I rolled out of my slumber around nine in the morning, and prepared myself for the day. I must have been taking my time getting ready and cleaning the room because I looked up and it was almost ten in the morning, which is the time that I told my “Chinese sister” that we would leave to visit the family. I grabbed some food walking out the door, met my “sister” on the first floor, and we headed towards the National Library Subway station. She was an old pro for Chun Jie, as this was her second or third time in China for it. My host “sister” is named Sandra, and she is a graduate student from New York. She went to undergrad at the University of Hawaii, and is the daughter of two immigrants from Grenada. She is one the most multicultural people that I think I have ever met.
We chatted on the way to our subway stop, which was the terminal station for line 4, about 6 stops to the north of the campus. When we got to the station at the appointed time, we were met with naught but a dismal view of the urban sprawl of Beijing and some rather poor looking dwellings. The scene was brightened by the arrival of a man and his Saluki, which I mistook for some sort of greyhound mix. However, within ten minutes or so, our host father arrived, driving the family’s Passat. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but the mom tried to drive me in the family Buick on the night that she gave me the fish and plant. I did not fit in the car, and I’m sure that my “mom” requested that the father drive something that would fit me.
It was about a 15-minute ride over to their apartment, which was one of many in a sea of apartments. There were no less than 40 apartment buildings in their “subdivision,” each one of eight floors, and each floor having three apartments. That makes no less than 960 apartments in this one neighborhood. That is incredible! Also, allow me to give you a sketch of my host family.
The father is approximately 4’ 8” by my guestimation, and is a portly man with a quick eye set behind a pair of glasses and keen mind. He works in ZhongNanHai (gasp!), the secret location of the central government. I have no idea what exactly he does, but supposedly he advises the government and advised Hillary Clinton herself when she visited the country during Clinton’s presidency. He loves trinkets of all sorts, and has quite a collection of Chinese souvenirs from all over the country.
The mother is a law professor at MinZu University, and she is as smart as her husband. She is about the same height as her husband, and quite a bit less rotund. She has the Chinese telltale round face, and is in many ways the epitome of the modern Chinese woman.
The two parents have one son, whose name is Ben-Ben. I remained in the dark about the nature of this name, as the son’s name sounds like the parents are calling him a dumb-dumb the whole time. Dumb-dumb is the stereotypical Chinese boy at age 16. (May I interject? I hope that at age 16 I was not half as socially awkward or strange as this lad.) He is around his parents’ height, and has the thin frame of all Chinese boys, garnished with a little bit of the baby fat that Chinese parents love to see on their children. Being a little chubby in this country means that your kids are not on the verge of starvation, and that they can afford to put on a few extra pounds. He is a freshman in high school (but remember that Chinese high school only has three years. So maybe he is a sophomore… Think about it), and has his sights set on the Gao Kao, the test that all Chinese graduates must take to prove their worth. The Gao Kao is the culmination of work from the first 18 years of their life, and high schoolers will postpone sports, exercise, love, their health, their sanity and more in order to get good grades on this test. And parents expect their kids to be the best on the test because if you don’t you have no chance of getting into college. In a country where 20 million people are unemployed every year (that’s the equivalent to the population of Canada), an education is all that stands between you and and a life working in a sweatshop for the rest of your life. Ben-Ben is preparing for said test, and he is also preparing for the SAT. He hoped to attend college in the US, which for a student looking to get a god job on the mainland, is a great move.
We got a tour of the house, and then we sat around and watched NBA, while the mother peeled fruit for us. After a little while, the mother and another lady whose presence remained a mystery to me throughout the entire visit retired to the kitchen and prepared the midday meal. That left Sandra and I with the father and Ben-Ben. The father must have grown tired of his son’s awkwardness as well, as he left us alone with the son after a few minutes.
Soon, the lunch was ready, and we sat down to a great meal. We ate salt pork with peppers, homemade tofu, stir-fried cucumbers, tomato and egg, kimchi (Korean pickled vegetables), green beans, pickled-spicy mildew, chicken wings, shrimp, and dumplings. Dumplings are a New Year’s tradition for China, and a must-have for any festival. To top off the meal, the father decided that we should drink some Great Wall dry red wine and Xin Jiang rose wine. I stuck to the red, and we sat around the table for about 2 hours, eating our fill of Chinese cuisine. We talked about everything ranging from the Chinese government, US politics, cultural customs, cuisine, life in the states, and sports. Nothing is taboo in this country – expect revolution (shh!).
The family had some sort of arrangement, where they were going to meet their relatives out of the city, and I politely told the host father that I did not want to interfere with their plans. It would seem that the host father was waiting for me to say that (but would never show it), as we were walking out the door in less than three minutes of when I opened my mouth. He gave each of us a bottle of Great Wall red wine, which would make a great gift for my next appointment of the day.
We drove back to the station, wished each other well, and boarded the train taking us back to campus. The mysterious woman accompanied us back to campus, and on the ride I learned that she was a professor at MinZu as well. She lived on campus, which I thought was very strange.
When we made it back to the dorm, I made contact with Shazeda, Lee, and Emily. Shazeda invited us to go with her to visit her host family to celebrate dinner. Dinner is the more important of the two meals on New Year’s Eve, and she thought it a shame that we couldn’t celebrate the meal with our families. I brought my wine and some chocolate – in Chinese custom – and Emily brought some apples. We took the subway to a northern district of the city, with fireworks going off all around us. The city looks and sounds like a war zone: empty streets and explosions everywhere.
Shazeda’s “Chinese brother” greeted us at the entrance to the neighborhood, and we walked over to their apartment with the din of fireworks ringing in our ears. I did not expect Chinese fireworks to be this potent. This family lived on the 6th floor (or so) of an apartment building, and I met the family there. The relationships were quite confusing, and I’ll try to explain with a diagram:
Grandfather----Grandmother
/ | \
Host father---Host mother Older sister---husband Younger brother---Wife
| | |
Xuan-Xuan 15-year-old son Infant son
ØOlder female cousin (by marriage)
(Underlined members were absent)
Confused yet? I was. The family was so nice, and they seemed very excited to have us in their home. Their four-year-old son, Xuan-Xuan, really liked the chocolate, and tried his best to prevent anyone else from consuming it. He liked to take pictures on his father’s Cannon camera, and insisted that I take pictures of him while he took pictures of me. I helped the family cook some food for the meal that evening, and I learned how to make and cook dumplings on my own. I would also love to have a gas stove at my future residence, so that I can cook stir-fry. You can make so much with a round-bottomed pan…
We sat down at the table to share the New Year’s meal, and there was quite the spread. Allow me to expound upon the food. There were all sorts of dishes: spicy beef with peppers, boiled beef, tofu skin, rice noodles, dumplings (and a lot at that), roast fish, shrimp, 100-year-old eggs, eggs with shrimp, roast pumpkin, bread, and fish fillets. You can see the seafood theme running through the day. The Chinese people love their fish on New Year’s.
After the meal, we sat down to watch the Chinese New Year’s spectacular TV program extravaganza. The entire Chinese-speaking world put their lives on hold to watch this program, but the attraction of the program is beyond me. I, along with my fellow students, did not understand the jokes in the program. I was, however, mesmerized by the crazy stunts that they made Chinese people do, like a Tron-themed gymnastics presentation, 20 people on unicycles in unison, giant ethnic minority dances, and a host of other strange things.
After watching the program for a while, we played some MaJiang with the family. This is an inordinately complicated game, somewhat akin to gin and rummy, played on colored tiles. I had to have a coach to just play the game, and I won my first game! It was sheer luck, I assure you, dear reader. Around 10:15, our host mother told us that if we wanted to make it back to our dorms, we needed to get on the road. Her words were most true. There were no cabs for hire in the streets, and we walked over to the subway station to board a near-empty train back to the dorm. We probably made the last train for line 4, the boarding of which saved us a 45-minute walk through the cold.
We made it to the dorm no earlier than 11:30, and I wrote journals and sent emails until the midnight festivities began. Please keep in mind that throughout this entire day, I have been bombarded with a cascade of explosions. The explosiveness of the city, which one once thought could not have been increased, not by one measly iota, was immediately brought to an apocalyptic level at 12:00 AM. The sky brightened from fireworks all over the city, and the sky clouded with sulfurous fumes. Angels sang. Doves cried. I watched. Around 1 in the morning, I could take it no longer, and fell into a deep sleep.
I’ll write soon!
Love,
Jameyi
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