burning spirit money in my neighborhood

Yesterday I saw something strange when I was walking down our street, on my way to go teach at my school. There were these charcoal circles on the octagon sidewalk tiles, and little piles of burnt paper. I sort of pushed the image to the back of my mind, and then forgot about it until this afternoon.

In my World History class that I'm teaching to the Korean students we had a discussion last week about whether or not we should study the ancient China section in our book. Our textbook has a chapter on ancient China, but I skipped over the chapter earlier in the semester, figuring that my students must have learned about ancient China in their other literature and history courses, taught by their actual Chinese teachers. I found out from my students, however, that this was not the case. They really wanted to study more about Ancient China, so that's what we're doing. I actually took several courses in my honors program at Washington State University on ancient China. Still, it's bizarre to be an American teaching Korean students in a Chinese public High School about ancient China. "Unqualified" is the adjective that keeps running through my mind while I teach this unit. In any case, today my student "Abraham" asked me if I had seen the burnt circles on the sidewalks. I said that I had, and he explained to me that people are burning paper money for their ancestors to spend in the afterlife. We also talked about the practice in China of setting off fireworks to keep evil spirits and ghosts away. Abraham and my other Korean students explained to me that in China there are many traditions to scare away the ghosts, while in Korea, there are traditions to encourage the ghosts to visit. Abraham and my other students told me that in Korea the Korean people want the spirits and ghosts from the afterlife to visit them, because the spirits can teach them important things, or help them make decisions. About a half hour ago Erin and I were walking down our street after dinner and there was this amazing line of our neighbors burning little fires of paper money. We stopped and Erin asked a nice man from our neighborhood, in Chinese, about the practice, and he explained it to her. Once we were in our apartment I decided I really wanted to try and take a picture, but then when I got back out in the neighborhood I was nervous and didn't want to do anything inappropriate, or disrespectful. Some of our neighbors saw me and smiled and motioned that it was okay, but I still only took one picture. What an amazing evening.

Chang Cheng

more photos

photos

Ancient Culture Street

In Kansas, if you go to Dodge City, people put on cowboy shows, and tourists are able to see a "real" Western town. I imagine that "Ancient Culture Street" is a little like this in Tianjin. That sounds horribly cynical, and I don't mean it to. I think it's interesting how different cultures all over the world create little areas to reproduce some time period, or place in their history, which they consider to have been a high point. What exactly, or really, "when" exactly a culture chooses to reproduce might be very telling about that particular culture. I'm not going to think about what recreating a gun fight and the graveyard of Boot Hill in Dodge City might mean for my own country. Wait, it's too late. I did think about it. Here are three videos I made in ancient culture street. One is just to show what it looks like, the other is to show this really cool stand where an artist would make little characters out of clay very quickly, and the last one is of a food vendor. I thought the noise coming from his steamer was some kind of musical instrument at first, which was what made me walk over to the area where I made the movies.



Hm. Two of my videos had some trouble uploading. Hopefully I can add them to this post.



I think I fixed it.

pictures of people

I have this pet theory that people should take fewer photographs of "scenery" when they're traveling, and more photographs of people. I think that when I return to the states, the pictures I'm going to want to look at are of the people I got to know in my daily life here. So, with that in mind, I took my camera with me yesterday. The other impetus for this was that Erin chatted with our friend Elliott online and he mentioned that I should post more. This made me miss Elliott like the Dickens, so here you go Elliott. Erin just got off the phone with her sister Megan, as well, and Megan mentioned being curious about what other foods we've been discovering here, after she read the post about the breakfast thing I ate. I'll try to take more pictures of food. If anyone else has suggestions of things they'd like me to post about on this blog, just leave me a comment. Like Mark Twain, I have a "truant disposition", so I need people to help me keep on the blogging straight and narrow.

Picture descriptions: 1) This is a picture of all the flags in front of apartment buildings in our neighborhood, in honor of the holiday for the founding of the PRC. Many women also wear a red berette in their hair for the holiday. I'm going to try and find information about what that's all about. 2) This is a picture of a waitress and one of the owners of the little restaurant that's around the corner from where we live. This place is very close to our apartment. People eat out a lot more frequently here, it seems, than in the U.S. Restaurants are loud, and lively, and social. We frequently see a large number of people from our neighborhood also eating out at this same place. You can see on the wall this gigantic block of pictures of food from their menu. The menu is written entirely in characters, without images, so I think Erin has set a challenge for herself to try and order just from reading the characters in the menu, but we sometimes break down and walk over to the wall to point at things like ignorant Laowai. I really wanted to take a picture of the waitresses, because they're very funny and we've gotten to know them more, but when they saw I had a camera, three of them scurried off. The remaining waitress in this shot is pretending to organize the chopstick and cup sets, but really, she's avoiding having her picture taken. After I took this shot, the guy I assume is one of the owners ushered me over so that I could take a picture of the woman behind the counter. We'll get to her eventually. 3) This is a picture of the lady running the cigarette and booze shop next to the restaurant. These shops are everywhere. All they sell are cigarettes and booze. We've never actually bought anything from this particular lady, but she seemed nice. You can't see him, but there's this guy sitting on the floor behind the counter to this woman's left, dead asleep and snoring loudly. He's the man we wave to who usually runs the shop. Also, I wanted to take this picture so that you could see the insane cigarette lighter they have for sale. Click on the picture to make it bigger. The cigarette lighter is the gold-looking...uh...elephant? I think it resembles those things the Riders of Rohan fought in The Lord of the Rings movies in front of the white city. Anybody want it? I could probably ship it, or fit it into my suitcase on the return trip. 4) I love these guys. These two men run the bicycle repair stand on our corner. There are bicycle repair carts all over the city run by men like this, but these two particular guys run the one in our neighborhood I walk by on my way to get a cab to work each day. I think they might actually be upstart bicycle repairmen, because there's another little shop deeper into the neighborhood that looks more elaborate. One of our friends here said that you should be careful of some of the stands in the city, because some of the ones close to the university sell bicycle locks for a very specific reason. They sell locks that they have the master key to, and then they go bicycle "shopping" after you have one of their locks. These guys don't strike me as running that kind of operation, though. They don't sell locks. And seriously, how could you not trust them? Look at how amused they are. I envy these guys. They get to sit on this corner all day. 5) This is the aforementioned "lady behind the counter" at our local restaurant. I would like to draw your attention to three things. First, there is a nice bust of Mao on the counter. Second, you can sort of see my head in the mirror. Third, this lady's ensemble is not exceptional; in China, feather boas, sequins and see-through, knee-high socks are adequate business attire. Also, pajamas are acceptable if you're just walking along the side of the street for a few miles.