Spring Festival

The past few days I have been visiting various relatives. The eighteenth was Chinese New Year, or otherwise named Spring Festival. It is the biggest festival on the Chinese calendar, the festivities lasting several days. It falls on a different day of the (international) calendar each year because the Chinese holidays are reckoned according to the Chinese lunar calendar.

As an interesting side note, in the Chinese lunar calendar last year there was two Julys(?). My wife, Poppy, has her birthday in that month so, counting her birthday on the international solar calendar and her two birthdays in the two Julys of the Chinese lunar calendar, she had three birthdays last year, which is simply not fair.

Another note concerning the Chinese calendar. Several Chinese people have said to me very smugly that it is no surprise to them that this winter was so terribly warm. They say they knew it would be a warm winter because last year’s lunar calendar had two Julys. They claim that the lunar calendar is more fitting to the weather than the solar one. I don’t know if this claim is true because I still as yet barely understand the lunar calendar.

Anyhow, back to Spring Festival. On Saturday Poppy and I went to her mother’s relative’s house and talked with them for a while. Then we went to her father’s parents’ house and spent the night with them. We ate a huge meal for lunch, consuming so much delicious food that whereas our mouths were delighted with flavor, our bellies were feeling the crunch. After the meal, most of us drove over to Poppy’s grandfather’s brother’s house to visit them. There is a special word in Chinese for going around and visiting the relatives because it is an essential tradition of Spring Festival. After that we returned to Poppy’s grandfather’s house and talked and watched the annual Spring Festival TV program.

This program is probably the most watched television program in the world. I think the Super Bowl is the most watched program in the USA, and maybe less than 50 percent of TV sets in America during that time are playing the Super Bowl. In contrast, in China during the Spring Festival program something like 90 percent of the total TV sets that are on are tuned into this program.

There are lots of people singing and dancing and doing comedy plays in the program. The Chinese navy boys sang and danced. Then, the brave and handsome army guy sang, flanked by two beautiful young army ladies. As you guessed, the air force guys also got to sing and dance. Then they have various Chinese minority people groups sing and do traditional dances. Then the little children with their red neckerchiefs did their song and dance, which was cute. Probably the biggest star of the show this year was Zhao Benshan. He is the number one comedy play guy in China. Usually the middle-aged Zhao does comedy routines on a stage but he also has a TV show. He is attractive to us laobaixing (common folk) because he always plays a common person, dressed in poor cloth and behaving as a good ol’ Northeasterner. The reason he was such a star this year was that he recently put out a full-length movie. Later, I hope to tell you about this movie which all of you in America should see, but never will.

While we were watching the program, we were making the festival food: dumplings. They are meat or vegetable balls wrapped up in a doughy covering. Right before twelve o’clock, some of us went outside to light off some fireworks, which is a must do before eating any meal during the festival. We didn’t do many fireworks this year, just popped off a few crackers and rushed back inside to eat. Most of us were probably still full from lunch, so we didn’t eat too many dumplings. However, tradition says that we have to eat dumplings at midnight, so we all obliged. Finally, everyone went to bed. That was Spring Festival.

My wife and I visited other family members for the next couple days. Now, we are home for just one night. We will go in the morning to visit other family members.

When I have time, I would like to tell you about many things, including
-Regifting: what to do when you don’t know what to do with it.
-Bathrooms: how sometimes you feel you are in a glass house.
-Zhao Benshan’s movie: why I’m surprised the other main character had a name.
-Potentiality: would it still happen if it wasn’t going to happen in the first place?

More holiday activities

Recently, I’ve had two get-togethers with the school. The president took the English teachers out today for some hot-pot. The restaurant was a great place: the rooms swank, the food delicious. Besides the hot-pot foods, they also served some raw beef on ice, which though disgusting, was tasty dipped in wassabi.

Yesterday, I ate Chinese dumplings with the dormitory building employees and all of the poor expatriate souls that didn’t return to their home countries for the holiday. There were three Russians, one of which could speak English. There were three Japanese, two of which could speak Chinese but not English. And there was my wife and me. Once a Russian that couldn’t speak English asked a question to the Japanese that couldn’t speak Chinese, so the question was translated from Russian to English to Chinese to Japanese, much to the humor of all. I had never had the opportunity to talk to the Russians before, so this was good time to be able to get to know them.

A couple days ago we went to my wife’s parents house. We had a good time there. I was not embarrassed by my poor Chinese this time. The family and I were able to talk this time more than last time, and Mamma didn’t criticize me for not being able to understand them (whew!). Often when we go there to visit, the family will all sit on the bed in the master bedroom and watch TV and talk.

This time we were watching a soap opera that was named rather inappropriately, “Women Don’t Cry.” It was a show about women . . . crying. They had plenty of reason to cry; the show was one disaster after another. I made a prediction as a joke, that the main character would be let out of prison (don’t ask) just as her friend was going into surgery and that her friend would die before she could get there. I was absolutely right. It seems that many of the TV shows here are pretty melodramatic, but this one really went above and beyond the competition.

This n'that

This week I met for lunch with a bro. that I haven't seen for a while. He lives here nowadays, but he's preparing for studying abroad. He has a lot of decisions to make, so we were discussing those things. He is really working hard on his study. Beyond learning a third language, he has also decided that he wants to read thru his book 20 times before leaving: a goal that keeps him busy for about three hours each day.

My wife and I two nights ago met with her friend who had a special surprise for us. She announced to us that she and her boyfriend had gotten their marriage certificate a few days before. They were very happy, as you can imagine. They treated us to a meal of dumplings at a popular restaurant in town. I was pretty quiet since the guy doesn't know English, but my wife and her friend talked nonstop about wedding things.

For those of you that don't know, it is a custom here to get your marriage certificate six months or more before you have your wedding. My wife's friends had not had their wedding yet but just became legally married.

Last night, we met with two of our neighbors, J. and M. My bro. J. was going to leave town for a couple weeks the next day so we invited him and M. over to eat with us. My wife cooked some of her delicious food; I was really proud of her. I’m proud to show off her good cooking to my friends. We all talked at the table for a long time last night. I regret that we had not done it sooner. I think I might see my bro. M. again tomorrow.

Today, my wife went shopping with her mother, and I stayed at home and read. Actually I finished reading two books. I finished reading G.’s Rghteous Kingdom by Walter Chantry and Thomas Aquinas by G.K. Chesterton. Both of those books are excellent and both of them left me with questions. Chantry left me questions about the law and about what law is good for us today. Chesterton’s book on the other hand was mostly understandable except for two paragraphs towards the end. He said something about “the metaphysical problem with mere change.” I don’t know what that problem is. In fact, I don’t even know what mere change is! I looked on the Internet for a while, but to no avail. If you know, I would be really happy if you clued me in on the answers. The other thing I didn’t understand was he said, “potentiality doesn’t explain itself.” I wish that he would have explained himself a little more. :-)

Queue

This is a poem that I wrote in December of 2002.

Queue

Johnson, Schaeffer, Kant.
He bought, studied and scrawled notes
In these books before
He shelved each one, one by one.
I read to learn about Dad.

Study

Today Poppy and I studied all day. She is working on her paper and I on Chinese. Now I need to find some articles online for her about immigration, immigrants, law etc.

Just today I finished reading The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. It was an old book of my dad's. I don't think he read it b/c he always made marks in the books that he read and this one was unmarked. Now, since I have read it, it is marked from beginning to end. (I wrote a short poem long ago about his books once. I'll find it sometime.) It was pretty easy reading as far as philosophy goes. It was a pretty good book.

One thing that I was struck by as I read it was that almost all of the philosophers in it had a kind of arbitrary prejudice against the possibility of the supernatural. Why do they have this untouchable dogma? Science is wonderful, but it tells us only about the natural world. It can't tell us about many things, including whether it is conceivable for things to happen supernaturally. It was really interesting to see Herbert Spencer weaving an entire system of how evolution explains everything only to discover that it can't explain consciousness. They labeled this, "epiphenomenon." This word somehow seems to me similar to the word supernatural.

One thing that was notably missing from this book was all of the thinkers from Aristotle to Bacon. It seems a little far-fetched to say that no one thought about anything from after 322 B.C. until the 1560s A.D. What about Augustine? What about Aquinas? The author said that he didn't like the scholastics, so he didn't include them. (Aquinas was a scholastic philosopher.) His definition of scholasticism was "the philosophy of the medieval theologians, in general, the divorce of speculation from observation and practice." The definition seems a bit biased against scholasticism, but I don't know; maybe it is accurate. I need to study scholasticism for myself. Aquinas was important because he was the one that introduced Aristotle's ideas into the very Platonic church. He thought that it was a good idea to observe the world around him. Maybe if it were not for his influence, the renaissance would not have come when it did.

Now that I am finished with that book I will get back to The City of God by St. Augustine. I am about 2/3 through. But I will not read very much now because I decided that it is more important for me right now to study Chinese, help my wife with her paper and do some other things.

"Skiing"

Today my wife and I did what people in this province call skiing. It was quite an experience. The ski area was actually in a district of the city. However, it was far out in the countryside; a 45-minute drive. We were treated by the school to the ski trip. The ski area was pretty nice. It had a big lodge, a roller skating rink, an ice skating rink, a (frozen) pond, a dormitory, a hotel and restaurant, an indoor pool, snow, tubes and ski rental. The only thing missing was the ski slope.

Oh, there was a slope of sorts but nothing so steep that the Illinois highway commission would put a “Danger, Steep Grade” sign beside. If you pushed really hard with the poles, you could get up to a pretty decent speed for a bunny slope.

Not to say I was bored. I had a really great time and so did my wife. The slope was good for her since she had never gone skiing before. She didn’t mind the slow rate of descent; in fact, it was about as fast as she wanted to go. She did her happy little dance, which some of you have had the pleasure of observing, every time she reached the bottom. That probably has something to do with the reason that her skis kept falling off. In fact, the reason she fell over once or twice was probably that she was so happy she started to dance up and down while she was still sliding down the slope (but that is just my speculation).

The place was quaint. At about noon a lady came out to the side of the slope with an ampliphone and said that it was lunchtime. The whole slope emptied off as all the people herded into the dining area. Even the lift turned off for a short time. But my wife was so enjoying the slope that she asked me, “Can I play one more time? Can I play one more time?” So I my lunch had to wait for later as she went down one more time.

For supper tonight I made some onion-egg-garlic fried rice. It was pretty good, if I do say so myself. My wife liked it so much she had three helpings. She also requested that I pull out the stinky tofu, a side dish that you eat in small amounts along with the main dish. Stinky tofu is one of those foods that you wonder: who was the first sicko to discover that it is edible? It is ashen-grey, the color of a corpse, and it smells like manure.

It actually doesn’t taste too bad. In fact, it brings back fond memories. As I chew it I feel as if I can smell my grandfather's pig lots in Iowa. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of eating the tofu in the bedroom. Now the whole room smells like poop. If you walked into our apartment right now you would think that the smell you smelled was coming from the bathroom and not from the meal.

I think now we will call my wife’s cousin in Japan. G’bye.

A Snowy Day

This being my first update, I wish that I could say I was really busy and had done the world a great favor today, but actually that's not the case. I awoke at 8:40, read my book and my Book, checked my emails, read the news and then started this blog. Later today I will call a friend and I'll clean the house. My wife plans to work on her graduate thesis today. Though this post was as boring as clipping toenails, I promise next time it will be better.

Out Post

Hello to everybody that calls me a friend or family member,

For years I have been planning of getting a website or a blog started so that all of you can know what I am up to and how I am doing. After numerous failed attempts, I have finally succeeded in the venture, having given up my quixotic idea of making my own website with http. I have wanted much to give you periodic updates; however, I didn’t want to flood your email in-box with my emails if you didn’t want them (a sentiment I wish that spammers shared). Further, even if you did want my emails, there is something intimidating about getting a really long email. If I get a really long email, maybe I will read it later, or maybe I will put it off and never read it.

So I think this blog is a perfect way for you all to know what’s happening in the lives of my wife and me. I think I will also create another blog in which I will write my thoughts about things. If you want to know what I am doing, you can check this blog. If you want to know what I am thinking, you can check the other blog.

Thank you all for your prayers for me through the years and now for my wife and me. I’ll never forget those who have supported me faithfully with your encouragement and kindness.