights I've seen here or anywhere else.
The term finished up on Christmas Eve for both Chinese and foreign teachers; other classes continue for another couple of weeks before exams begin about January 8. The Thursday and Friday of Christmas week featured end-of-term / Christmas parties of various sorts. And we foreign English teachers all felt compelled to do something Christmassy in our classes that week.
So there I am, leading a roomful of Chinese dental students in a rousing chorus of "Jingle Bells" and asking myself how it has come to this. "This is a job for Diana Duff and the Sweet Adelines, not for yours truly," thinks I. "Where's Diana when I need her?" It's not only "Jingle Bells." There is also "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," "Frosty the Snowman," and "White Christmas." Dana had produced an elegant illustrated song sheet, Matt and Elke a longer but less colorful one. I used them both. I also read a Christmas story to each class. I first tried the John Henry Faulk Texas tale that has made the rounds in the KC Star and elsewhere over the years, but even when I standardized the dialogue this proved too difficult for most, so I shifted to "Twas the Night before Christmas." Better.
I have to admit it didn't help my morale to learn that some of the students call me Father Christmas among themselves!
Then there was stuffing ourselves at a nurses' dumplings and candy party, to say nothing of wailing out "The First Noel" at another class gathering. At the latter I found myself standing unsteadily behind the first teleprompter (or whatever it was) I've ever seen. All in all, I've done more public singing in the last week or so than in the rest of my life altogether.
Thursday night the city put on a (Chinese) Christmas dinner for the "Jinzhou Foreign Investment Enterprises and Foreign Experts." "Foreign Experts," that's us, lumped in with various investment business types. But seated toward the back of the room in the fancy hotel where the dinner was held, placed nowhere near the business types. Still, it was a good dinner.
Then on Christmas Eve the college took all the Chinese and foreign English teachers out on the town, first to dinner and then to a local karaoke ("KTV") joint. With a couple of dozen Chinese teachers and us six foreign "experts" we made up a sizeable crew. We ate well at a newly opened restaurant. Then Paul (real name, Zhongbao Liang), our boss, led us on a hike along the icy streets to the KTV district. We were turned away from two establishments because they didn't have room for us, so we crossed the street to a third. Paul led us across busy People's Street by simply walking in front of an oncoming cit bus and holding up his hand to stop it. On the icy street. After seeing that I'll follow him anywhere--at a safe distance.
Actually, Paul had earlier impressed me by getting on stage at the restaurant and cavorting with some scantily clad "minority nationality" dancing girls. Along with the Han Chinese majority the Chinese population includes some 200+ ethnic minorities. They include Tibetans, tribal people near the borders with Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar, small pastoral and fishing groups far north of Jinzhou, Muslims in the far west, Manchu people in our area, and many others. These dancing girls from one of the southern nationalities were done up in allegedly native garb which, I'm afraid, reminded me of something Carmen Miranda might have worn in a 1940s Technicolor extravaganza. The contribution of Paul and the others who accepted the invitation to join them on stage didn't add anything to the exoticism of the performance, but I had to admire their chutzpah.
So I'm finally settled in my first ever KTV lounge, and we settled down to enjoy ourselves. Paul (of course) led off and was followed by a number of our Chinese colleagues. I don't know if this is universal in the karaoke world, but this one featured a large TV screen. One selects any of several hundred songs, most in Chinese, of course, with a few dozen in English. An MTV type performance of the song on the screen follows, with the lyrics subtitled. If you are moved (or moved by others) to perform, you can lip-sync to the TV, sing along with the singers, or even turn off the sound and actually sing alone. The problem is that whether you are lip-syncing or really singing it is hard to avoid turning your back on the audience in order to read the subtitles. But what the Hell. Matt and Elke screamed out something called "Last Christmas" back and forth to each other, many of the Chinese teachers sang along or lip synced, and Dana and I managed "Unchained Melody" on our own. After "Jingle Bells" in front of the dentists it was nothing. (As an aside, "Unchained Melody" is translated as "Unk Aired Melody" on the jacket of our locally purchased U2 album.)
My ultimate Christmas experience, however, wasn't with a college event but at the downtown Fu Mart department store. At the top of the escalator I was confronted by a larger than life mechanical Santa turning his head back and forth and singing "The Yellow Rose of Texas" in American accented English. Well. I stood dumfounded for a time, then moved on without waiting to discover if his repertoire also included "Don't Fence Me In" and "Deep in the Heart of Texas." I can only take so much strangeness at a time.
Santa doing "The Yellow Rose of Texas" was only the most bizarre of the Jinzhou Christmas sights. There are Santas, Christmas trees, and angels in many downtown store windows, a Father Christmas and two plastic Christmas trees in the lobby of our hotel, and a downtown restaurant sports a little Christmas house stuck out onto the sidewalk for their yuletide entrance. But I suppose "bizarre" probably isn't the best term to use. Everything we've seen here, including Santa and the "Yellow Rose," would fit nicely somewhere in the galaxy of chintzy American Christmas holiday marketing displays. If you couldn't find it in a store, somebody'd have it on his front lawn or roof.
So the stuff itself really isn't bizarre, it just seems so perversely out of context. I've been telling people here that in America Christmas is really three distinct things: the family gathering holiday when families get together; a religious observance cherished by some and commercially exploited by many; and the year's greatest capitalist sales pitch. None of the three really fits with what goes on here. Families get together for the National Day Holiday in October, not now. Religion is officially discouraged and is ignored by most people. And the store displays (incredibly!) don't seem to be linked to sales pitches, while the college displays and parties certainly aren't religiously or commercially oriented. True, some of our Chinese students and colleagues have come up with lovely little gifts and Christmas cards, but the emphasis is on "little," and more important, I don't believe this is any sort of a family gift-giving time.
Rather, all this nonsense seems to me to be more a sort of party time-winter solstice-last blast before exam time excuse for a good time. It has been a long time since the National Day holiday in early October; about time for something to break the routine. That, plus it is part of the generalized importing of western trappings and policies that don't seem to threaten the political status quo. Maybe the Chinese have actually adopted Christmas at its public secular best: an excuse for a party, a few decorations, and wailing tuneful songs.
The day after Christmas we set off on our traditional Christmas Day walk. So we didn't get to it until a day late; what the Hell. We decided to hike along one of the two wide but very shallow rivers running through the southern reaches of Jinzhou City. What began as a pleasant ramble through a part of the city we hadn't seen before suddenly became one of the best day's entertainments we've had here. We spied a group of people skating on the river ice and decided to wander their way to see what we could see. Recognizing us as Westerners, they began waving and shouting "Hello!" as we approached.
We had no time to introduce ourselves or do anything else before they were offering, no, insisting we try one of the cunningly designed and constructed homemade skate-seats they were using along with conventional store-bought ice skates.
The skate seats consist of one, or two parallel, short (about 10") runners in the form of lengths of about 1-inch angle iron bolted to a very small (about 10" square) piece of wood that serves as a base. Mounted on the top rear of the base are smaller pieces of wood forming a seat, raised about 10" above the base. The skater sits on the seat and wedges his or her feet into the space between the front of the seat and a strip of wood along the front of the base. Your feet are sharply heels up and toes down. The front of the angle iron is beveled so it/they won't catch in the ice, and they make fine runners. The equipment is completed by two pushers, lengths of smooth steel rod sharpened and curved at one end and twisted into handles at the other. Short ski poles would serve much the same purpose.
So you twist yourself onto this little item and use the pushers to propel yourself along the ice. Because the skate seat is quite small it is easy to maneuver with the pushers and by leaning. I was immediately challenged to race (gasp!) with one of the guys and did my erratic best. So I fell over is what I did. And scraped my hand, as I was trying it barehanded. I was on the only two-runner seat; all others were single runner models. After giving up the racing silliness I was able to do fairly well on my two-runner jobbie, lurching along the ice without too much inadvertent zigging and zagging. Great fun! When I tried a single runner model I couldn't even get both feet into it without falling over. We both tried the double runner model and both enjoyed it.
After that it was tea heated over a camp stove and tasty dried sweet potatoes as we attempted to chat about this and that. The group of men, women, teenagers, and one little boy, had a camp tent along with their stove, and a colorful flag flying (one even Frank Connaghan surely hasn't come across). One fellow wanted to talk about how we are all under the same heaven and should bow and shake hands with each other, not fight. He knew the names of some American presidents and spoke their names approvingly: Lincoln! Washington! Roosevelt! I returned the compliment with Deng Xiaoping! Zho Enlai!
They then insisted we try some of their conventional ice skates, which actually fit pretty well. The problem was that they did not extend far up one's ankles, so offered little ankle support. Still, we both did surprisingly well; which for me means not falling down.
We also learned that a small Chinese boy can easily tow an adult on a skate seat (provided Dana promises to tow him in return), and observed that a skater can get up quite a rate of speed when towed by a guy on a bike. We did not actually attempt that latter stunt.
This crew turned out to be a (the?) Jinzhou outing club, as we learned when Dana finally asked them about their flag. They camp, hike, and, obviously, do winter skating parties. We exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses. So here's a possibility of future sharing some fun outdoor things with local people.
My but we've been lucky here!
We've now begun our nearly two month long holiday from teaching at the college, time we plan to use getting caught up on a lot of things and to do a little traveling. And of course for me to write up more ramblings. The holiday may not feature quite as much free time as we'd thought it would, though. We'll spend this weekend in Panjin, a city some 40 miles from here, auditioning for teaching English for a couple of weeks in January at several of the local schools. A friend we met on our October trip to the North Korean border area runs a school in Panjin and has asked us to visit and teach a few demonstration classes. So we'll see what happens.
Alan, to everyone's relief through with public singing
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