Chinese shadow boxing is actually called 太极拳 (tài jí quán).

More like this here: [Photo Gallery:] Daily tai-chi & morning exercise in Yonghe, Taipei, Taiwan

“Diaoyu Islands are inherently China’s territory,
this restaurant will not receive Japanese people!”
钓鱼岛是中国固有领土，本店恕不接待日本人！

Interestingly enough, the restaurant right next door is also very patriotic, with “Comrade Mao Zedong” posters on the wall.

For more about popular Chinese hatred for Japan:

• Japanese apologies
• “Japanese and dog no nearing”
• Why they hate the Japanese
• Anti-Japan protests channel uncomfortable amounts of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution

“Please refuse to eat dog meat! There’s all different kinds of food, but ‘friends’ are extremely precious.”
– The Beijing Loving Animals Foundation
请拒吃狗肉！食物多种多样，而“朋友”弥足珍贵
– 北京爱它>动物公益基金会

If there’s a campaign to stop eating dogs, our district in Qingdao has definitely not received the memo. Here’s some pictures I just happen to have on hand, taken right in our neighbourhood and at the nearest restaurants:

“Five Spice Dog Meat” 五香狗肉 Spring Festival gift box.

This hotpot restaurant’s menu includes fish head meat 鱼头肉, beer duck 啤酒鸭, dog 狗肉, and eel 鳝鱼.

At a competing restaurant dog meat tops the hotpot menu 狗肉火锅.

These photos can be found in our public China Instagram feed.

Pro Tip! “Dog food” — is that food for your dog (狗粮), or your dog for food (狗肉)? You’ll probably want to be careful you don’t confuse this:

(pet food store)

with this:

(dog meat gift bag from Chinese teacher)

or this:

(dog meat restaurant)

Pro Tip #2! Dog meat is a wintertime food. In the spring and summer it won’t be available at many restaurants that usually serve it. Because Chinese medicine. So you’ll probably have to wait a while before you get to try any.

On the first glance, it’s not immediately obvious why Mainland Chinese would be campaigning to not eat dog, or any other animal. I found some interesting explanations here: China’s dog-eating controversy is class warfare

And of course we’ve had our own dog eating adventures:

• Dead puppies (don’t look, Grandma!) – menu included
• “Cats are friends, not food!”
• Obligatory cat eating post

China also has other creative uses for dog, aside from food:

• Beware “EXPLOSIVE DOG” in Tianjin, China
• Curiosity + China = way more than I bargained for

[Update Apr 19]
Dog is more popular around here than I realized. Normally I eat with a group on Friday nights, but everyone had to work overtime tonight. So I was on my own for dinner, and took my time walking around just to see what was available. In five minutes I found five places that serve dog. I’m sure there would have been more but friends called and said they could make it after all so I stopped looking and went to meet them. See if you can find “狗” in each of these pictures:

My hunch is the neighbourhood management saw an opportunity in the bird flu situation and took it. The story is this was a village ten years ago and the villagers were compensated with apartment square meterage matching that of their village homes, end result being that this neighbuorhood has a higher percentage of peasants than the average urban development.

Anyway, the chengguan were right outside our windows around 11:15 this morning:

I was at work and Jessica took this out the kitchen window. She said about 30 people in all.

They’re cracking down on domestic chicken coups and vegetable gardens like these:

The notice said it was OK to plant trees and flowers, but not vegetables. Panties weren’t mentioned.

I took a quick spin around the neighbourhood before lunch while out getting eggs. There are vegetable gardens all over the place, but I didn’t see evidence of any being disturbed. Maybe they’re saving their bylaw enforcement for after 休息, and this morning was just recon?

More fun with Chengguan:

• In case you ever wondered what it’s like to eat BBQ’d silk worm larvae (蚕蛹)
• The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game
• Making our neighbourhood more “civilized”

Warm and Fragrant Briefing

All Respected Property Owners, Hello:

To counter the many recent instances in various places of people becoming infected with H7N9 bird flu, various places are adopting emergency contingency plans to take preventative measures, people are also attaching increasing importance to the H7N9 bird flu preventative measures, and our Fulinyuan neighbourhood management office especially draws to everyone’s attention:

1. Maintain favourable life habits， ensure to keep adequate sleep and rest, drink more water, eat more fruit.
2. Pay attention to personal hygiene, diligently wash hands, maintain household indoors, diligently ventilate the air.
3. In case of fever, coughing, runny nose, etc. respiratory tract symptoms, immediately go to the hospital and see a doctor for inspection.
4. In the kitchen must separate raw and hot, do not eat raw or half-cooled chicken, duck, goose, etc. all kinds of meat, especially pay attention to not eat half-raw not hot eggs.
5. Seldom go to crowded places, guard against contagious or infectious disease.

Especially take note:
In order to ensure and safeguard all property owners’ physical and mental health, property owners raising poultry are asked to conscientiously and voluntarily dispose.

Thanks for your cooperation!

Fulinyuan Neighbourhood Property Management Office
2013-4-9

温馨提示

尊敬的全体业主您们好：

针对近期各地多列人感染H7N9禽流感病例，各地纷纷采取应急预案防控，人们对H7N9禽流感的防控也越来重视，我们福林苑小区管理处特别提示大家：

1. 保持良好的生活习惯，保保持充足睡眠和休息 多饮水 多吃水果。
2. 注意个人卫生 勤洗手 保持家庭室内 勤通风换气。
3. 一旦出现发热 咳嗽 流涕等呼吸道症状 立即到医院检查就诊。
4. 厨房中要将生热分开 不吃生的或半热的鸡 鸭 鹅肉等各类肉食特别是注意不要吃半生不热的鸡蛋。
5. 少去人多拥挤的地方 防止传染或感染疾病。

特别提示：
为了保障和维护广大业主的身心健康，请部分饲养家禽的业主自觉自行清理。

谢谢合作！

福林苑小区物业管理处
2013年4月9日

The Passive-Aggressive Window Game

I want to switch out this picture for one showing my coworkers in the office, wearing their winter clothes, scarves, everything, next to a heater that’s not on and a window that’s not closed, complaining that it’s cold, while a guy walks by outside with a cloth mask over his mouth and nose because he’s protecting against the cold wind.

To my Western sensibilities, the scene is mildly insane. It’s cold and windy, people! Shut the windows and turn on the heaters that are in every single room, and we won’t have to wear our outside clothes inside! If you’re afraid of cold wind outside, why are you inviting it inside? Why did you deliberately turn our workspace into a near-freezing wind tunnel?

I’m all for creative responses to culture stress, so I’m conducting an informal and surreptitious sociological experiment. On my Chinese coworkers.

Now that winter is officially over but it’s still cold, during most of March at work we play the passive-aggressive window game. They open the windows wide — of course you should open the windows wide on cold and windy days. Parents will complain if they don’t. So we’re all freezing. But when no one’s looking, I walk by and, with numbed fingers, shut the windows. And after a couple classes, someone’s opened them again. So I wait until no one’s looking and shut them again. Just to see what will eventually happen. Will they catch on? Will I get caught in the act? What will they say? It’s exciting, no? :)

• So you want to change China?

I can see not turning the heat on as a practical thing: everyone has to wear several layers just to survive the commute to work and changing would be inconvenient, homes might not be well-heated, heating costs money for the school, and the wiring can’t handle even half the heaters at one time. But none of that explains opening the windows and deliberately creating a draft in every classroom and office.

What do you mean, ‘Why?’? Isn’t it obvious?

To someone with no understanding of traditional Chinese medicine, what Chinese often do for the sake of health makes absolutely no sense; it’s maddeningly contradictory. And one of many areas within this health disconnect that we perennially encounter involves temperature and “wind.” For example, “wind” and “cold” are bad. Do not serve a Chinese person a glass of refrigerated water — that’s practically criminally negligent; give them hot water, even (especially) when it’s hot outside. If you drink cold water you’ll get diarrhea, unless it’s winter — then you can eat ice cream outside. But I don’t care if it’s summertime: if you don’t put socks on that baby she’ll get diarrhea!

• You’ve got wind! 你受风了！
• The Untranslatable (TCM translation fail)
• “You’d better put socks on that baby or else…”

And do not eat an apple outside on a windy day, unless you want to be guānxīn-ed about your health: “You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ‘stomach’!” Unless you’re provoking your local friends on purpose, like one foreign coworker I had who once faced the wind and opened her mouth wide to deliberately swallow as much wind as she could just to get a reaction from our adult students. But don’t expect a comfortable temperature indoors, even when it’s possible and affordable. Like fearing cold water, they also fear still air. Air must move, or else when we get old, we’ll die, or something. It doesn’t matter if it’s single-digit Celsius outside and windy; they will deliberately turn your school hallways and classrooms into wind tunnels. And then they’ll wear their winter coats and scarves inside and talk about how cold it is. It’s healthier.

• 关心 talk: so offensive it’s funny
• Don’t eat that! You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ‘stomach’!

If that seems like a deliberately disorganized jumble of anecdotes, that’s because it is. That’s how you first encounter traditional Chinese healthiness when you move over here. You don’t get a systematic introduction to traditional Chinese medicine; you get random comments at meals (“No thanks, my fire’s up”), coworkers who keep turning off the air conditioning in summer (空调病！), and unsolicited advice about not wearing shorts in the spring (you’ll get arthritis when you’re old). Sorting that all out and making sense of it is your job.

Healthiness with Chinese characteristics

People usually don’t do things for no reason. Maybe you don’t agree with their reasons or don’t understand their reasons, or maybe their reasons are objectively bad. But most of the time their reasons make sense, at least according to their own terms. The deliberate early spring wind tunnel even makes some degree of sense to foreigners: it’s flu season, especially in a school, so they want to keep the air indoors fresh by ventilating 通风换气。Anyone who’s crossed the ocean in an airplane shared with sneezing coughing snuffling people should be able to appreciate this.

But health is often one of several huge areas of cultural disconnect between China and its resident laowais, of total misunderstanding and mutual scandalization. How wide is the disconnect? One coworker, after observing our daughter and how we handled her, theorized in all seriousness that the reason foreigners don’t care about their kids’ health as much as Chinese parents is because foreigners can have as many kids as they want. If we mess one or two up, no biggie — we can always have more! (To be fair, the other coworker in the conversation disagreed. Plus, it’s not uncommon for foreigners to basically make the same kind of accusation against Chinese. Remember: we’re mutually scandalizing.)

“Chinese medicine” 中医 as “the general Chinese understanding and approach to health” (rather than meaning “Chinese herbs” 中药 like ginseng or “techniques” like fire-cupping) is near impossible for Westerners to understand. The concepts are extremely difficult to express within our languages and worldview because they are so thoroughly tied to Chinese worldview, philosophy and thought categories. The Web That Has No Weaver, a book that attempts to explain Chinese medicine while appreciating the difficulty, begins with Chinese philosophy, not biology. If you read a description of Chinese medicine that you understand right away, then either you’re Chinese or what you’re reading is not a description of Chinese medicine; the meaning was lost in translation.

• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• The Untranslatable (TCM translation fail)

P.S. – “ventilating the air” to help combat flu season is the reason our youngest and most cosmopolitan employee gave me. But there’s another reason that’s probably at least as relevant: avoiding drastic changes in temperature. It’s not considered healthy to move from cold to hot or vice versa, to put cold things in your body when you’re warm, etc. People’s body temperature stays more consistent when they bundle up inside rather than making inside warm. This thinking is behind eating ice cream outside in the winter, and behind the story a friend told us yesterday explaining why she has bad cramping every month: when she was around 13 she got hot and sweaty from sports one day and went to take a shower. But the water came out really cold, suddenly dousing and chilling her over-heated body. She was on one of her first periods at the time. And that’s why she now has bad cramping every month.

1. Three-Self Good Friday

At the local Three-Self Patriotic Church‘s Good Friday service. Three-Self churches can seem stodgy in many ways, as if the Party-mandated international isolation and societal marginalization has frozen in time an imported 1930′s Western fundamentalist style of Christianity by strangling its development. But things are changing, as anyone who spends time at their local Three-Self can tell you. Even if the outward forms — music, facilities, teaching, etc. — seem under-resourced at times, this little church is packed every Friday night. This last Friday, half the attendees and the preacher were in tears by the end.

I’m using this picture to represent China’s traditional, legal, urban Christianity.

2. Good Luck Crucifix

A crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror of our taxi on Easter Sunday morning, next to a typical luck charm (drivers usually hang folk Buddhist, Daoist, even Maoist luck charms). This driver had no idea at all what the crucifix represented; he just vaguely associated it with something positive, saying he doesn’t care about the meanings of any of that stuff but just hangs whatever gives him a nice feeling. (How a miniature scale model of someone being tortured to death could give anyone good vibes — especially if they aren’t aware of the greater hopeful story from which that image comes and what it’s meant to represent — is beyond me.) Have to admit, I was not expecting to see that hanging in the taxi on Easter morning.

I’m using this picture to represent the millions upon millions of Chinese who have zero background knowledge of Christianity, but who cannot avoid encountering it (at least in small, token ways) in today’s China.

3. Jesus Car

A Christian car that shows up in our neighbourhood every couple weeks, including today (Easter Sunday afternoon). What they’re trying to communicate by using English I don’t know (status, education, cosmopolitanism?). They’ve got a cross glued to the dash, where traditional charms like Buddhist prayer wheels often go. But if you look closer you’ll see a key detail that marks them as a new breed of Chinese Christian: their Chinese Bible verse is not written in the traditional, beloved, archaic-sounding KJV-esque translation that 99.99% of China’s churches are unwilling to part with (something that annoys this language student to no end, even though I sympathize). It’s written in the latest translation (Chinese Standard Bible / 中文标准译本), meaning they’re probably part of a next generation of Chinese Christians who are willing to break with cherished traditions.

Even though most of them don’t advertize on the side of their cars, I’m using this picture to represent the newer breed of Chinese Christian, who are typically urban, wealthy, educated and trendy, and whose newly-emerging churches represent an additional third branch of Chinese Christianity along side the Three-Self and traditional unregistered church legacies.

More about Easter in China:

• Easter art from Chinese artists
• 哈利路亚！主复活了！
• Happy “Resurrection Festival” 2012!
• Christianity in China (topic)

More about Chinese good luck charms:

• Mao the saint / icon / bodhisattva / talisman / fuzzy dice
• Chairman Mao the Daoist immortal, and his Bodhisattva friends
• Crossing Cultures & the Meanings of Things
• Chinese Folk Religion (topic)

Of the many valuable things you can do in addition to class and book homework, two that we do just happened this morning, and it makes for a good example:

1. Build language into your daily routines/environment, and
2. Recognize and seize the opportunities to practice that come your way.

1. Fill Your Daily Life/Routines with Language

Maximize your exposure to the language by controlling your daily environment as much as you can. Going to class for a couple hours, doing a couple hours of homework, but then shifting mental gears into English for the rest of your day is a recipe for frustration. There are all kinds of ways you can increase your exposure to the language. Which ones are most helpful depends on what stage you’re at in your language progress. Probably the best thing you could do is get Chinese roommates (who wont try to speak English with most of the time). Beginning students often label all the objects in their apartment. Intermediate students will start listening to and learning Chinese pop songs. We found bilingual versions or translations of fun, classic children’s stories. Every night when we put our daughter to bed we have the option of reading in English, attempting to read in Chinese, or both. Anyway, the more creative (or resourceful) you are, the more options you’ll have for building Chinese into the structure of your life, into your daily routines.

2. Recognize & Seize Practice Opportunities

There are more opportunities to practice than people tend to realize. And seizing them doesn’t take too much extra effort. The problem is we often don’t recognize the opportunities that come our way. Or we think we’re in too much of a hurry to bother taking advantage of them. Every time something’s broken, or we have to run an errand, or text a friend, or whatever — anything we do that requires us to use Chinese — is an opportunity.

The default behaviour for most language students is to just rush off to accomplish whatever it is on our long list of tasks for the day, muddling through with whatever language ability we have. After all, we don’t want these daily annoyances to suck up too much study time. But these daily tasks are study time, or rather, practice time — valuable practice time. It’s worth the effort to look up the relevant vocab and grammar before you go do whatever it is you need to do. If you already have enough Chinese to get through whatever it is you need to do, you can still sharpen your vocab and grammar, using more accurate Chinese instead of “just barely enough to make myself understood” Chinese.

Example

There’s a leaky solar water heater that we don’t use on the roof of our six-storey building, but the electric control panel for it is in our bathroom on the first floor. Water is leaking down the electric wires and dripping out from inside the panel. So I started to text the landlord. I knew how to say “leaking water” but couldn’t remember how to say “down the wire.”

So I had a choice. I could write the text anyway and make myself understood by simplifying or talking “around” the meaning. But I remembered that in one of our daughter’s bilingual bedtime story books, Yertle the Turtle king, standing on top of a tall stack of turtles, looks down the stack to see who’s complaining at the bottom. So I chose to go to my daughter’s room, open the book, find the phrase, and import the grammar into my text message — “looked down the stack” became “leaking down the wire.”

When the landlord comes over this afternoon I’ll get to practice the phrase in conversation (or discover it’s the wrong phrase and learn the right one). It’s learning through an interactive real-life experience rather than by looking at a text book. By making the small effort to look up the phrase in the book and attempt a more accurate text message, I’m engaging the language more than I would have otherwise. And no matter whether the phrase is right or it gets corrected in conversation this afternoon, it’s sharpening my language accuracy, too.

So these two non-classroom aspects of language learning work together: because we’d already built language into our daily lives by using bilingual bedtime stories, I was able to seize the opportunity of the leaky water heater to sharpen my vocab and grammar. And for very minimal extra effort. It’s just a mundane little example, but a filling your lifestyle with these makes a difference in language acquisition.

Related Stuff:

• The Best Decisions We Ever Made in China (#1): ditching the laowai ghetto
• Robert Munsch’s “I Have to Go!” in Chinese
• 蚯蚓的日记 Diary of a Worm
• Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” in Chinese! 好饿的毛毛虫
• Dr. Seuss in Chinese!
• The suspiciously Orwellian children’s story 《鸭子农夫》 “Farmer Duck” Chinese-Pinyin-English read-along
• Learning Mandarin (topic)

She’d attended what she thought was a Bible study group. She didn’t notice anything amiss until the end, when they mentioned that not only has Jesus come back but she’s living in Henan province. Even then she didn’t realize what she’d stumbled into; she hadn’t heard of this particular group despite the fact that the gov’t's Dec. 2012 crackdown made international headlines.

Just of the top of my head I can think of four unrelated circles we’re connected to in which people have mentioned running into cult — just within the last three weeks.

People who keep tabs on Christianity in China have been aware of this group since the early 90′s because they specifically (and sometimes violently) target Christians and churches. Here’s links I found helpful/interesting — some crazy stuff in here, especially the first-hand accounts:

• Eastern Lightning and the End of the World
• “Eastern Lightning Destroyed My Family” (Original: 东方闪电拆散了我的家, also here)
• Church of Almighty God (their official English website)
• Eastern Lightning may be a cult, but they still have rights
• Experiencing the Eastern Lightning Cult (Detailed first-hand and second accounts, historical overview and analysis. Much more here.)
• Deceived by the Lightning
• China’s “Almighty God” Rises with Threat of Apocalypse
• Jesus Is Back, and She’s Chinese

It’s important to understand this cult within the Chinese rural house church/indigenous modern religious context from which it mutated. I found this in-depth review of a recent scholarly work on China’s modern, Christianity-influenced homegrown religious context helpful:

• How “Dangerous” Are Chinese House Churches?

Hitting problems sideways goes back thousands of years in China. Wéiqí 围棋 (aka “encirclement chess” aka “Go”) is at least 2500 years old. And while they’re certainly willing to engage in head-on confrontation, using an indirect approach is the standard M.O. for Chinese authorities when dealing with troublesome, undesirable groups — it’s effective and less accountable. Here are three examples: two on-going and one more-or-less recent.

The Doomsday Cult

侧面地 — “sideways” — is the adverb a friend used this last Sunday to describe the way the gov’t indirectly combats the Eastern Lightning/Church of Almighty God cult (东方闪电 / 全能父教会), of whom his mother-in-law is a member. Everything she does and everywhere she goes is monitored, but they haven’t confronted her directly. They went instead to her husband’s employer, revealed a bunch of what they know, and pressured the employer to use his leverage to pressure the husband to contain his wife.

The result so far is that the entire rest of the family now fears for their livelihoods. All of them reject the cult and its teachings, but having a family member involved is enough to put them all at risk. It’s sufficient motivation for a family to do whatever they can to discourage the wayward grandma. Which, in their case, isn’t very much; this group isn’t called cult for no reason (links at bottom). In China, they’re officially an “evil religion” (邪教).

The Social-problem-engaged Non-Profit

A couple years ago a non-profit in our former city got the sideways treatment. They run a project that provides therapy for disabled kids and training for their parents. That project’s major event every year is a Christmas performance; they rent out a local theatre and the kids, parents and teachers put on a show. One year the local authorities decided to squash it. But instead of contacting the org directly or telling them during the monthly meeting to ‘have tea’, they went to the theatre on the weekend before the show was scheduled and told the managers to cancel the booking. The theatre refused; apparently the authorities weren’t offering to cover their lost revenue. So police were sent to the org’s office. I was told by a person present that there was a verbal confrontation between them and the Chinese staff of the disabled children’s project. Apparently one staff member got agitated: “This is not a religious event, and if you want to cancel it then you can bring your battalions to the show and cancel it yourself!” In the end there was a compromise: they could still put on the show, but they had to take out all the parts that had to do with the Christmas Story (so no baby Jesus in the manger, shepherds and sheep and angels and all that).

The Envelope-pushing Church

In the under-reported case of Shouwang, a church in Beijing that’s been engaged in a public standoff with the authorities for over a year, sideways tactics played a key role in creating the mess. They were a large unregistered church network of small gatherings that decided to begin meeting as one big group. This was breaking an unwritten rule in the gray area of illegal-but-tolerated religious practice in China; unregistered normal churches are often left alone so long as they don’t meet in large groups or otherwise draw attention to themselves. After repeatedly being turned out of venues they’d rented by landlords who were being pressured by the authorities, they purchased their own place. But when they were prevented from taking possession of their own property, they began holding their Sunday services outside in a park in protest, demanding an end to the harrassment and that they be allowed to register as a legal organization without being required to join the Party-controlled “Three-Self Patriotic Church” (三自爱国教会). These demands, however, require changes to actual policy, not just an altering of the unwritten rules of the status quo. They want an end to the “sideways” management, and they want official, legally-recognized status.

So they’ve forced direct confrontation with local authorities. Those that aren’t under house arrest are detained by waiting police every single weekend. But consider these details (emphasis mine):

In 2012 … members of Shouwang Church were detained 1,600 times by either Domestic Security Protection agents in various districts [of Beijing] or in more than 90 different police stations across Beijing (for periods of several hours to 48 hours). Sixty people were evicted from their homes and more than 10 people lost their jobs…

They’ll use legions of police to make sure a scene isn’t created in a public space on Sunday morning, and they’ll keep the leaders under long-term house arrest. But in the meantime they’ll wear down the rank-and-file, suffocating them by twisting the arms of their landlords and employers. (You can find more details of this on-going saga documented here.)

Update #1: landlords, employers, relatives

I’m adding this update because it’s a perfect real-life example:

the situation has been increasingly tense since the beginning of March. He said, the government departments don’t even bother trying to have any direct contact; instead, they go behind our backs to threaten the landlord and not allow us to continue worshipping here. Then they go to the work units of the individual church members and give them orders, telling them they do not have permission to come to our church anymore, otherwise, they must resign from their jobs or they will be fired.

The senior pastor said, “Last weekend, even my 70-year-old elderly mother was summoned by the neighborhood committee and forced to answer questions about my situation, which gave the old lady a great fright.”

Update #2: Children

I failed to mention in the above examples that children are not exempt from being used as leverage: Ten-Year-Old Girl Detained, Denied Food and Water

We did that once, the first time we moved to Asia. After three years we returned to Canada to have our first child, and then we did it again. After another two years in China we returned to Canada a second time for the birth of our second child. And now we’re back in China for the third time.

The return trips to China after each birth were harder than the first time we left. Taking your children away from their grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins, Sunday school friends (never mind all the grass and trees and oceans and lakes and air) hurts.

You realize more what you’re doing when you’re also doing it to your kid.

There’re others you leave behind, too: coworkers, people you don’t like, people you have a grudge against. And there’s the nasty bonus surprise: returning to your culture of origin (like our friend Rob) after a long time away is often harder than leaving your original home ever was in the first place. Not only are you leaving behind so many friends and places and memories, but “home” has changed since you left, and so have you, and it won’t feel the same. Much of the familiarity you’re expectantly anticipating never materializes. But this post isn’t about entry or re-entry; it’s about leaving.

Regardless of which direction you’re going, the experience of leaving so much behind is huge whether you take the time to acknowledge it or not. And how you leave it can have a big impact on you personal development, on the kind of people you and your lover and your kids are becoming. This experience impacts all of you, and some ways of intentionally navigating the experience are healthier than others.

We received some great advice about how to do cross-cultural transitions before our most recent move back to China, advice we tried out a little bit in the months before we left, and we think it’s worth sharing. I wish we’d put more of it into practice than we did. It’s called “building a R.A.F.T.” and comes from chapter 13 of Third Culture Kids by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken (pages 200-204 in our 2001 edition). Below is my summary/paraphrase/riff of what they wrote.

Building a R.A.F.T.

You’ll see quickly that this process takes some forethought and planning ahead; put it off ’til the last two weeks and you’ll likely not have enough opportunities. You’ll also notice that it’s something for every family member to do, not just the adults.

Reconciliation
Closure matters. Festering bitterness matters. Making peace matters. Emotional baggage matters. Guilt and regrets matter. Forgiving and being forgiven matter, and that’s what reconciliation is all about. Reconciliation means growing up. It means attempting to communicate hurts and forgiveness, and initiate apologies.

A cross-cultural move presents a tempting cop-out: to run away and ignore strained or broken relationships. But refusing to resolve interpersonal conflicts sabotages healthy closure, and this lack of reconciliation sabotages the rest of your “RAFT” — the rest of your transition and entry/re-entry experience. You can’t really move away from these kinds of difficulties anyway; you’ll carry the emotional baggage of unresolved problems with you. Bitterness is unhealthy, unresolved relational issues can interfere with new relationships, and if/when you eventually move back, those problems will still be there, and they’ll be even harder to resolve.

A cross-cultural move also provides a great excuse, if you need one, for attempting to make peace: “Hey, I’m leaving for China for who knows how long, and I don’t want to leave a mess between us…” or however you need to do it.

You can’t always achieve reconciliation, of course, because it takes two willing parties. But you can always attempt it, and at least own up to the part of the relationship you’re responsible for. In our recent personal experience we found that the attempt is worth it whether the other side engages or not.

Affirmation
Think through your list of friends, coworkers, supervisors, neighbours, classmates. Do more than just say goodbye. Affirm people; let them know you respect and appreciate them, acknowledge that they matter. This is good for them and for you: it strengthens your relationships into the future and makes you more aware of what you’ve gained from living in the place you’re leaving. Pollock and Van Reken illustrate with some examples:

• Make time to tell coworkers that you enjoyed working with them.
• Tell friends how their friendship has been important, and maybe leave them some sort of memento.
• Send a note and small gift to neighbours, mentioning positive things about your interactions with them.
• Reassure those close to you of your love for them and that you don’t leave them lightly. Order flowers for the day after you leave.

Affirmation helps with closure by acknowledging the blessings you have in the form of relationships, and mourning their passing.

Farewells
Making farewells to people, places, and possessions helps avoid deep regrets later. Schedule ahead so that you won’t end up missing anyone or anywhere or any thing that was in any way significant, and make a real ‘official’ farewell to each. It’s a time to acknowledge all the positive things and feelings, and acknowledge that it’s sad to leave each person and thing behind.

People - this is crucial, even more so for children, who will need guidance. You want to say and do something, make some sort of gesture like baking cookies or writing a note, that acknowledges the importance of that person to you, expresses thanks, and lets them know they will be missed.

Some sort of “rite of passage” ritual often accompanies major life transitions like graduation or retirement parties. Taking the time to do something similar in spirit creates a significant memory acknowledging the importance of a person or place, and helps face and process the fact that you’re leaving them.

Places - Visit emotionally significant sites to reminisce and say goodbye. Everything from the tree you loved climbing to the park where you got engaged. Some people plant a tree, or hide some little treasure that they could dig up later if they ever return. The point is to openly acknowledge the time as a true goodbye, admitting that the stage of life these places represent will soon be in the past.

Possessions - You have to leave a lot of stuff behind in international moves. Certainly, adults and kids have to learn about letting go, and we all have too much stuff anyway, but everyone should talk over what to take and what to leave behind. It’s also important to deliberately choose and take what become “sacred objects”, a slowly growing collection of physical objects that connect the different places and stages of your life. When important objects must be left behind, try giving them as gifts to a friend and taking photographs. Jessica and I have a Christmas tree ornament (or something we use as one) from most of the significant places in our life together. Every year we can remember.

In addition to all her teachers and ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’, we had our three-year-old say good-bye to her classrooms, playground, the lake where she swam all summer, places we visited regularly, her bedrooms, toys she was leaving behind, parks we often walked in, and a bunch of other stuff. And we took pictures of it all. This gave us plenty of opportunity to verbalize what was happening then and later after we’d returned to China. It helped all of us put words to the experience and mourn all that we were losing in a healthy way.

Think Destination
During the goodbye process, start shifting gears mentally, reorienting your thinking to the near future: you’re arrival and adjustment in a new place. Think realistically: identify positives and negatives and differences about your destination. List problems you’ll likely encounter. Make a list of your coping resources, both external (finances, support people you can lean on) and internal (your ability and methods of dealing with the stress of change).

Thinking ahead and identifying these things helps make the transition much less rockier than it could be. Forming realistic expectations helps avoid disappointment (from too high expectations) and makes sure you don’t miss out on available resources (due to too low expectations). You aren’t mentally and emotionally leaving so much behind in order to go nowhere; every step away from what you’re leaving can be a step toward what you’re gaining.

Related stuff:

• Homecoming Saboteur: the cultural shock of returning home
• Homecoming Saboteur: the cultural shock of returning home (PART 2)
• Topics: Travelling and Cultural Re-Adjustment (reverse culture stress)
• 15 Things I Want to Tell My Third Culture Kids (Djibouti Jones)
• 20 Things Expats Need to Stop Doing (Djibouti Jones)

Here are four quotes from three different centuries. The first three come from Jonathan Spence‘s To Change China: Western Advisers in China 1620-1960 (1969).

Jonathan Spence on education in 19th century China:

It was particularly hard for a foreigner to enter the educational sector. To the Chinese, education was the key to social harmony and political stability: from the Confucian Classics, hallowed by a tradition reaching back over two thousand years, the young learned obedience, morality, and the norms of acceptable behaviour. On the basis of their study of the Classics, they participated in ascending levels of examinations for the civil service. Success in these examinations opened up prospects for a career in government, the major source of wealth and power. To introduce new subjects — such as Western philosophy, languages, or natural science — was to threaten the basis of the Chinese state. Innovation, accordingly, was vigorously resisted. [Spence, 129]

John Fryer, missionary/educator/translator employed by the Qing dynasty, on learning Chinese:

It was all a question of time and tenacity: “Most foreigners who come to China have the notion that in a year they will master the language. They get a teacher, and pound away vigorously for a week or perhaps a month and then give up in disgust.” Accordingly, they made ludicrous mistakes which negated all their endeavors. He told his cousin of hearing a missionary in Shanghai trying to tell his Chinese audience that “Jesus is here also”; the missionary, muddling his tones and aspirates, succeeded only in assuring the puzzled listeners that “Jesus is inside shaving his head.” “If I could have my way, not a single missionary should say one word in public till he had lived with the people and studied the local dialect of his mission station at least five years, and passed an examination. Just imagine the ridicule which such people bring to Christianity.” [Spence, 145]

Mikhail Borodin, “Stalin’s man in China,” on his failure:

I came to China to fight for an idea. The dream of accomplishing world revolution by freeing the people of the East brought me here. But China itself, with its age-old history, its countless millions, its vast social problems, its infinite capacities, astounded and overwhelmed me, and my thoughts of world revolution and the fight for freedom, in China became an end in itself, and no longer a means to an end. My task was to grasp the situation, to start the great wheel moving, and as time has passed it has carried me along with it. I myself have become only a cog in the great machine. [Spence, 202]

BBC commentator Martin Jacques on understanding China (quoted by Dr. Brent Fulton of ChinaSource.org):

Last year Martin Jacques, a BBC commentator, put it well when he said, “The great task facing the West over the next century will be to make sense of China – not in our terms but in theirs. We have to understand China as it is and as it has been, not project our own history, culture, institutions and values onto it. It will always fail that test. In truth such a mentality tells us more about our own arrogance and lack of curiosity than anything about China.”

(And of course we have lots more quotes and reviews of China Books and DVDs.)

You can download this PDF with the full Chinese and pīnyīn. Below is a mouseover-able excerpt. Buy the book to see the English.

Suggestions for improvement are welcome!

《我要尿尿！》

Page 1
有一天，安德鲁的爸爸妈妈要带他去看爷爷奶奶。他们在让他上车之前，妈妈问：“安德鲁，你要尿尿吗？”

安德鲁说：“不不不不不。”

爸爸很缓慢地、清楚地又问了一遍：“安德鲁，你要尿尿吗？”

“不不不不不，” 安德鲁说。“我决定了再也不尿尿。”

Page 2
于是他们让安德鲁上车，系上了他的安全带，也给了他很多书、玩具、蜡笔、然后上走了——呜～～。他们刚开了一分钟，安德鲁喊：“我要尿尿！”

“哎呦，”爸爸说。

“哎呀，”妈妈说。

Page 3
接着爸爸说，“嗨，安德鲁，只等五分钟。五分钟以后我们就到加油站，你可以在那里尿尿。”

安德鲁说：“可我现在就要尿尿！”

于是妈妈停了车——哧～～。安德鲁跳下车就在灌木丛后边尿了。

Download: WoYaoNiaoniao.pdf

More Chinese bedtime stories:

• 蚯蚓的日记 Diary of a Worm
• Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” in Chinese! 好饿的毛毛虫
• Dr. Seuss in Chinese!
• The suspiciously Orwellian children’s story 《鸭子农夫》 “Farmer Duck” Chinese-Pinyin-English read-along

In one of the English classes I used to have to teach in Tianjin, students had to invent tourism slogans for China and Tianjin. One of theirs was “China — source of mystery.” I couldn’t disagree, though I’m guessing the China mysteries they were thinking of and the China mysteries I was routinely encountering weren’t necessarily the same.

So I thought I’d make some of my own tourism slogans. I may have been feeling a touch culture-stressed when I came up with these. :) Tianjin’s big tourism slogan at the time was, “Tianjin — Pearl of the Bohai Sea.”

Tianjin — Touch the sky.
Tianjin — Where the sky feels… lower.
Tianjin — Relax. It’s healthier not to jog.
Tianjin — Where the sun doesn’t hurt your eyes.
Tianjin — Biggest. Construction site. Ever.
Tianjin — 11 million people, one giant construction site.
Tianjin — Where you couldn’t buy a real DVD even if you wanted to.
China — More traffic; less internet.

I’m sure anyone who’s lived in the region can think of many more. What’ve you got?

Recent related stuff & Tianjin photo galleries:

• Conspicuously Curvacious Tianjin, China
• Tianjin (topic)
• The Great Chinese Airpocalypse of Jan. 2013
• The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game
• [Photo Gallery:] Our China 2011
• Our Tianjin 2010 photo gallery
• [Photo Gallery:] Tianjin Fall & Winter (’09-’10)
• [Photo Gallery:] Tianjin’s 南市 hutongs
• [Photo Gallery:] Tianjin foreign concession area bike ride
• Tianjin: more colourful in the rain, more marriable in the sun
• Photos from a Saturday bike trip around Tianjin
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

Working for a Chinese company gives opportunities to perform — and I mean like song-and-dance perform — that you typically don’t get at the average North American job. For example, at the year-end banquet it’s common for every department in a company to put on some sort of performance. Lots of singing along to pop tracks at the very least. It’s actually more of an obligation than an opportunity; it means bad vibes if you cry off participating.

Chinese love karaoke (KTV). They practice beforehand, and when they go they’ll easily stay for four, five or six hours singing the cheesiest pop lyrics and melodies you can imagine. And the practice shows. Have whatever stereotype of mild-mannered, bespectacled bookworm Chinese you want, but you haven’t seen China until you’ve seen said bespectacled office drones rocking out in a KTV lounge like they are the Chinese incarnation of Whitney Houston. It’s not what you’d expect from the impressions and stereotypes that float around, but in my experience the average Chinese tends to be less inhibited than the average cripplingly self-conscious and cool-anxious, irony-plagued North American when it comes to public performance.

Our school has a New Year’s Show, a Children’s Day Show, and a Teacher Show — those are the one’s I’ve discovered so far anyway. And it’s normal for teachers and parents to be involved in a couple performances even for the kids’ shows.

So here’s the song and lyrics some of my coworkers picked to cover for the Teacher Show (performed for the parents and grandparents of our 200+ students) — our first and most likely final performance. :)

我相信 by 杨培安

(Better quality version here.)

想飞上天和太阳肩并肩 / xiǎng fēishàng tiān hé tàiyáng jiānbìngjiān
Want to fly up to heaven and be shoulder to shoulder with the sun

世界等着我去改变/ shìjiè děngzhe wǒ qù gaibiàn
The world is waiting for me to go change (it)

想做的梦从不怕别人看见 / xiǎng zuòde mèng cóngbù pà biérén kànjiàn
Want to have a dream and not fear that other people will see

在这里我都能实现 / zài zhèlǐ wǒ dōu néng shíxiàn
Here I can achieve all of this

大声欢笑让你我肩并肩 / dàshēng huānxiào ràng nǐ wǒ jiānbìngjiān
Laughing loudly let us be should to shoulder

何处不能欢乐无限 / héchù bùnéng huānlè wúxiàn
Wherever there’s not infinite joy

抛开烦恼 勇敢的大步向前 / pāokāi fánnǎo yǒnggǎnde dàbù xiàngqián
Throw out worries, go forward with brave strides

我就站在舞台中间 / wǒ jiù zhàn zài wǔtái zhōngjiān
I just stand in the middle of the stage

[Chorus]

我相信我就是我，我相信明天 / wǒ xiāngxìn wǒ jiùshì wǒ, wǒ xiāngxìn míngtiān
I believe I’m me, I believe in tomorrow

我相信青春没有地平线 / wǒ xiāngxìn qīngchūn méiyǒu dìpíngxiàn
I believe youth has no horizon

在日落的海边，在热闹的大街 / zài rìluòde hǎibiān, zài rènǎode dàjiē
At the sun-setting seaside, on the bustling street

都是我心中最美的乐园 / dōu shì wǒ xīnzhōng zuìměide lèyuán
Both are the happiest paradise of my heart

我相信自由自在，我相信希望 / wǒ xiāngxìn zìyóuzìzài, wǒ xiāngxìn xīwàng
I believe in carefree freedom, I believe in hope

我相信伸手就能碰到天 / wǒ xiāngxìn shēnshǒu jiù néng pèngdào tiān
I believe you can stretch out your hand and reach heaven

有你在我身边 让生活更新鲜 / yǒu nǐ zài wǒ shēnbiān ràng shēnghuó gèng xīnxiān
Having you at my side makes life fresher

每一刻都精采万分，I do believe / měi yíkè dōu jīngcǎi wànfēn
Every moment is extremely splendid

Karaoke adventures:

• Karaoke Birthday Party!
• A banquet, baijiu & Bon Jovi (my first office party in China)
• Four-hour KTV party
• Karaoke Party!

Chinese songs to learn:

• 宝贝 (Baby) by 张悬 (Zhāng Xuán) — lyrics & guitar chords
• Brother Who Sleeps in the Top Bunk / 睡在我上铺的兄弟
• Nothing to My Name / 一无所有
• Even in Death I’ll Love / 死了都要爱
• Liang Shanbo & Juliet / 梁山伯与茱丽叶
• Mouse Loves Rice / 老鼠爱大米