My Chinese Easter Part One

For those of you who were frequent visitors to my blog you might have noticed a prolonged absence. My excuse: I live in China and Blogspot was and still is blocked, don’t ask questions. Here is a long one to make up for it….

My Easter celebration began during my Wednesday night adult English class while I was trying to explain Easter without talking about Christ, virtually impossible. Then my students asked me why we use eggs and why we color them. The research I have done on the subject since then has been rather inconclusive. It is just a bunch of guesses. So I decided against the Easter egg tradition in exchange for something a little more Chinese and therefore a little more exciting.

On Friday night another teacher at my school named Belinda asked if I wanted to come over to her house for dinner with her mother and father and grandmother. We made Easter Jaozi. For those of you who read my Chinese New Year blog, Jaozi are very traditional Chinese dumplings. They are like potstickers, they are made with really thin dough and a variety of meat and vegetable fillings like beef and green pepper or chicken and carrot and then steamed. Belinda’s parents are a bunch of geniuses and used carrot juice, purple cabbage juice and some little green herb (not marijuana) juice to dye the dough orange, purple and green. So we folded the jaozi and they looked like Easter Chinese style. It was far less messy than all of the egg dying I remember and SO tasty. A fabulous Chinese treat. I did NOT however hide the jaozi about the house as I was a guest in the home and could not really imagine making her 96-year-old grandmother scamper around the apartment looking for them.














Saturday morning I went to watch conference at the church. There were about 50 people there despite the fact that it was a rerun. I enjoyed it so much. That evening I tried to go for my yearly Easter mass at the Catholic church here but it was so crowded I couldn’t even get in. I stayed and listened to the priest sing the Mass in Chinese for a while but then I had to go to meet Aunt Ada.














Ada (Grandma Allred’s sister) and Dex (her son, Dad’s cousin) were staying at a very nice hotel right in the middle of Beijing so I went and had dinner with them. They had been to see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and had gone pearl shopping at the pearl market. It was so fun to see family all the way here in China and on Easter no less.

That night we went out bowling and I broke one hundred. I know that claim is rather pathetic to most of you bowlers but…I bowled a 43 a couple of weeks ago. My secret, I just let the ball do the work.

I spent the night at my friend Faye’s house and was able to get to church in 15 MINUTES instead of the standard 2 hour commute to church that I have grown to love and hate. That was my first Easter miracle, then I got two bags of Easter chocolately goodness from a couple of the amazing members of the branch here. Side note: If a person gains nothing else from living abroad other than the chance to see how wards were, in my opinion, meant to function like a close knit loving family then it is all worth it. I have been blown away by how amazing the members of the church are here and how kind and loving they are toward me. So, bags of chocolatey goodness was Easter miracle #2. Conference, as always, was amazing but I was really sad to see Sister Parkin be released. I am sure the next General RSP will be wonderful, but for some reason I really loved Sister Parkin. She just seemed so humble and real to me, like someone whom you could just sit down with at her kitchen table and talk about life and she would be wonderful and understanding and loving and down to earth. More on that later. After church a family from the ward invited the YSA over to Easter Dinner; Easter miracle #3. There was hanging out and general Easter appropriate merriment to be had all day. All in all it was a fabulous Easter weekend and what with three miracles, someone should be sainted.

Fall Carefully

I haven’t posted much from Beijing but I am having a blast and my internet is a nightmare. I am paying for unlimited access BUT I have had the internet guy out here twice already and it works well for like the day that he comes and then it starts to get spotty and unreliable again.

So, class is going well. I am learning how to be a first grade teacher and as it turns out it is kind of tough and really exhausting. I tell everyone that I teach a swarm of first graders because I think that is the best way to describe them. They are like a swarm of bees, cute, in constant motion and ALWAYS making noise. It is especially interesting because the kids don’t understand me. To them I sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher and so they find it very easy to tune me out so that is exactly what they do. They have been given English names to emphasize the “English environment”; problem being I only know their English names and most, if not all, of them can’t recognize their name. So I can say their name a bazillion times and they will never turn around and stop hitting the kid behind them. I have however learned some great techniques let a teacher or a speaker know that you’re bored. One of my favorite includes acting like you died all of a sudden and you just slink out of your chair and fall motionless to the ground and remain there until the pace of the lesson changes to something more exciting. The other one that I think works well is getting out of your chair and going to the back of the room and acting like a frog leaping across the room. This one will usually draw the attention of all the other people in the room that are bored and cause them to join you.

Every day at 10:00 am all the students have to go to one of the courtyards and they do “exercises.” There are a bunch of dances that the PE teachers have taught the kids. They blast music through the loud speakers and the kids are all supposed to do the dance in unison. These are my first graders. They don’t do it as well as the 7th graders but they are getting it.

I teach about 50 of the teachers at the school every Wednesday night and that class is REALLY easy in comparison and actually a lot of fun.


A guy from the branch who speaks really good Mandarin taught me his method for learning new vocabulary and correct sentence structures. It consists of carrying a small notebook and a pen with you wherever you go and writing down new words and the way that people use them. A teacher from my school invited me to go with her to a huge botanical garden in Southern Beijing. It is March and still freezing so this garden was all housed within these huge greenhouses. Having never been much of a flower person, I went more to get more Chinese vocab for my notebook than for the flowers but I was amazed with how beautiful the gardens were. We were there all day and I had a blast with my friend Belinda, her parents, her grandparents, her friend and her friend’s daughter. These were my favorite ones. In Chinese they are called beautiful Butterflies.

This last one is just because well, as China becomes more and more foreigner friendly they are trying to translate a lot of their signs into English. Some times the most entertaining part of a tourist attraction are the translations. This one is one that I liked from the gardens. It says "fall carefully" and is placed over a pool of sludge. What, may I ask, does it mean to "fall carefully?"

Miss Desk

So I made it to Beijing despite the crazy bus driver’s best efforts to kill us all. I did get to see how the people of rural China deal with a car crash from my seat in the bus I could see the big crane lifting the car and aided by about sixty onlookers. No police tape, no concerns about safety and really no supervision. What will become of China when people learn how to sue?

So I got to Beijing and was promptly taken to my apartment. I live alone in a “nice” two-bedroom apartment south of Beijing in a little suburb called Yi Hai. The school that I work at is like a five-minute walk from my apartment and I get all my meals for free there. They are actually pretty good meals. The school is a HUGE private school with about 2,500 students. Many of the students live at the school and they all wear these great brown uniforms. I was hired to participate in a new program that gives the first grade students three classes with a foreign teacher each week. I have nine classes with about 30 students in each class. The students are, for the most part, well-behaved. They have a ton of energy, which, comes as no surprise because they are first graders. The other thing that makes teaching a bit difficult is something the Chinese call the “little emperor syndrome” which affects many of the little kids in China. Since China’s one child policy is still in place (although not as strictly enforced) it means that all the children in China are only children and not only are they only children, for this generation they are also only grandchildren which means they are used to being doted upon and cherished and well, spoiled so they get a little cranky when they have to share the attention of a teacher between 30 students. So far it is not too bad but every teacher that I have met in China says that this situation is a particularly difficult challenge, especially among the wealthier families. I teach 29 classes a week including two classes to the teachers.

On the first day of class they asked me to do a review of some of the vocabulary they learned last week. So I had the kids running around touching all their vocab words. Like the door, something blue something red, the blackboard etc. When I told them to touch a desk a bunch of them ran up and started touching me. I was really confused at first but it turns out that Jessica sounds very much like “desk” to a first grade Chinese student with a limited vocabulary. So now the students call me Miss Desk and I am sure they are very confused as to why my parents would name me desk. Mom, Dad and explanation? I will try to take some pictures this week but I don’t’ feel very touristy in Beijing.

In the meantime...here is a picture of one of Cui Guo Hua's nephews. I took it to show you all the famous Chinese split pants. This is the East's answer to diapers. Basically little kids wear pants that are split in the middle until they are potty trained. When they are little they just pee on the floor or on the sidewalk or wherever. They are potty trained a lot earlier here (I have been told) because they never learn to pee in their pants. The result, all the little kids saunter around with their bare bums sticking out and it makes me a little uncomfortable to hold the babies.

New Years Day!

On New Years Day I was startled awake by the blasting in of the New Year with all sorts of explosives. For breakfast we had Jaozi as is the custom and my Chinese little sister Mimi put on her new clothes which she was thrilled about.

Then I went with Cui Guo Hua to perform another very important New Years custom, that is to go around to all of your friends and relatives and wish them a happy New Year. At each of the homes they offer you fruit, candy and nuts from a platter and beg you to sit and stay awhile. At each of the houses you refuse and leave within five minutes.
We visited Cui Guo Hua’s uncle’s home and I took this picture to show you a typical Chinese farmer’s home. It consists of three rooms, the one that you enter is the kitchen and then there is a bedroom on either side, the bedrooms typically also serve as sitting rooms to entertain guests. The bed is a huge brick block that takes up on whole side of the room and is connected to the stove in the kitchen by tubes underneath to keep it warm. The front is ALL windows and typically faces East so as to let in the light and the warmth and there is a huge pile of corn in front of every home in this area of the country they are all corn farmers.

We also visited Cui Guo Hua’s grandfather. He was so sweet and nice and I thought he looked like cute old Chinese man.

For lunch and dinner we had jaozi again and I had hid a quarter in one of them, Cui Guo Hua’s mother found it, Lucky her!







That night when I got home, Mimi wanted to go and light fireworks in patio by her apartment complex, so her father took us downstairs to light some. Mr Hui works in the forest service and regularly gets calls in the middle of the night to go fight fires and Mrs. Hui is a nurse so you can imagine how mild the fireworks they let Mimi light are. It was a completely different experience than the night before.





The next day Cui Guo Hua’s friend wanted me to go with his parents, his wife and he to visit the village where he was born that was up in the mountains and has only had a paved road between it and Ping Quan for a few years so you can imagine how isolated they have been. In Ping Quan the people stare at me as they walk past. In the small villages they actually stop in their tracks and act as though they have seen a ghost. His friend's father was born into what was a wealthy family before the revolution and so, because of his last name, was ordered by the communist party to go with his wife to a tiny, poor village up in the mountains to be a doctor for what the Party called "reeducation." This picture was taken in front of the home of the lady who babysat Cui Guo Hua's friend.















This is the hospital that his father worked at and is still being used as a hospital. Inside it was freezing and very dirty and there were tons of broken empty glass medicine bottles.

Happy New Year!!

Chinese New Year was on Sunday, February 18th and it was a celebration unlike anything I have ever seen. It was like Christmas on crack.

Wednesday was the last day of class for the pupils at the study center so that everyone could have time to prepare.

I don’t think that any description of the New Year will quite do it justice because you can’t HEAR it. In rural China, firecrackers are a very important element to any New Year celebration so ringing in the New Year sounds more like World War III. People are lighting firecrackers all day and all night without stopping for five days. So Friday, Cui Guo Hua and I went to buy some. He spent over 600 Yuan, which is almost two months salary for most people in this town and he spent far less than many other people. We took a taxi out to his parents house who live in a small village a few miles from Ping Quan to drop them all off.

Friday night there were so many firecrackers that I didn’t sleep at all. Saturday morning I lay awake in my bed listening to what sounded like gunshots and bombs, mixed with laughter. It was a very odd mixture of sound. I got up and had breakfast and then met Cui Guo Hua to go to buy some last minute vegetables at the market. The market was packed with people. They were selling candy, vegetables and lanterns and these red paper signs to paste around the door for the New Year.












We took a taxi out to his parent’s house and helped paste the red paper signs around the front door. These red paper signs basically say the wishes of the family for fortune or happiness or whatever. EVERY home and business has them hanging outside. The little boy in the picture is Cui Guo Hua's five year old nephew. He and I get along wonderfully, he talks incessantly to me and leads me around the village. I don't think he notices or cares that I don't speak Chinese, he is just thrilled that I follow him. He has lived with his grandparents since he was born. His parents come every six months to see him but now that he is old enough to go to school they are going to take him home with them. I feel so bad for Cui Guo Hua's mother, she adores him.

Then we went in to the house and everyone was helping to prepare the big meal. At 2:00 p.m. on New Years Eve they have a huge feast. Cui Guo Hua taught me how to make ba si Hong Shu (candied sweet potatoes). We had a big meal with his parents, his younger sister, her husband and their son. Most of it was very good. There were a few dishes that I opted out of but I loved the sweet and sour pork.





After the meal, we cleaned up and then the tradition is to make joazi to be eaten at midnight and all the next day. Jaozi are Chinese dumplings; they have a meat and cabbage or chives filling wrapped in dough. They are called potstickers at Costco and are like wontons only steamed not fried. Cui Guo Hua’s mother and younger sister taught me how to make them and we sat around and folded jaozi for a few hours and then we ate them at about 11:30. They are really good and fun to make.

















At about five minutes to midnight we went out and started lighting firecrackers. It was so loud and crazy. I think I may have lost some of my hearing. These firecrackers are no American fireworks, they are blow your head off type firecrackers, so loud and powerful you can feel them more than see them. Cui Guo Hua, as I said before is slightly crazy and he put a string of firecrackers in an old dry tree, I don’t know why, but there was not mishap there. However the huge firecracker he put on top of the main gate to his home had about 20 of the kind of firecrackers that professionals set off in the US and one of them malfunctioned and blew out of the side. It started a small fire in his parents shed. I thought his mother was going to have a panic attack but it all worked out. It was after one in the morning by the time we were ready to head back into town. There were no taxis, it was very dark and FREEZING. We rode bikes back into town. Riding a bike in rural China is an adventure in and of itself. I will tell you about New Years Day in the next post. Stay tuned…

Adventures in food..

So I consider myself a fairly adventurous person and not a wimp about most things. Rural China has challenged that perception in so many ways. One of those ways is the food. Cui Guo Hua likes to have me try new things, which works out really well sometimes and really not well at all sometimes.

The other day we ate these big black worms. Well they were black because they had been roasted but they had a crunchy outer shell and were white and soft inside. The insides were the consistency of tofu with very little flavor. I ate two of them and was not totally disgusted but would probably not order them again.














One of the favorite dishes here is chicken soup. Basically, you put a large bowl of chicken meat and chicken broth over a flame in the middle of a table and then order all the things you want to put in the soup separately. The waitress brings out little plates of raw potatoes, tofu, cabbage, carrots, radish, onion, noodles, etc and you throw them in the broth and fish them out when they are cooked to your liking. The chicken that they put in it is prepared by taking the feathers off of a chicken, but leaving the skin on and then marinating it and then taking a cleaver and chopping it into pieces and throwing it in a bowl. So the pieces of meat contain, fat, bone fragments, cartilage and pieces of lots of different organs. One of the great treats is the chicken head. When you look down into the soup the only parts of the chicken that are really identifiable are the head and the feet. I have not worked up the courage to eat the head yet, but I will.














I guess it is a very western thing to not want to look into the eyes of the food you are eating because I am always surprised when the fish comes out still intact with the eyes looking at me. This place is a barbeque place where they bring out different types of meat on skewers and you roast them over coals that are in a hole in the middle of your table.















So breakfast is one of the few things in my life that are currently completely out of my control. I live with the Hui family and either Mr. or Mrs. Hui prepares my breakfast and they call me in at about 7:40 every morning to eat “zaofan.” I trudge with dread to the kitchen to see what awaits me. Sometimes it is great. There is ”porridge” that is the consistency of oatmeal and I think is more like cracked wheat or something. It has no taste but is hot and great for breakfast. They choose to flavor it with salt and vinegar. I usually eat it plain. Other mornings we will eat sautéed onions and bell peppers and meat. They are all dripping in oil. We also eat a lot of seafood, the type that are little sea creature (you can tell by the taste) that still have their feet and eyes on them and you just watch them swim around in your soup. Breakfast is usually very salty and very oily. It is definitely an adventure. Sometimes we just have steamed bread. They are balls of bread the size of a baseball that you put in a steamer until they cook. Nobody has ovens around here so that is how they cook the bread.

Warming up...

So it started to get a little warmer here this week so Cui Guo Hua decided we would take the students into the hills that surround their town and go “mountain climbing.” I was so excited to get outside and march around in the hills even though they were basically big dirt mounds. So 34 of our students showed up at 8:30 Wednesday morning and Cui Guo Hua had them get into four lines and we marched through the middle of town out towards the mountains. We climbed up steep trails and explored all over the mountains. Cui Guo Hua, being a philosopher, a tad crazy and the proud owner of a rather severe superiority complex wanted to make this little outing difficult for the kids so that they would “know what it is to be tired, hungry and in pain” I was not really buying into this idea so I told him I would lead and he should stay behind. He agreed after I pretended not to understand him long enough that he got frustrated and said okay. We gave the kids lots of rests but he still managed to make them scale some pretty steep hills and go down some pretty steep and uneven drops. He managed to make a few girls cry and I remembered hiking with the family and being scared of heights and Dad making me walk up morro rock anyways, so I decided that if I survived it they could and let him teach his little lessons while I disagreed in my head. The kids were exhausted by the time we got off the mountain and headed back into town. I made them sing “If you are happy and you know it” as we walked through a little farming village and all the people came out and watched us walk by like we were a parade. When we walked through Ping Quan lots of people just started following us to listen to me talk to the kids. It was pretty funny. I loved being outside and hiking around but am amazed that we made it back to the study center at 1:30 pm with all 34 students still alive.

This is me walking down one of the streets in Ping Quan with the students.














This is the students walking along the trail with Ping Quan in the background.















This one is Cui Guo Hua (He is the one with both of his arms up standing at the highest part of the rock) and the students.














I was loving the warmer weather right up until about two hours after we got back and it started snowing. For those of you who live in Bakersfield, in a place as cold as Ping Quan it has to warm up in order to snow. It snowed for several hours last night, which made the air a little cleaner and made the town seem a little cleaner temporarily.