I spent yesterday in China, in the year 4709. The Year of the Rabbit, to be precise. A link on our college website led to a festival with the magic word 'free', and that is how I ended up celebrating Chinese New Year again, surrounded by dragons, clowns, acrobats, warriors, singers, dancers, magicians, and more.
My Japanese classmate and I, having survived a torrent of essays, were willing guinea pigs, I mean lab rabbits, to test the waters of hitherto unexplored Chinatown. And what waters they were. Her bunny hat bobbed among an ocean of dancing red and gold paper lanterns, sizzling steam from outdoor hot bun fryer stoves, fluorescent-security-vest-swamping crowds sampling free sugared lotus nuts and sesame cookies, straining blue ad balloons held by open-mouthed children riding shoulders double-decker, and the resulting reverberating pulse of crackling, cheering, balloon popping, mike testing, cracker testing, and drumbeats. Dragon drumbeats.
Before I describe to the dragons I need to mention the food. My classmate, like me, is home-food-sick, and anything Asian is a closer substitute to Japanese or Indian than is European cuisine. So we made a beeline for the nearest restaurant's takeaway offer, mix 3 items of your choice - in our case, tofu/seafood, with hot black bean sauce, sitr-fried vegetables and sticky/fried rice. My classmate said it was a good sign that the restaurant was packed, and her prediction turned out to be spot on - the food was hot, fresh, perfectly seasoned (actually spicy!) and filling. Our only regret was that they had sold out of the 2-for-1 offered 'Bubble Tea' we were curious to try.
The relaxing semi-familiar sights, smells, and surfaces of the restaurant also made me realize the buffering it offered for my residual unconsciously-suffered culture shock. And it took me back a year to another Chinese restaurant, the second best in Vancouver (the best was apparently full). I was there having decided that now was my chance to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Olympics, which it was. My Chinese hosts ('my home is yours') made the Feb 14th dawn of the Year of the Tiger further memorable by inviting me out to a traditional lunch, and the concert afterwards they were attending (which was also free -- what is it with Chinese generosity? :) and in the morning I went to the brilliant annual Chinatown parade. To top off what I had been trying to ignore was Valentine's Day, when I gave my Chinese hosts and their friend the traditional oranges, the latter gave me back heart-shaped chocolates, thus rounding out the best February 14th ever.
That sounds worse than it is, lol. It's just that in India until recently, Valentine's Day was never a big or traditional holiday, and in fact in some areas culturally unacceptable (I'm serious) so any celebrations of the day were generally pretty low key. In theory it never bothered me one way or the other; while I will never be a Valentine's Day scrooge, the commercialization of the holiday bugs me to no end, together with the marketers' efforts to ram down singletons' throats the myth that it takes a partner (with gifts) to complete them. That being said, I admit to having grown up a diehard romantic, ever since witnessing my one of parents making for the other the unassuming Valentine's Day gift of a handwritten booklet of Shakespeare's sonnets.
This weakness/strength may partially also account for my having just bought the latest RSC copy of the Sonnets, even though it is probably (surely) packaged and released to coincide with V-Day. I couldn't help it for so many reasons -- the editor was there to sign it after the interesting talk he gave (including free refreshments...yes, I am a student), it has been discriminatingly edited, including leaving the 'unknown' word out instead of making one up (my audience question), it is small enough to take on the train, and it has a beautiful cover photo of deep red roses. I am an unabashed rose lover -- especially the wild ones that actually smell and aren't perfect. I once even wrote a song about red roses; it's probably best I can't find it anymore lol, but it was all about how in their natural richness, sweetness & simplicity, roses were a better gift to say 'I love you' , than the stereotypical fairytale princess stuff like diamond rings, jeweled slippers, palaces, horses, etc. etc. Yes, I love roses, especially alive.
This Valentine's Day, since I am so far off the topic already and might as well digress full circle while I'm at it, my classmates are planning a 'girls' night in' for both the single and the taken ladies. I'm not sure how that's going to work, but I do know it involves both desserts and a romantic movie, so it's hard to see what could go wrong (as long as it's not a tragic movie of course). While I am partial to 'Pride and Prejudice' (o imperfect rude & snobby humans, meet divine love i.e. understanding & unselfish compromise, with humor thrown in a la Jane Austen's fantastic wit) if I had a choice I would pick the 'Princess Bride'. If you've never seen it, it is not at all sickly as its title might suggest, rather a fun adventure/satire of all fairytale stories -- it has kidnappings, giants, geniuses, pirates, sword fights, sea monsters, miracle men, forests, disguises, fire swamps, rodents of unusual size, six-fingered men, revenge, and, best of all the skeptical boy whose his grandpa is reading the story, who keeps trying to head him off from reading aloud any part which might result in true love's kiss. I don't want to give the plot away too much so skip this sentence if needed, but a major part involves the heroine trying to escape becoming an arranged bride, not always that easy.
So where was I...I got interrupted by an automated NatWest call, grr. That would have been a great topic for the student debate I just helped chair as a volunteer. "Cold callers, victim or villain, argue". It was so fun; they were very impressive in their arguments. And I was honored to be chosen as the best of the 'mock bad example debaters' lol. I was even able to figure out which student went missing on our lunch outing-break.... years of experience :D
I did briefly lose my classmate twice in yesterday's crowds though, despite her bunny hat. The masses grew so huge that the fluorescent vests barricaded off one section to divert the surge. The entertainment was really amazing, from the opening Entrance Dance of the Dragons with drums, to the dazzling final Fireworks Display from the roof. In between the program featured the hosts and hostess's serious and comic speeches, accented by tossing the crowd fortune cookies (I told you the Chinese celebrate generously); grinning flower-like fan-dancing girls in pink and green and fiercely solemn praying-mantis-hopping martial artist boys in black, white and red; impossibly delicately graceful acrobats supported by their strong, silent partners; colorful clowns and brash breakdancers; jugglers and artistes spinning ropes, plates, pots, flowers, candelabra, and other with their hands, mouth, backs, and feet; magicians and mask-changers http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/26364/ ; stoically stern weapon-wielding warriors and cheerfully cheesy karaoke singers (to the tune, I was informed by my classmate, of a popular Japanese pop song!); and my favorite, the dancing, leaping dragons http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwSYNtRq_Dc&feature=related .
In between the long program we wandered out into the side streets which were hosting a Chinese fair, with stalls of every sort and even a few rides. You could get your name written in Chinese, or choose your own food to fry, or buy a set of painted mask-changer-faces, or carvings and scents and paintings and jewelry of every size, shape, and description. What I ended up with was a tiny hand-beaded rabbit charm to hang on my college backpack, to remember the day and the year by.
I think my Japanese friend, however, was even more excited by her discovery immediately afterward of the Japanese brands featured in the nearby Asian supermarket. We had barely walked down the first aisle, when I heard her gasp 'I need a basket!' and rush off. It was soon filled with instant noodles, not so instant noodles, cup-o-noodles, short noodles, long noodles, straight noodles, curly noodles -- the only thing bigger was the smile on her face. I teased her that she was loading up on the starch and I was taking care of the sugar side of the shopping: fortune cookies (we missed them earlier, being too far back from the stage), pandan rice roll (whatever it is it tastes great), peanut mochi, Taiwanese honey dew melon cake ('nice choice' says the label, and they're delicious) and the ubiquitous South Indian coconut milk and creamed coconut paste. And I forgot, sweet red bean paste buns. I've always wanted to try those, ever since I read Jackie Chan's autobiography. I steamed them for breakfast (even though I prefer the traditional South Indian salty meal) and they were almost as good as his description.
This supermarket had just about every bizarrely fascinating food you could imagine (except Kit Kats, grr): twisted fruits labeled 'bitter melon'; pickled eggs; candied tamarind; brown sugar slabs; frozen octopi (nauseating!!); twelve grain + dried powered egg yolk health mixes; blueberry Pocky, two litre tanks of tomato ketchup, fluorescently colored tapioca balls (I also got some plain white ones; boiled till transparent with water and served with milk and sugar, they are a delicious and radically infallible cure for, um, Delhi-belly); A&W root beer imported from Singapore, 'husband cakes' and, next to them, 'wife cakes' (where, we wondered, were the cakelets?); 'nutritious mix for students' which we were in the middle of giggling over when a woman came and swept 10 packets one after another into her basket; instant soup mixes with dried grains, beans, seeds, and mushrooms; giant bottles of soy sauce I was tempted to get since my Tesco one is so rubbish; mochi of all different flavors; seaweed sheets for sushi; and, since it will tire out my fingers to describe the rest, I will end by mentioning the checkout line, that stretched to the back of the store and halfway around.
And then we further indulged ourselves by taking up the 2-for-1 offer announced at the Chinese celebration, and going bowling+ice skating. Once we'd succeeded in convincing the kind management we deserved digging up an extra voucher for, since they had handed them out the previous day (they always have coupons stashed in the back if your appeal manages to catch their better natures), we had a great time figuring out bowling (my second and her first time) including each getting a strike, and finishing with some commendable scores in the 90s. This was followed by remembering how to ice skate, which was even more exciting, and involved not only figuring out which European shoe size we wore (you should have seen their faces when neither of us knew) and crashing up against the rail face to face with the DJ who was laughing in his plexiglass booth behind it (we both thought he had good music taste), to aiming for the disco light part of the ice while trying to avoid the penguin-support-pushers, and using our hard-saved extra pounds to buy fluorescently colored Gatorade and rent a locker to stash our bulging bags in and then try to remember our electronic butterfly logo to reopen it. Unfortunately, all of this had to be cut short to catch our train.
On the ride back home to 2010's England, we joked about our less mysterious fortunes: 'In six days it will be your lucky day' -- "check your calendar!" 'Learn from your mistakes' "yes I know now not to leave my essays till the last minute!" and also tried to figure whether the others had a deeper meaning: 'A difficult relationship will improve in future'..."but I don't have a difficult relationship with anyone here?" "That just leaves Japan!" 'If you think sunshine brings you happiness then you haven't danced in the rain.' ..."Hmm." That was mine, and I have, actually :) it was also was reminiscent of one of my favorite quotes, 'Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass..it's about learning how to dance in the rain.'
Interestingly, the fortune cookies were called 'Silk Road', also the name of a Chinese band I had already been reminded of by one of the Chinese tunes played in the program, which I recognized from the eponymously titled CD I bought at Silk Road's concert in Vancouver. This phrase will probably always bring out my sentimental (cough maudlin cough) side since it was the first international (fun) journey I undertook on my own; it's amazing for me to think that this time last year I was just off of crutches, and grateful for the support offered by a shopping cart as I made my way to see events like the figure skating, while now I'm not only carrying heavy baskets but flying freely on my own two skates. As my 'favorite symbol' out of those for the locker's electronic password, I picked the butterfly as blue as my Halloween costume, not just because I love how pretty they are when they float around the garden and get all aflutter over the flowers, but also since, though delicate, they represent life's power, cocooned in immobile shells till they stretch their wings so strongly they burst the chrysalis to fly across the world.
My Japanese classmate and I, having survived a torrent of essays, were willing guinea pigs, I mean lab rabbits, to test the waters of hitherto unexplored Chinatown. And what waters they were. Her bunny hat bobbed among an ocean of dancing red and gold paper lanterns, sizzling steam from outdoor hot bun fryer stoves, fluorescent-security-vest-swamping crowds sampling free sugared lotus nuts and sesame cookies, straining blue ad balloons held by open-mouthed children riding shoulders double-decker, and the resulting reverberating pulse of crackling, cheering, balloon popping, mike testing, cracker testing, and drumbeats. Dragon drumbeats.
Before I describe to the dragons I need to mention the food. My classmate, like me, is home-food-sick, and anything Asian is a closer substitute to Japanese or Indian than is European cuisine. So we made a beeline for the nearest restaurant's takeaway offer, mix 3 items of your choice - in our case, tofu/seafood, with hot black bean sauce, sitr-fried vegetables and sticky/fried rice. My classmate said it was a good sign that the restaurant was packed, and her prediction turned out to be spot on - the food was hot, fresh, perfectly seasoned (actually spicy!) and filling. Our only regret was that they had sold out of the 2-for-1 offered 'Bubble Tea' we were curious to try.
The relaxing semi-familiar sights, smells, and surfaces of the restaurant also made me realize the buffering it offered for my residual unconsciously-suffered culture shock. And it took me back a year to another Chinese restaurant, the second best in Vancouver (the best was apparently full). I was there having decided that now was my chance to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Olympics, which it was. My Chinese hosts ('my home is yours') made the Feb 14th dawn of the Year of the Tiger further memorable by inviting me out to a traditional lunch, and the concert afterwards they were attending (which was also free -- what is it with Chinese generosity? :) and in the morning I went to the brilliant annual Chinatown parade. To top off what I had been trying to ignore was Valentine's Day, when I gave my Chinese hosts and their friend the traditional oranges, the latter gave me back heart-shaped chocolates, thus rounding out the best February 14th ever.
That sounds worse than it is, lol. It's just that in India until recently, Valentine's Day was never a big or traditional holiday, and in fact in some areas culturally unacceptable (I'm serious) so any celebrations of the day were generally pretty low key. In theory it never bothered me one way or the other; while I will never be a Valentine's Day scrooge, the commercialization of the holiday bugs me to no end, together with the marketers' efforts to ram down singletons' throats the myth that it takes a partner (with gifts) to complete them. That being said, I admit to having grown up a diehard romantic, ever since witnessing my one of parents making for the other the unassuming Valentine's Day gift of a handwritten booklet of Shakespeare's sonnets.
This weakness/strength may partially also account for my having just bought the latest RSC copy of the Sonnets, even though it is probably (surely) packaged and released to coincide with V-Day. I couldn't help it for so many reasons -- the editor was there to sign it after the interesting talk he gave (including free refreshments...yes, I am a student), it has been discriminatingly edited, including leaving the 'unknown' word out instead of making one up (my audience question), it is small enough to take on the train, and it has a beautiful cover photo of deep red roses. I am an unabashed rose lover -- especially the wild ones that actually smell and aren't perfect. I once even wrote a song about red roses; it's probably best I can't find it anymore lol, but it was all about how in their natural richness, sweetness & simplicity, roses were a better gift to say 'I love you' , than the stereotypical fairytale princess stuff like diamond rings, jeweled slippers, palaces, horses, etc. etc. Yes, I love roses, especially alive.
This Valentine's Day, since I am so far off the topic already and might as well digress full circle while I'm at it, my classmates are planning a 'girls' night in' for both the single and the taken ladies. I'm not sure how that's going to work, but I do know it involves both desserts and a romantic movie, so it's hard to see what could go wrong (as long as it's not a tragic movie of course). While I am partial to 'Pride and Prejudice' (o imperfect rude & snobby humans, meet divine love i.e. understanding & unselfish compromise, with humor thrown in a la Jane Austen's fantastic wit) if I had a choice I would pick the 'Princess Bride'. If you've never seen it, it is not at all sickly as its title might suggest, rather a fun adventure/satire of all fairytale stories -- it has kidnappings, giants, geniuses, pirates, sword fights, sea monsters, miracle men, forests, disguises, fire swamps, rodents of unusual size, six-fingered men, revenge, and, best of all the skeptical boy whose his grandpa is reading the story, who keeps trying to head him off from reading aloud any part which might result in true love's kiss. I don't want to give the plot away too much so skip this sentence if needed, but a major part involves the heroine trying to escape becoming an arranged bride, not always that easy.
So where was I...I got interrupted by an automated NatWest call, grr. That would have been a great topic for the student debate I just helped chair as a volunteer. "Cold callers, victim or villain, argue". It was so fun; they were very impressive in their arguments. And I was honored to be chosen as the best of the 'mock bad example debaters' lol. I was even able to figure out which student went missing on our lunch outing-break.... years of experience :D
I did briefly lose my classmate twice in yesterday's crowds though, despite her bunny hat. The masses grew so huge that the fluorescent vests barricaded off one section to divert the surge. The entertainment was really amazing, from the opening Entrance Dance of the Dragons with drums, to the dazzling final Fireworks Display from the roof. In between the program featured the hosts and hostess's serious and comic speeches, accented by tossing the crowd fortune cookies (I told you the Chinese celebrate generously); grinning flower-like fan-dancing girls in pink and green and fiercely solemn praying-mantis-hopping martial artist boys in black, white and red; impossibly delicately graceful acrobats supported by their strong, silent partners; colorful clowns and brash breakdancers; jugglers and artistes spinning ropes, plates, pots, flowers, candelabra, and other with their hands, mouth, backs, and feet; magicians and mask-changers http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/26364/ ; stoically stern weapon-wielding warriors and cheerfully cheesy karaoke singers (to the tune, I was informed by my classmate, of a popular Japanese pop song!); and my favorite, the dancing, leaping dragons http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwSYNtRq_Dc&feature=related .
In between the long program we wandered out into the side streets which were hosting a Chinese fair, with stalls of every sort and even a few rides. You could get your name written in Chinese, or choose your own food to fry, or buy a set of painted mask-changer-faces, or carvings and scents and paintings and jewelry of every size, shape, and description. What I ended up with was a tiny hand-beaded rabbit charm to hang on my college backpack, to remember the day and the year by.
I think my Japanese friend, however, was even more excited by her discovery immediately afterward of the Japanese brands featured in the nearby Asian supermarket. We had barely walked down the first aisle, when I heard her gasp 'I need a basket!' and rush off. It was soon filled with instant noodles, not so instant noodles, cup-o-noodles, short noodles, long noodles, straight noodles, curly noodles -- the only thing bigger was the smile on her face. I teased her that she was loading up on the starch and I was taking care of the sugar side of the shopping: fortune cookies (we missed them earlier, being too far back from the stage), pandan rice roll (whatever it is it tastes great), peanut mochi, Taiwanese honey dew melon cake ('nice choice' says the label, and they're delicious) and the ubiquitous South Indian coconut milk and creamed coconut paste. And I forgot, sweet red bean paste buns. I've always wanted to try those, ever since I read Jackie Chan's autobiography. I steamed them for breakfast (even though I prefer the traditional South Indian salty meal) and they were almost as good as his description.
This supermarket had just about every bizarrely fascinating food you could imagine (except Kit Kats, grr): twisted fruits labeled 'bitter melon'; pickled eggs; candied tamarind; brown sugar slabs; frozen octopi (nauseating!!); twelve grain + dried powered egg yolk health mixes; blueberry Pocky, two litre tanks of tomato ketchup, fluorescently colored tapioca balls (I also got some plain white ones; boiled till transparent with water and served with milk and sugar, they are a delicious and radically infallible cure for, um, Delhi-belly); A&W root beer imported from Singapore, 'husband cakes' and, next to them, 'wife cakes' (where, we wondered, were the cakelets?); 'nutritious mix for students' which we were in the middle of giggling over when a woman came and swept 10 packets one after another into her basket; instant soup mixes with dried grains, beans, seeds, and mushrooms; giant bottles of soy sauce I was tempted to get since my Tesco one is so rubbish; mochi of all different flavors; seaweed sheets for sushi; and, since it will tire out my fingers to describe the rest, I will end by mentioning the checkout line, that stretched to the back of the store and halfway around.
And then we further indulged ourselves by taking up the 2-for-1 offer announced at the Chinese celebration, and going bowling+ice skating. Once we'd succeeded in convincing the kind management we deserved digging up an extra voucher for, since they had handed them out the previous day (they always have coupons stashed in the back if your appeal manages to catch their better natures), we had a great time figuring out bowling (my second and her first time) including each getting a strike, and finishing with some commendable scores in the 90s. This was followed by remembering how to ice skate, which was even more exciting, and involved not only figuring out which European shoe size we wore (you should have seen their faces when neither of us knew) and crashing up against the rail face to face with the DJ who was laughing in his plexiglass booth behind it (we both thought he had good music taste), to aiming for the disco light part of the ice while trying to avoid the penguin-support-pushers, and using our hard-saved extra pounds to buy fluorescently colored Gatorade and rent a locker to stash our bulging bags in and then try to remember our electronic butterfly logo to reopen it. Unfortunately, all of this had to be cut short to catch our train.
On the ride back home to 2010's England, we joked about our less mysterious fortunes: 'In six days it will be your lucky day' -- "check your calendar!" 'Learn from your mistakes' "yes I know now not to leave my essays till the last minute!" and also tried to figure whether the others had a deeper meaning: 'A difficult relationship will improve in future'..."but I don't have a difficult relationship with anyone here?" "That just leaves Japan!" 'If you think sunshine brings you happiness then you haven't danced in the rain.' ..."Hmm." That was mine, and I have, actually :) it was also was reminiscent of one of my favorite quotes, 'Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass..it's about learning how to dance in the rain.'
Interestingly, the fortune cookies were called 'Silk Road', also the name of a Chinese band I had already been reminded of by one of the Chinese tunes played in the program, which I recognized from the eponymously titled CD I bought at Silk Road's concert in Vancouver. This phrase will probably always bring out my sentimental (cough maudlin cough) side since it was the first international (fun) journey I undertook on my own; it's amazing for me to think that this time last year I was just off of crutches, and grateful for the support offered by a shopping cart as I made my way to see events like the figure skating, while now I'm not only carrying heavy baskets but flying freely on my own two skates. As my 'favorite symbol' out of those for the locker's electronic password, I picked the butterfly as blue as my Halloween costume, not just because I love how pretty they are when they float around the garden and get all aflutter over the flowers, but also since, though delicate, they represent life's power, cocooned in immobile shells till they stretch their wings so strongly they burst the chrysalis to fly across the world.
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