KILLING A PIG pt 2

the pig and the goat, in all their dolled up prettiness.

This part deals with what happened after the pig was killed. Here, we are preparing the pig for sending up to heaven for Buddha by dressing it in red cloth.

Grandma teaches me how to make these little sesame balls, also part of the offering to Buddha

Grandma woke up at 3AM to prepare the offering to Buddha. I woke up at 4:30AM in the frigid cold, put on my parka and started to creep downstairs when my aunt said to me, "wash your face and brush your hair to worship buddha," so I did, with the icy tap water, and when I went downstairs this is what I saw. A table with bowls of food and incense holder, a pig, a goat, and a paper tower with paper silver nuggets. My grandma chanted, holding pages of folded 'scriptures' while other people hit instruments. I was handed some incense-three sticks

we walked around the offerings in a circle, holding the paper money offerings (silver nuggets, big tower thing) while chanting, then placed it all in a metal bowl and burned it, so that it would reach Buddha up in heaven

while we waiting for the 'money' to finish burning, we set off firecrackers and fireworks...to wake up the gods (?) or maybe our neighbors

the money burning, the goat and the pig

dawn was breaking. there was more light. i took a photo.

That night, there was a big dinner celebrating the pig killing. pig insides were cooked--liver and green peppers, instestines and celery, pig blood soup, etc--and served at the dinner. the pig meat was chopped up, some of it salted to make into the region's famous smoked ham, and some of it gifted to family and friends.

KILLING A PIG pt 1

Here are pictures from our family New Years celebration in DaPan, a little village in the mountains of ZheJiang, where we killed a pig, sacrificed it to Buddha, then ate it. Usually, this sort of thing would happen during Chinese New Years, but since I’m usually at school during that time, grandma decided to do it during the solar calendar new year. Animal lovers might want to stop reading/navigate away from this page.

The pig. My grandmother raises one every year, keeping it in a little pen next to her house and feeding it leftover human-food scraps + other corn stuff

The dead pig. Pig killing master (man on left) stuck a knife in her throat and let it drain into a bowl.

the bowl of pig blood

my grandma also purchased a goat that day, so that there would be a goat and pig by the end of the day

The pig was placed into a tub of hot water and twirled around for a good ten minutes at least, to scald off all the hair

more de-hairing

time to de-gut

mmmm intestines

and then there was a pig

the lungs/heart hanging in the bathroom

Steel, Glass, and gleaming white concrete

I’ve been hanging out too much with the dying and the dead here (grandparents, graves of grandparents, etc), and it’s extinguishing my spirit for life a little. Today, my little cousin (16) came back from school for the weekend, and I made a special effort to spend some time with her, to absorb some youthful energy, to get a feel for the spirit of the Chinese youth, but also because she’s the closest thing to a sister I have (what with the one-child law and all).

Turns out, the spirt of the Chinese youth is pretty extinguished of the spirit for life as well, which is even more depressing, because it should be bursting with it. Not that my sister is dull, no, she is wonderful, it’s her lifestyle–and the strictly enforced lifestyle of every other Chinese high school student–that is suffocating and terrifying. First, high schools in China are all boarding, even if they are 15 minutes away from home (like in my sister’s case). This is necessary, because their schedules are thus:

5:50 Wake up

Breakfast + morning stretches

Morning Independent Study (memorizing texts; ‘independent study’ means all the students sitting at their assigned desks in their classrooms doing homework separately and quietly under the supervision of a teacher)

3 Classes

Lunch

1 hour nap time (Chinese siesta tradition, although many students use this time to do homework. I asked my sister if  students used this time to play, hang out, relax, she thought for a moment and said ‘not really’)

4 more classes

dinner

a series of evening independent studies

9:20 return to dorms 9:40 lights out. no flashlights allowed in rooms.

For free time, the students have the one hour nap after lunch, and ten minutes break in between every class. Also, they have the ‘weekend,’ although it is severely shortened. My sister’s last class of the week ends at 1:50pm on Saturday, that is when my uncle goes and picks her up and takes her home, and then she has to return to school by 5:00pm (for evening independent study) on Sunday. There is lots of homework assigned as well, so the major portion of the ‘weekend’ is spent doing that. To further emphasize the image of rigidity, I must add that all the courses are fixed for everyone–all Chinese high school students take the same classes, in the same classroom with the same classmates. Also, please note that this is not some special academic boot camp, but an average good Chinese high school.

‘What are your dreams?’ I asked my sister.

‘I want to test into a good college and get a good job.’ she said. And who can blame her for not wanting anything more or less or different, when these two things have been drilled into her head since wee-hood, and her education–which is her life–is so regimented and crammed to the brim with learning and memorizing that she has not a moment to breathe, to have fun, to think.

There is something very wrong with the system. 90% of these kids will forget 90% of the crap they spent 90% of their waking lives drilling into their heads after they fulfill their life dreams and test into a good college and get a good job. Furthermore, it seems to me that China is training its people to be a joyless flock of sheep. High achieving, really knowledgeable sheep, but sheep sheep sheep.

My aunt called the school today to ask for a vacation for my sister so that she could have dinner with us–vacation in this case meant 3 hours, she was to be back at school by 8pm. After dinner, I went with my uncle to take her there. This is what I saw: a large spacious campus, with many modern-looking buildings, steel, glass, gleaming white concrete, bright lifeless fluorescent lights. In the rainy dark, the school looked like an empty steel shell, part of its architecture included a claw-like curve that made me think of the Vatican, intimidating, imprisoning, cold. It seemed deserted. As I walked across campus, the clicking of my boots on the tile echoed in a sterile way. We spoke in whispers. But, as I walked my sister up to her classroom, I noticed that every single bright fluorescent classroom in the big steel monster was packed, filled with students working silently at their desks, a teacher supervising silently up front. It was evening independent study. As the door closed on my sister’s happy waving image, I felt like I was placing her in a prison or a hospital, or some sick mixture of the two.

Food Food Food

In Cuba people would always talk to me about me being Chinese, because that was the obviously simple thing to talk about. If there was ever a lull in the conversation and I was part of it, you could count on someone to pull out some funny little banal statement about los chinos. One of these, which I heard often, was some variant of, “Chinese people eat dogs, right? Have you eaten dog? Chinese people will eat anything!”

To answer this question, I am making a list of all the somewhat interesting foods I have eaten in the past days (animal lovers stop reading now!):

dog (Indeed! My first time ever, if you’ll believe it. I thought it was beef, it tasted like beef, then my auntie told me it was dog)

goose feet (a delicacy)

goose liver

lamb liver

pig liver

pig blood (congealed), pig intestines, pig stomach, lots of other pig insides

turtle

wild boar

wild hare

duck tongue

cow head meat

Unlike in Cuba, where there is no food (jk jk), eating is quite the activity in China, and Chinese people are really good at it. It seems like all I’ve been doing since I’ve gotten here is eat eat eat. Big fancy meals have been overabundant, partly because its customarily respectful/polite/good to feed people who are visiting a lot of good food (no one meets old friends over coffee or tea, only over meals), and partly because we’re always eating with a lot of people, so even if the meal isn’t meant to be big and fancy it ends up that way. They also end up lasting a very long time because 1 – there are a lot of dishes to serve, since there are a lot of people, and in China everyone shares all the dishes, and 2 – people are chatting it up. Conclusion: I feel like I’ve been sent to a fattening farm.

—-

On a relatively unrelated note, a funny little story pertaining to food: My grandmother was talking about her grandchildren, and complaining about one of my cousins, saying how she’s really not very ‘guai’( a word that means obedient, well-behaved, respectful, used all the time to describe the good qualities in children). Then she stopped and thought a little, and said, “but she’s changed, I think. For example, at lunch today she gave me the duck head. Imagine that! She put the duck head in my bowl and said, ‘grandma, have the duck head.’ I was so surprised. Yes, she’s gotten a little better.”

Checking in from the Motherland

China! That’s where I am. After 7 months of soul-searching in Latin America, coming back to my roots of roots is quite the shake-up. There is no dancing, there are no kisses, (on another note there is also no HEAT), but there are lots of extravagant meals with strange animals/animal parts, lots of toasting, Buddha-worshipping, and the like. There is also a lot of MSG, which makes the food very tasty, and makes me very thirsty and bloated all the time.

So far, I have spent most of my time at my grandmother’s, my mom’s hometown, where I spent a good portion of my childhood before the whitewashing, and where I feel most irrationally attached to; if you ask me to think of ‘home,’ images of this village enter my mind more than any other. It is a tiny little farmer’s village in the mountains in province of ZheJiang, where people (like my grandmother) still cook with firewood, plant their own bok choy, and kill their own pigs. It is absolutely beautiful, we all agree, but when I ask my relatives who grew up there if they remember growing up in such beauty they say, no, at the time we only thought about how hard it was to walk all the way up the mountains.

I must run now, got to run around to see more relatives, who will undoubtedly try to stuff me with more MSG-filled food. I am going to be a little Asian balloon when I get back, luckily will have some days to deflate before returning to school.

CUBA Propaganda Pt 2

old posters from a former propaganda artist's house

cuban flag image-play

random box on the side of the highway

tourists taking photos of the che monument in santa clara, city of che

VOLVERÁN! cienfuegos, plaza josé martí

more baseball stadium deco--'the cuban sport, by way of victories'

más pelota-

cuban sport, well-being, health, happiness, solidarity

Happy New Year!

2010 has arrived. I spent the passing of the year chasing it on an airplane. When I left cold snowy miserable Michigan, it was New Year’s Eve, and when I landed in China, it was 2010, and I was very tired from many hours of not sleeping so much. New year’s isn’t such a big deal in China, because Chinese New Year is what really counts. You know, lunar calendar. But family is still pretty excited to see me, and I’m still pretty excited to see them. I also stand firmly by my conviction that Chinese food is the best food in the world.

Now I must go kill a pig, no time to write more.

PROPAGANDA pt 1

Here are some pictures of things that you don’t see so much in the USA, or at least not in this form. I guess it’s ‘propaganda’ in the American sense, though in Cuba the word is used for advertisements for consumer goods, which don’t really exist in Cuba.

Monument to the Cuban Five in Viñales

signs at paseo y linea

pharmacy on 23, la rampa

G y 13

bus-waiting in casablanca

santiago, serendipity

baseball stadium in la habana

Getting Around in Cuba

Here begins a series of picture-posts of Cuba, since a lot of pics couldn’t load on the slow Cuban internet, part of a longer series of retrospective posts on Cuba. Maybe I will complain about America some more in the middle of this series, we’ll see. 

Coco taxis - mostly tourist fare; once we bargained with a really spunky coco taxi driver who asked us if we had caramelos

fancy máquina

shitty máquina

campesino in horsecart

a moving guagua in havana, they are normally this full or more

FREEDOM BUS, sent from some church or other type of do-gooders in the US

electric train - the 'hershey train' - from havana to matanzas; most likely 50+ years old

empty pilot's cockpit of train

inside of the train; as you can see, seats were super comfy

normal vehicles in santiago

tourist cars waiting outside capitolio - on the sides are painted the words 'rentar una fantasia'

plane santiago-havana

open back camioneta, hitchhiking

floor of the camioneta, covered in frutabomba

horse- taxi, one peso per person

cienfuegos, cleanest most put together city in cuba, the 'pearl' they call it

In Search of Humanity

Turns out, the American suburb is actually hell.

Less than a week ago, I was in sunny Havana, living in a renovated house from the 50s in el Vedado, the nice suburbs of the city where the University of Havana resides. This is what I did every day: I walked outside in shorts and a tank top, with no cell phone and no watch, I saw the sun, I saw people sitting outside, sometimes we would greet each other, if they were men they might throw some piropos at me, I walked a few blocks to a busy street and bought food, or caught the bus, if I needed the time I would ask someone on the street. I lived in a city full of people, and lo and behold, I could see them, right there, on their porches, in the streets, la la la la la.

Now I am back in America, in my parent’s house, which is lovely because my parents are here and I love them. Unfortunately, however, it is located in suburbia, in one of those subdivisions on a golf course surrounded by other subdivisions on golf courses. It is also desafortunadamente located in Michigan, where it is freezing. A few days ago I was trapped at home (no car), and felt a desperate urge for human company. I was not bored–I had lots to do, things to read, emails to send, instruments to play, and the whole world wide web at my free speedy disposal for the first time in four months–but I was a little lonely. I decided that I could easily fix this. I put on my coat, gloves, scarf, and boots and went on a walk in search of humans. After all, I live in a residential area, where people supposedly reside.

I ran into three people and a lot of empty looking houses. The first was a woman who was running with her dog, I smiled and waved at her, her dog stopped to bother me, and I didn’t even mind (I don’t normally like dogs), but she yanked at its collar and told it to get moving. The second two were a daughter and father taking a walk together. I greeted them, too, of course, and thought about starting small talk or asking to join them, but decided against it because maybe they were having special daughter/father bonding time. A few cars drove past me, and I guess there must have been people in them, just like there must have been people in the houses, but I couldn’t get past the shiny metal exteriors and tinted windows in the little time that they rushed past to make eye contact with the drivers. One honked at me in an unfriendly way, because I was walking in the street (the sidewalk was icy), and that startled me a bit. By this time I was frozen. I had forgotten how being outside could do that to you, even if you were walking briskly (strolling also doesn’t exist in this country/weather). I ran into my house again, and started to make phone calls to friends, which required a boost of courage because I much prefer conversing face to face. But it was nice nonetheless, especially since I hadn’t spoken to some of these people in a long time. In the end I guess I found humanity, if accompanied by a few degrees of technology-separation.

Here is my rant: there is something wrong with a society in which I can be physically surrounded by lots and lots of people (all the houses and cars! one after another after another) yet NEVER see them, even when I actively go looking, where a cell phone–something that is obviously not fundamentally necessary–becomes a necessity for sanity, where I yearn for a car even though I am morally against private cars because without it I am trapped and cannot live. Why did we do this to ourselves! This kind of lifestyle, while addressing the individual-society conflict by allowing us to tap into a warped version of society when we want if we want on our own individual terms, cannot be the answer. The cold, of course, doesn’t help either. Conclusion: suburbia is hell, long live warm weather.