I’m on the Top of the World

(Perhaps, but I still spend most of my time on the floor.)

China’s “official” Valentine’s Day is July 7 (or thereabouts), but that hasn’t dissuaded businesses from attempting to make money whenever they can. In China, retail companies promote November 11 as a time to give presents to that special single person in your life. November 11, of course, is 1111, implying that you unmarried people are all alone. Sadly, no one gave me anything on 1111.

China does not celebrate Thanksgiving. Why should they? What do they care about the Mayflower and dinner with a bunch of Indians on the east coast of America? So businesses here start pushing Christmas early in November (unlike America, where we respectfully wait until the middle of November).

Yes, many people in China celebrate Christmas, not in a religious manner but as an excuse to decorate and give each other presents. (Hmmm, sound familiar?)

By the beginning of December, the big Wal-Mart-type stores were fully stocked with the required high-end stuff. Here’s Carrefour:

My friend Xiaowen, who in many ways is more like a 13-year-old kid than a Ph.D. student in mathematical logic, enjoys goofing off with the stuff for sale (though she rarely buys anything):

My friends are so very considerate, always wanting me to feel at home and worrying about me on Western holidays. Thus on Christmas eve I was invited to dinner at the apartment of one of my Chinese teacher friends and her Swedish husband…

Initially I was excited to see them (Lynne and Stefan) drinking some alcoholic beverage, but I soon learned it was some sort of Swedish sangria, and I’m not a fan of fruity wine concoctions.

Fortunately, I soon found another table with real wine, cheese, and crackers.

Their only other guest was a biology Ph.D. student from Peking University.

I think I finished off half the bleu cheese before dinner began.

The table was decorated and set nicely, in a Western way,…

Stefan did all the cooking, asserting that this is his one day in the year to eat Swedish food. In addition to a simple salad of lettuce and tomatoes and rolled up slices of ham, he made many delicious dishes, such as potatoes,…

…unusual potato gratin flavored with sauerkraut or something (I’ll have to ask because I loved it),…

…tomatoes and sausages,…

…a wonderful cole slaw-type dish,…

…interesting and delicious deviled eggs with shrimp,…

…and two different kinds of salmon, smoked and cured by Stefan himself.

Stefan told me that salmon is so common in Sweden, especially northern Sweden, that there is a law that prevents companies that feed their staff from serving salmon more than twice a day. That’s fine with me because in the year just after I left EPA and went to work for a K-Street trade association (1984), I often took clients to Ernie’s Crab House on Connecticut and L Streets; during that period I ODed on salmon, and to this day I rarely order.

As we were finishing our meal, Stefan brought a selection of flavored vodkas. Of the six, the lemon one tasted the best. The worst was hazelnut — I think.

In 2007, during my first trip to China, I took a local Beijing bus from our hotel to the zoo. On this bus there was a music system, and as I was standing and holding on for dear life, I was surprised to hear “Top of the World” by the Carpenters come on. What was even more surprising was that many of the passengers on the bus sang along. This observation puzzled me for over 2 weeks, at which time the same phenomenon occurred in an elevator in Xiamen, a seaside resort city in Fujian Province (southern China). I asked our guide why so many Chinese knew this song, and he explained: In the mid-1970s there was a brief time when China opened to the West, and in that time period there were two groups whose music quickly infiltrated China: the Carpenters and the Eagles. Then China closed up again, but the popularity of “Top of the World” and “Hotel California” persisted. Thus I was not surprised that the music listened to throughout the entire meal was this:

The next day, Christmas Day, one of my friends Cheng Lan came over late in the afternoon to make sure I wasn’t alone on Christmas.

That’s when she confided in me that she was a Christian, something people generally don’t go around China advertising vociferously. I made my ever-popular spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce and meatballs,…

…served with a pretty good Malbec.

Cheng Lan brought me a 4-inch panda statuette, which is still on my table – somewhere.

She also brought me one apple in its own special box.

Many Chinese like to give their friends an apple at Christmas. The Chinese characters for apple are 苹果, and the characters for peace are 平安. The first characters, though different, are pronounced the same. Thus when you give someone an apple at Christmas you are saying “peace.”

Apple to all of you.

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This Little Light of Mine

On the 15th day of the first month of the lunar calendar, China celebrates its Lantern Festival. This year it will take place on February 15.

Lantern Festival is also the name given to the mid-autumn festival in Singapore, Malaysia, and other countries in southeast Asia. It turns out that my dorm floor is loaded with families from that part of the world, and they invited me to their own Lantern Festival. The women cook…

…and there was a ton of food, none of it Chinese but all of it good.

In addition to the stuff on the main table (above), there little puff pastries that were filled on the spot with some meat-vegetable mixture.

They lit up our dorm hallway with candles leading to the apartment with all the food.

Outside that apartment were more candles near a design,…

…and inside was another design on the floor.

I asked two different people the meaning of the sign and the Festival and I got two different answers. So I intentionally forgot both. Maybe one of my former students will clue us in.

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Holiday Inn

No, I’m not referring to that large chain with small rooms but rather to the 1942 movie with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. They set up a country inn in Vermont or Connecticut (who can tell the difference?) that specializes in song-and-dance shows on holidays (e.g., Thanksgiving, Christmas).

Speaking of old movies, I watched “Double Wedding” (1937) last night with William Powell and Myrna Loy, who are best known for their “Thin Man” series of movies in the 1930s. I don’t know if I was in a particularly giggly mood, but I have to say I was alone but laughing out loud with tears in my eyes.

Anyway, like America, China celebrates, either officially or unofficially, a flurry of holidays during the fall and winter, and the next few posts deal with those.

Halloween

Fall and early winter in America is a time of holidays and holiday parties, and one of the most common questions I get from my friends back home is “Do the Chinese celebrate X holiday?” It seems to me the Chinese take every opportunity celebrate any holiday that augments their already burgeoning consumerism. Not only do they celebrate their traditional holidays, they use many Western holidays as excuses to exchange gifts and to set up displays in stores urging people to buy cheap junk related to the upcoming holiday. (Sound familiar?)

In October Carrefour was loaded with Halloween stuff: masks and costumes, plastic pumpkins, trick-or-treat pails, etc. The top two floors of my door is populated primarily by foreign teachers, many of whom have Chinese spouses. So as not to lose all threads back to American holidays, they do a great job of reproducing key aspects of these holidays. For Halloween, they gave everyone in the dorm (or at least this part of it) a small piece of paper in the shape of a pumpkin with instructions to tape it to our door if we want to participate in Trick-or-Treat.

I, being the local social butterfly, decided I had to participate in order to keep that status. Here’s my front door on Halloween. In addition to my white paper pumpkin, I added a scary mask at the appropriate height. Also, in case I haven’t shown you already, my door is bordered by two embroidered decorations obtained in Guanxi Province when I was there with KK.

At the announced time, the hall suddenly became gravid with trick-or-treaters and their escorts.

As expected, the kids were cute in their outfits:

Here are Xiaowen (a good friend) and I (on the right) ready to dispense some weird candy we found at the store.

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Food Heals All Wounds

I’m now to the point where I am semi-mobile. To celebrate, I accepted a lunch invitation from the mother whose daughter I was teaching English to in the park last summer. I walked from my apartment across the street to a restaurant on the campus of Renmin University. I started off with plenty of extra time, I thought, but I was late because I could only walk at a snail’s pace. Here’s the hostess of the lunch:

My good friend from the park Jingjing was there also, as was his wife.

Though we had her a lot about each other through Jingjing, this was our first meeting. She also had a bad back last year, and she brought me some Chinese medicine that she thought would help my ailing body. She brought several stick-on medicated patches in beautiful packaging.

She also brought me a couple of ointments from Thailand.

She emphasized that these were all high quality (and Jingjing added “expensive”) medicines.

In addition, the hostess brought me special vitamins for my back…

…and some cookies and candy from her daughter who is still in New York.

As usual, enough food to feed a battle-starved battalion was ordered.

In addition to a large Peking duck, we had a friseé salad,…

…some unidentified vegetable that was both people and slightly sweet,…

…tofu curry,…

…tofu soup,…

…a plate of unidentifiable meat products (either no one COULD identify them or WOULD identify them, but I ate them anyway – is this the literal definition of glutton for punishment?),…

… my favorite eggplant dish,…

…pig’s feet with beans,…

…sushi,…

…and last, and least, cucumbers with a chunky brown sauce of unknown ingredients. This is the first time in my entire life that I actively sought to eat a cucumber and actually finished the whole think because (1) the sauce mystérieuse was pretty good, and (2) the cucumbers in China taste better than American cucumbers (milder, for example).

We spent 3 hours talking about 2 things: my back and Mingming’s daughter. Mingming was hoping I could use my connections to get Helen into a good university. There was a time when Jingjing was eating, I had finished, and the two women were talking rapidly in Chinese. It reminded me of scenes I’ve witnessed in restaurants in Italy where a family of 8-10, sitting at a picnic-type table, would all be talking at the same time and no one would lose track of any of the 3-4 conversations gong on.

At the end, Jingjing and I agreed that he would come over to my apartment for lunch or dinner in a few days – which he did, bringing his wife (below, in pink) and one of her friends whom Jingjing calls Red Generation #2.

He calls her Red Generation #2 (RG2), which evidently is a commonly known phrase, because her father was an important general in the Communist revolution.

Several decades ago my wife and I had a dinner party for 12 people. We told everyone to come at 7. One couple (two good friends) arrived and they were surprised to find that we were serving dinner. Because they were hungry, they stopped at McDonalds on the way to our house and thus arrived not very hungry. This episode came to my mind when I asked everyone if they were hungry and all 3 of them said no, not very. This still befuddles me: why would you eat a short time before going to someone’s house for dinner? Jingjing ate lunch at 2:00 and arrived at my place at 5:00. Good grief!

The first course was my now-world-famous dumplings.

I have introduced my dumpling cooking method to several Chinese friends, all of whom have now adopted it in their own kitchen’s to the delight of their spouses. RG2 was so enamored of them, she insisted on knowing whether I made the dumplings from scratch and, if not, where I bought them. I simply told her “It was magic!”

If you’ll keep it just between us, I tell all. I buy the dumplings at a grocery store on Renmin’s campus where they make them fresh to order. Instead of having them boiled there (which I used to), I now ask them not to cook them. I take the dumplings home, freeze them, and when company arrives, I move the required number of dumplings directly from the freezer to boiling water for 4 minutes. Then I briefly pat them dry with a paper towel and move them to aluminum foil that has a light coating of canola oil. When we’re ready to eat them, I fry them gently in olive oil.

I serve the dumplings with two different dipping sauces: (1) Spanish balsamic vinegar, and (2) a concoction of soy sauce, a little wasabi, and a little sesame paste, which my friends now copy. I set out for China to change its education system; guess I’ll change its cuisine while I’m here.

In between the dumplings and the main course, Jingjing’s cell phone rang. I almost asked him not to answer it – you all know how I feel about cell phones – but instead I just took his photo from a distance.

I previously had given Jingjing several options to choose from for dinner, and he said his wife wants Option 3: Italian pasta with homemade tomato sauce. Evidently they liked it.

After 2½ hours we broke out dessert. A friend brought me a dessert the day before, thinking I was starving or something and still physically unable to get forage for food. It was a small cake topped with chocolate mousse and fruit.

It was OK, but you know, when it comes to looking for great desserts in China, all I can think of is “needle in a haystack.” It’s like trying to find a great dessert in Guatemala where, if you’re lucky, you end up with a little guava with cream cheese. Let’s face it: if you want the great desserts of this world, go to France or Italy. Period. Well, not period, because Belgium has the best chocolate.

After all that, it’s clear I need to go eat dinner now. I have a fridge full of leftovers (Chinese stir-fry, stroganoff, pasta, cheese, etc.), and I can’t make anything else until I clear a little room.

Chow.

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Alone Again, Naturally

This is the first of only two hit songs Gilbert O’Sullivan had in the early 1970s. Do you know the other? It’s one of my favorite girl names, despite the fact that I don’t ever think I was close to a girl with that name.

For many years I spent the 3rd week of July in Glacier National Park, one of the most beautifully majestic places I’ve been. About 8 years ago, on our last day in the Park, FII, David R. (another childhood friend), a few other knuckleheads, and I did a marathon hike of 23 miles that included 3 peaks. Grueling!

When I returned to VA I discovered a slight tingling in my left leg. Because I was due to depart for Portugal in 7 days, I visited my doctor, just to be safe. It turned out that I had a herniated disc at L5-S1. He gave me a prescription for Percocet, which I failed to get filled.

My wife and I spent the following week tooling around in a little car, eating and drinking the rustic fare and shopping for pottery. After dropping her off at the airport in Lisbon, I headed north into the hills with my bicycle.

I found a little rural campground where I settled in, setting up my tiny one-man tent and putting together my bike. That afternoon I took off for a 25-mile ride through the beautiful hilly countryside, but when I returned and got off my bike, I had an ENORMOUS pain in my leg that prevented me from doing anything, including walking. Sciatica.

I spent the following 10 days on my back in the tent, unable to move without severe pain. I was the only camper at this place, and the only other human was the campground’s owner, Qim. My daily routine, other than lying in the tent, consisted of (1) hobbling to take a shower (after which it took me 10 minutes to tie my shoes), Qim helping me into his car and driving me to lunch, and Qim half carrying me to a nearby village for dinner. One bottle of wine and 3 Vicodin per day was all that made the pain bearable.

I returned to the U.S. and got cortisone shots that fixed the problem.

A couple weeks ago a friend was helping me get off the floor and yanked too hard. Initially the pain in my back seemed mostly of a muscular nature, so I continued going to my massage guy (Jerry Zhang) who carefully worked on my back. His wife put a patch on my back that she said would.

On the way back to my apartment I stopped into the English teachers’ office room where there are 10 small cubicles. I needed to pick up a package from one of the teachers. As I entered, I smelled the distinctive odor of eucalyptus and assumed someone there had been sucking on cough drops or something. Then I proceeded to a classroom to talk with some students. One of them asked me if I was sick; I said no, that just had a bad back. He said he wondered because he could smell Chinese herbal medicine. I told him that I just came from a room where that smell odor was strong and that it must have stuck to my clothes. It wasn’t until I got to my apartment and continued to smell eucalyptus that I realized that I was in truth the source: the patch on my back. Ah, yes, we have met the enemy…

A week ago came the sharp pain in my right leg that was totally debilitating. I was now homebound, barely able to make it to the bathroom.

The principal, always caring and now worried about my condition, sent over her personal massage therapist, Dr. Li. In the photo below, she is sitting at my kitchen table while my friends Ruby and Mi Qi explain the situation.

Dr. Li came three consecutive days, working on me for an hour each day. This was not your typical massage. To be frank, every minute was torture. Here she is pushing my arm back until I squealed in pain; then she pushed a little more.

For the full hour each day, I was gripping the edges of the bed and biting into the sheet. On the second day, when Ruby and her husband Eric came, she had Eric pull on my leg very hard while she did the same to my head. I was sure I was in imminent danger of becoming paralyzed.

Then she took her thumbs and her other 15 finders and dug them deep into my abdomen so she could manipulate my viscera.

I assumed, perhaps erroneously, that she knew what she was doing.

The Chinese have a different concept of privacy than we do. My friends seemed to have no qualms, or even second thoughts, about coming into my bedroom and watching me undergo this near-death experience.

Dr.Li’s ministrations did not reduce the pain. She asked me if I wanted her to come back, saying that it usually takes 10 visits to solve this problem. Evidently I would be paying nothing; the principal was picking up the tab, though I’m not sure. I told her I was going the next day (last Monday) to get an MRI, and she scoffed at that. (Part of the abhorrent bourgeoisie life style?)

Last Monday I went to the hospital. A school car and driver were arranged. Ruby came with me to take care of all the administrative stuff (and there’s lots!), and Mi Qi came, also, to make sure I didn’t fall down. Both of them were needed.

The first step is to register, which usually costs 10-20 RMB. Because I was cleared (thanks to phone calls from my famous principal, I was cleared to see a VIP doctor. (They’re much better than the proletariat doctors. No doubt.) Registration to see him, however, cost 300 RMB.

First, the X-rays. There was a mob of people waiting to get X-rays, but I was bumped to the front of the line. Inside the room, while I was standing next to the X-ray machine, Mi Qi was outside holding everyone’s coats and stuff, and Ruby was in the little booth with the male technician and a female assistant. There was a big window so they could see me. The technician told Ruby how he wanted me to stand and she, looking through the window, translated through a microphone and speaker. When he asked me to lower my pants to my knees, I felt foolish and embarrassed, but I was in no position to argue. (Thank goodness there were no holes in my underwear, something my mother always warned me about – just in case, she said.)

Then the MRI. Again I was put in front of the mob standing outside the MRI door. I went in, got onto the narrow tray, and the technician (male) told me to lower my pants. (Are these guys are perverts or what?) Fortunately, the door was closed and he and I were alone. Twenty minutes later I was sliding out of that noisy contraption, anxious to pull up my pants. By now, however, the technician had opened the door, so the mob and my friends were all peering in as I pulled up my pants.

We then went to a different floor where there was still another mob, waiting to see doctors who read the MRIs and X-rays. In just a couple minutes, though, my name was called and my friends and I were shown into a modest office where a distinguished-looking neurosurgeon told me I had a herniated and prolapsed (broken) disc between L2 & L3. He recommended immediate surgery but that, aside from the pain, there was no urgency.

I said thanks, took his prescriptions for painkillers, and left.

Back at home, I found the only non-painful position was on the floor (on cushions) with my leg raised, and this is how I slept for several days.

For a number of days I alternated between bed and floor, depending on pain level. In order to work a little during the day, I propped up my head with my laptop on my stomach (stomach-top?).

I had to leave my door unlocked all the time so people could come by. The cafeteria staff delivered all my meals, usually to me directly on the floor.

Yes, those are cucumbers to the left. What is with the Chinese and cucumbers?!

Others brought me flowers…

…or the omnipresent fruit.

Now I’m to the point where I can sleep in my bed, though last night I was awakened at 3 a.m. by a sharp pain in my right leg, upon which I remembered I had forgotten to take my painkiller yesterday before retiring for the night, so I got up and did.

My main doctor back in Washington is truly one of the best, but he’s very conservative, thinking that surgery should be a last resort only. He told me to toughen up, put up with a little pain, and see if things get better on their own. I’ve never gone against his advice, so here I am, home alone (except for the constant stream of visitors), taking inadequate painkillers.

The school’s clinic sent up its wheelchair, which was a rickety old thing with only one foot pad. It didn’t really matter, though, because I couldn’t sit more than a minute at a time. When Ruby saw that old thing, she had the principal buy a new one,…

Which was useful a few days later when Mi Qi wheeled me into a different, nearby hospital to get more painkillers because the maximum amount for a prescription of this type here is 2 weeks, clearly not enough time.

I spend almost the entire day lying on the floor. I used to complain at TJ that I didn’t have enough time to think, thanks to the meetings and other trivia. Now I think I have TOO much time to think.

At least now I’m to the point where I can sit at my computer for more than a few minutes, hence this medical report.

I’M REALLY BORED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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He Loves Me Knot

Three days a week I go to my Traditional Chinese Massage Therapist (Zhang). (See “Suicide is Painless.) It’s a 25-minute bike ride along flat but busy streets.

It’s a very modest place, both inside and out. Here is the entrance,…

…the sign,…

…and the waiting room.

When I arrive, this quiet man (who goes by Jerry to Westerners) welcomes me warmly every time, as does his wife Annie. They are really two of the nicest people I’ve met. Both of them are legally blind, though I think her vision is slightly better.

I lay face down on the slightly cushioned table with my face in the hole, whereupon this quiet, gentle man immediately and viciously attacks my back, seeking and quickly finding the knots. He takes his thumb and presses it deep into the knot, apparently with the goal of creating as much pain as possible in yours truly. Meanwhile, I’m clenching my teeth and fiercely grabbing the sides of the table. He can’t see me do this, of course, and I try not to utter any sound that would betray my discomfort – not that I think it would matter.

At least he interrupts the torture intermittently with gentle rubbing of my neck and head. He also goes up and down my body, pressing hard on specific points on my body. This is acupressure treatment where the therapist presses hard for a few seconds on the acupuncture points in the body in order to help the body heal itself. I don’t know how effective it is, but most of it is painless, which is my main concern. There are a couple points, however, that make me clench my teeth, etc., such as behind the knee.

There’s not much privacy here. There are 3 beds closely packed together. He works at one, Annie at another, and the third has a tall metal frame that befuddled me until my last trip there. First, there was another American there, the only other non-local Chinese person I’ve seen there. He came for cupping therapy, an ancient Chinese treatment whereby cups are placed on the back, and then suction is created by heat. This is supposed to increase blood flow, which in turn helps the body heal itself and provide relief from fatigue.

This guy was a real talker and I’m not, so I may have appeared rude. But he was nice and he is a professor mechanical engineering at a Florida university.

After he left, a 20-something woman arrived for a different kind of treatment. She lay face down on the bed with the frame, and Annie walked up and down her back, holding onto the frame. This took me back to my junior year in high school when I had 90-pound Japanese girlfriend who walked up and down my back – without the use of a frame, I might add.

Jerry knows I’m an adviser at China’s most famous high school, so he asked me one day if I would meet with his 15-year-old daughter Candy and talk about how to do better in school. So they came over to RDFZ on a Saturday morning and for 1.5 hours I imparted pearls of wisdom on study skills.

With my usual penchant for exploration, I’ve tried different routes to and from his place in order to identify the least dangerous route. I found this area outside a university crowded with street food sellers, and I stopped for a $1 bowl of stir-fried vegetables.

As usual, it was very good.

As I continued on my new route home, I came to a train crossing.

Note that they don’t have a little bar that lowers but rather a telescoping gate. I suspect that if they had a mere bar, many people would crawl under the bar to cross just ahead of the train. We did indeed wait for many minutes before the train actually arrived.

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I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter

This is a brief litany (an oxymoron, of course) of my excuses for not posting since I almost went up like the Hindenburg in 1937.

– After I wrote that episode I had to prepare for a complicated trip with RDFZ teachers to TJ.

– Then I was gone for 8 days on that trip to TJ.

– Upon my return, jet lag lingered much longer than usual and I was only slightly above useless.

– And the pièce de résistance: I hurt my back a couple weeks ago and sunk below the level of “slightly above useless.”

There’s more but no need to beat a dead horse.

You may have thought that nothing interesting has been happening over here. Au contraire, mes amis. It’s now to the point where I truly don’t know where to begin. Nevertheless, I’ll sort it out soon and start filling you in.

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