Super Bowl Monday

 Life as an expatriot leaves one always searching for connections to home.  Nothing creates a connection to home like a sporting event.  Watching the big game live almost makes you feel like you are in your living room at home.  Last fall, the Irish and the Brits and Austrailians all had their Rugby World Cup.  On Monday, February 6, we Americans had our Super Bowl.

 The inconvenient thing about the Super Bowl was that, in China, it fell on a working day....on Monday morning.  This inconvenience was easily over come by taking a day of vacation.  The true hardship was that kick-off was just after 7:00 am China time.  So the true faithful had to drag their behinds out of bed even earlier than normal in order to get a seat for the big game.

Luckily for us, Zapata's was hosting a Super Bowl party.  So it was just a five minute walk to get from our mattress to our seat for the big game.  Milton, the owner, put on a breakfast buffet that included lots of bacon and scrambled eggs and biscuits and gravy.  And even better, he subscribed to the NFL.com web feed that included all the national commercials.  Because no one really watches the Super Bowl for the game any more.  We all watch to see the commercials.

By noon the party was over.  As a natives of Indiapolis, Theresa and I were happy that the right team won.  (As natives of Indianapolis, any team other than New England is the right team.)  Much as it pains me to admit, I had to have a drink in hand - a Bloody Mary - to watch the Super Bowl.  So by Noon, with belly full of biscuits and gravy and tomato juice and vodka, it was time to go home and have a long, long nap.

Lost in Translation III

 It has been a while since I've shared some examples of mangled translations.  Here are a couple from Tian Ping Shan that struck my funny bone.

If you remember nothing else from this post, remember..... please play Civilization.

Lanterns in Yu Gardens

 In the first week after the New Year holiday, I had to go down to Shanghai for an overnight business trip.  This was on Tuesday, when the last of the fireworks had finished.  As it turned out, our hotel was not but 10 minutes walking from Yu Gardens.

 Yu Gardens, or Yu Yuan, is one of the prime tourist spots in Shanghai. They are just a few minutes walk from the Bund, which is famous for historic buildings and spectular views of the PuDong skyscrapers.  And just a few minutes more to walk to the legendary shopping on Nanjing Road, where every famous designer brand in the world can be had in both authentic and counterfeit versions.   The origin of the gardens dates back some 400 years, so it, too, is authentic to a point.  But like many tourist spots in Shanghai, it has been restored such that it is a caricature of Chinese culture....it could easily be a pavilion in Epcot Center.  The buildings and garden spaces are almost too beautiful and too perfect.

 Yu Gardens is also known for its colorful displays for the lantern day of the Spring Festival.   The photos here give a sampling.  I took a walk down to the park at about 7:00 am in the morning, before going to work, and snapped these.  As you can see, many of the "lanterns" look much like floats in parade.  No pun intended, but many of them were "floating" the waters in Yu Gardens.  The surrounding streets and alleyways were all decorated with more traditional lanterns, which were strung between buildings like street lights.  It was all very colorful.

 But like everything else in Yu Gardens, it felt like Chinese culture served up for the Western palate. About as authentic as General Tsao's Chicken or a fortune cookie.  But authentic or not, it was pretty to see.

 In Suzhou, they also observed the lantern festival on the south side of the old city on the 15th day of New Year, as is tradition.  Or so we heard.  Sad to say, but Theresa and I decided not to venture out.  It was raining cats and dogs and chilling-to-the-bone cold.  Our sense of adventure only goes so far.

 Sadly, I have more photo's than I can fill between with text.

 So bear with me to the next paragraph.

 And I will tell you that the most intriguing thing in Yu Gardens at 7:30 in the morning is not the lantern festival but the people.  The spaces near the entrance, near the dragon lantern, were filled with young people, mostly men in their 20s and 30's, playing badminton.  Deeper inside the park, the spaces were filled with older folks practicing their Tai Chi.  The photo below shows a few practicing the traditional forms of Tai Chi.  In other areas, there were people practicing forms that incorporated fans and swords.  I'm pretty sure that these folks were not paid by the Chamber of Commerce to come out in the morning.  I'm a sucker for authenticity.

 The last photo, below, is one of the more intriguing things I saw that morning.  The woman, with her back to you, is smacking her finger tips against the tree as part of her morning exercise.  It's like the Bruce Lee biographies, where you see him pounding his hands and feet against boards and rocks to build strength and increase the tolerance to pain.  This woman was no Bruce Lee....but she stood there for half an hour, pounding the tree with her hands.  If you look closely, the bark of the tree has been worn to a lighter shade by the constant abuse.

The Pursuit of Wealth

The fifth day of the Lunar New Year festival is purportedly the birthday of the god of Wealth.  The preceding four days are all focused on family and ancestors.  Day number five is all about taking care of number one.  Everyone could use a little more coin in the pocket.  So the fifth day sees people heading for the temples to offer their prayers and respect to the Wealth god.

Based on what I've heard from younger Chinese, I get the impression that the old beliefs are not as strong as they once were.  A key theme of the revolution was to break with old beliefs and old behaviors that had led the country to weakness in the 1800s and 1900s.  Several younger people have told me that they don't believe in anything spiritual, but rather they believe only in themselves.  They still respect and observe many of the old traditions involving family and ancestors.  But they tend to draw the line at anything with the slightest hint of organized religion.

But that said, there are still a lot of people who overtly believe.  And in a country of 1.3 billion, even a small percentage of believers means that a lot of people are going to the temple to make offerings to the god of wealth.  I also suspect there are a lot of covert believers....people who outwardly claim no religious beliefs but still make an offering now and again to hedge their bets.  And underlying it all is culture which for 5000 years has interwoven politics, language, art, and religion.  People do things because that's how they are done - never recognizing the spiritual origins.  (Kind of like saying "good-bye" in English without thinking that it started as "God be with ye")

People also do things to appease their parents.  Someone told me that he keeps a 100RMB note under the welcome mat at their front door.  This is based on the principles of Feng Shui, which say that the money at the door will invite fortune into the house.  "Really", I said, "you follow Feng Shui?"  "No", he answered, "but my mother-in-law does and I will do anything to avoid arguing with my mother-in-law."

Feng Shui, by the way, is still a big deal in these parts.  People follow the principles when building and decorating.  They claim that Feng Shui, though ancient, is based on sound scientific principles.  And I suppose the more basic rules, like orienting the entrance of your house to the South, make good sense.  But there are many elements of Feng Shui, like the money under the doormat, that are a bit more of a stretch.  These less-scientific practices live on.   If a shop is not making the profits expected, then the owners will often hire a Feng Shui expert to apply the more esoteric principles to remedy the situation.  I guess it never hurts to try.

As might guess from the five photos above, the god of Wealth LOVES combustion.  The overtures to the god started at midnight with exploding fireworks that went on for pretty much the entire 24 hours.  When daylight came, people thronged to the temples to burn incense and candles.  A lot of them.  And the bigger the combustible item, the better.  Also, people buy stacks of silver and gold foiled papers and burn them, one at a time, by the hundreds.  (That is what is shown in the fourth photo.)  I've never seen this done on any other visit to a temple.  I suspect that it is intended to mimic the burning of money.  But I'm not sure.

Inside the temple there were non-smoke-producing rituals.  One involved rubbing the head of the Chinese unicorn for good luck.  Another, shown below,  involved crossing a bridge to leave one's old fortunes behind and to cross over into the better fortunes of the new year.

At the start of the bridge was the statue of a crane, symbolic of long life.  Part of the ritual was to insert a coin into the beak of the crane before crossing over.  It is considered rude, I guess, to knock out the coins placed there by those who passed before.  So the trick was to balance your coin on top of those that got their first.  As the photo below shows, this turned into something like a game of reverse Jenga.  Thankfully, one of the monks would come by from time to time to clean out the crane's bill.

The photo below shows another tradition involving coins.  The people standing around the incense pot are trying to throw coins into the openings.  (We saw similar coin tossing in Japan, at the Golden Temple.)

The fifth day was, for the most part, the end of the formal New Year celebrations.  At least for us.  The traditional holidays do not end until after the fifteenth day - the day of the lanterns.   But the legal holidays of the golden week were over.  The god of Wealth day was a Friday.  We had to go to work on Sunday in trade for the day off.  With Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, people gradually began to filter back into town from their travels.  The roads became crowded again and the buses became full.

There is one last story of New Year to share.  It is tradition, we learned, for business to set of fireworks when they open their doors for the first time in the new year.  So on Sunday morning the fireworks started going off again with a vengeance.  On my way to work I saw bankers in suit and tie laying out huge rolls of firecrackers.  First at 8:00 am, and then at 9:00 am, the explosions reached a crescendo that sounded like the D-Day invasions.  On Monday, it all repeated again.  By Tuesday, things were back to normal and the only reminder of the holidays was the high level of particulate air pollution. 

Night Skies

We've had a good view from our apartment windows.  Each evening of the New Year holidays was marked by the water and light show at JinJi lake.  A special version of the show included fireworks in the extra-long performances.  A decent crowd of people turned out each evening, despite temperatures near the freezing mark. In the photo above you can see the red fireworks over the purplish fountains of the water show.  The lights of the Rainbow walk are just behind, and in the background are the colored lights of the restaurants along Li Gong Di causeway.

After the water-show the vendors would come out to peddle paper lanterns to the crowd.  The fourth night of New Year was the most popular for the lanterns.  You see, the fifth day is said to be the birthday of the god of wealth.  So I believe the lanterns were intended to greet him with the first requests for wealth of the new year.  In the photo below, the little points of light in the night sky are all paper lanterns.  If you double-click on the photo you should be able to see the full-sized version.  The flames of the lanterns stand out as orange points in the blackness of the night sky.  The air was thick with them.

At midnight of the fourth day of New Year, as it turned to the fifth day, the city went crazy with fireworks again.  There were just as many as on New Year's eve, if not more.  Again, this is part of the ritual of greeting the god of wealth.  (Fireworks on New Years Eve are intended scare away the bad spirits, but then later they are used to welcome the god of wealth.  This is one of those charming inconsistencies that you can't help but love about the Chinese.)

The fireworks died down about one o'clock in the morning but continued sporadically through the night.  At 5:30, when the sun rose, it once again sounded like the Normandy invasion.   Again, the pollution index went off the charts.

Tian Ping Shan

 About two blocks away from our apartment is the Eastern end-of-the-line for city bus #4.  If you get on the bus at that stop and ride to the Western terminus you will travel for about 15 miles as the crow flies.    The bus snakes its way through busy streets so that the trip takes about 75 minutes and probably covers 20 or more miles on the road.  You cross the old city of Suzhou on the South side and then traverse the entire Suzhou New District.  It's a cheap trip at 2 RMB - only about 30 cents.  (You gotta love the price of public transport.)

 At the other end of the line is Tian Ping Shan, a hill of about 800 feet that has become a public park and scenic area.  Shan in Chinese (山is the character) means a mountain or a hill and anything in between.  The land around Suzhou is so flat that 800 feet qualifies as a mountain of sorts.  Tian Ping Shan is one of many shans that ring Tai Lake and create a hard barrier limit to Suzhou's Westward growth.

 A payment of 10 RMB buys you a ticket to enter the park and climb to the top.  The area is almost entirely tree-covered and seems pristine and rustic, though nothing is China is truly undisturbed by man.   People have been crawling through these hills and building trails and temples and fortifications for thousands of years.  It is still a bit of a sacred place.  (In the top photo, that is a Buddhist monk on the stairs ahead of me.)  At the foot of the hill are several temples and tea houses and attractions (horseback riding, archery, playground for children, and so on.).  There are also several paths leading up Tian Ping Shan.

 A good portion of the climbing trail is covered with stair steps, placed upon or carved into the mountain stone.  But don't mistake that as making this an easy climb.  You are never more than one step away from having a really, really bad day.   Many of the stone steps are worn smooth as glass.  The path is slippery when it is dry....I can hardly imagine it on a typical rainy Suzhou day.  Safety features are non-existent.  If you slip and fall, then it becomes a contest between you and gravity.  Gravity will probably win a convincing victory.

 Still, it was a nice day and the opportunity to climb was impossible to resist.  So I lumbered up the steps and squeezed between the narrow passages with deliberate slowness.   There were quite a few local folks out enjoying the day too.  Just to humiliate me, they climbed with reckless abandon and no fear whatsoever.  Parents let their kids scurry over rock faces.  Women in skirts and dress shoes danced past me on the steepest parts.

 Along the way there were little shrines and grottoes for those who were climbing for mystical reasons.  For the tourists, there were a lot of places to look down upon the town of Suzhou below.  As you can see from the photo above, the visibility was not good.  Days of celebration had not helped the situation.  I figure the 6 million residents of Suzhou blew up a couple of million pounds of black powder and maybe burned again that much incense at the temples.   The newspaper said that the pollution index had gone off the charts during the New Year festival - particulate levels were over 5 times higher than the normal health alert limits. 

  As I kept climbing, I was filled more and more with a sense of pride and accomplishment.  The burn my thigh muscles was giving me an exercise high.  And the city below seemed like a small thing, a distant world of mere mortals.  And I was now high enough to see the other shans to the West toward Tai Lake.   I figured that there would be a place at the top to do high-fives with all the other supermen that conquered the mountain.

Pride goes before the fall.  Just to burst my bubble, at the top of the mountain were a bunch of carnival game booths and trinket shops.  There were little kids playing ring toss for prizes.  There was a place to shoot at balloons with a BB gun.  And all these booths were run by people my age or older.  I figure that every morning at sunrise they strap all this stuff on their back and hump it up the side of the hill.  And every evening the go back down again.  After about 15 minutes at the top, I packed up my wounded ego and stumbled back down to the bottom.

The Twin Pagodas

On the second day of the New Year holiday, I took the 307 bus to downtown Suzhou.  The bus conveniently stops near the pedestrian shopping district.  A stop or so before reaching that destination, I noticed a couple of spires peaking above the rooftops to the South.  I'd heard before of a set of twin pagoda's in the area and figured that these spires must belong to them.  So I decided to go exploring that direction before shopping.  I took a side trip through the city park first.  Then I went looking for the pagodas.

It was actually harder to find than I'd originally thought it would be.  Funny thing about Suzhou is that it may have a lot of historical sights (and sites), but most of them are hidden behind walls and nearly invisible from the streets.  Even these tall pagodas were difficult to locate.  The streets are so narrow that you can't get a good angle to see them over the tops of the two-story houses.

But I did find the Twin Pagodas, finally.  The pagodas were originally part of a sprawling temple complex built during the late tenth century, during the Song Dynasty.  There is not much left here other than the pagodas.  They're all that remain of the temple, which was destroyed when the British army came to visit in 1840, in what we now call the First Opium War.   In the top photo of the pagodas you can see a some stone columns and a few more stone foundations that once supported more columns.  These are the temple ruins, left as a reminder.

The sizable stone columns suggest that the original temple must have been impressive.  Most of the temples I've seen, even the older ones, are constructed primarily of brick and timbers.  The foundations here indicate a significant structure under roof.  It must have been well decorated too.  On display are a good number of stone carvings that were rescued.  The photo above is an example.

Next door to the twin pagodas is the Ding Hui temple, a smaller temple that was built upon the ruins.  It is a functioning Buddhist temple for the community.  People come to burn incense and offerings as part of their prayers.  The photo above shows a shop on the street which sells the variety of combustibles used by the faithful.  Red, as you might guess, is an auspicious color for such things.  On the table, to the left, are piles of large and small incense sticks.  To the right, lying horizontally, are red wax prayer candles.

Even the temple dogs were decorated with red for the Holiday.  Inside the temple, below, there were not so many people.  I didn't want to take too many photographs because this was not a tourist place.  For once, I figured I would give a little privacy.   I did get caught up in a conversation with a very nice Buddhist monk who spoke very good English.  He was a young fellow - I'd guess in his mid-twenties.  He didn't try to proselytize.  But he was curious to talk about what Christians believe in.   He was benchmarking.

The temple and pagodas are located on a narrow lane in an otherwise residential neighborhood.  A few folks were out strolling.  The photo below shows an elderly couple playing badminton.  Burning off a few calories after the holiday feast, I suppose.  Badminton is popular here, and you see a lot of parents and children playing in the parks.   I thought this couple was cute.  If you look closely at the man on the left, you can see him pivoting gracefully on his toes as if he were doing Tai Chi.

Music in the Park

There is a small city park near the center of the old city of Suzhou.  The people I work with - the younger people - joke that the park is a place for old people to go to.   And so it is.  If you walk through the park in the morning you will find older citizens practicing their Tai Chi.  As morning turns to afternoon, the park fills will grandparent-baby-sitters.  I think the grandparents come there as couples, usually pushing their prized grandchild in a stroller.  Once in the park, the couples split and regroup by gender.  Groups of older men gather under the trees and argue with each other and share cigarettes.  There is a similar gravity that draws all the grandmothers and the strollers together.  I'm not sure, but I think they take turns bragging on their grandchildren.  That is a safe guess.

On week-ends and holidays and warm summer evenings, the park fills with music.  People with talent bring their musical instruments.  People without talent bring a boom box.  People sing.  People dance.  People just enjoy themselves and enjoy being with their neighbors.  They sing all the old songs and, in the process, teach them to the grandchildren.  I suppose this is what village life was like in the days before air conditioning and television and 1500 square foot apartments.  People have gathered around the village commons like this for thousands of years, to share a common fire and to make their own entertainment.  In the truest definition,  "community" is not a collection of buildings, but rather is a collection of people who are actively living with one another.

The modern world has a way of killing off the old definitions of community.  In the U.S., I think that suburbs and air conditioning and television have pretty much erased the traditions of barn dances and community gatherings.  I suppose that in China, the modern world will win in the end.  Maybe these gatherings in Suzhou park are the last vestiges of a dying tradition.  Maybe the current generation - my co-workers - will opt to spend their retirement years surfing the Internet rather than to go out and sing, or dance, or argue with others under the trees in the park.

The holidays of New Year brought out the people in Suzhou City Park just as if it were a week-end or warm summer evening.   On the second day of the New Year holiday, I found several groups of people playing traditional instruments and music.  These were not professional performers or buskers.  No one had a hat out for donations.  It was cooperative Karaoke.  A person in the crowd would take the microphone and ask the old musicians to play a song.  The musicians would play and the person with the microphone would sing.  After the song, everyone would clap.  Then someone new would grab the microphone and request another song. 

I love the faces of the old musicians.  These are old guys.  Workers.  Farmers.  Fathers. Grandfathers.  People who struggled through the hard times of the 1960s and 1970s and sacrificed so that their children and grandchildren might  have better opportunities.  Maybe I'm sentimental, but their faces remind me of my grandfather.  Faces hardened by a hard lives, but the eyes still showing  warm hearts inside.

Not all the people in the park come to sing.  Some come to dance.  There is an pavilion that serves as the community dance floor.  Someone...I don't know whom...brings a monster boom box and sets it up on the grandstand.   The play list varies from traditional Chinese music to country-western to disco.  The people dance. They waltz.  They boogie.  They line dance.  Some of the couples appear to be man and wife.  Other couples appear to be grandmothers killing time dancing together while their husbands are arguing and smoking cigarettes under the trees.

Karaoke is big in China.  The photo above shows and enterprising fellow that has built a portable karaoke studio on the back of an e-bike.  You can see a lady, just right of center, holding the microphone and singing away.  The bike...the pink and red thing...is actually a tricycle.  Between the two rear wheels are a huge battery pack that is used to drive the loudspeakers and computer equipment.  You can see a blue plastic bench atop the seat.  On top of that, there is an LCD monitor.  The man hunched over the tricycle is managing the laptop computer that drives the whole thing.   The people come and request a song.  The man pulls up the song from the laptop.  The song plays and the monitor displays the words for the singer to sing along.

There is more than just music going on in the park.  The photo above shows people fishing in the park ponds.  I don't think there is a fish in that pond more than two inches in length.  But the people go crazy to rent fishing poles and buy bait as if they were on a fishing holiday in Canada.

The photo above shows a calligrapher writing poems on the sidewalk of the park.  Chinese characters are traditionally written by brush and ink.  It is a difficult skill to master, even with a small brush held in hand.  This gentleman is generating perfect characters using a four foot brush.   The people appreciated his skills as much, or more, than the musicians'.