The Mid-Autumn Festival

Last night, I walked into my host families apartment and was greeted by a 91-year-old granny equipped with a perfect set of teeth that refused to stop chattering. As it has been explained to me, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a time for families to come together eat dinner and mooncakes, write poems of hope and thanks, and gaze at a full moon. Perhaps this holiday was originally intended to celebrate the end of the harvest when the food and drink were abundant, back-breaking work had finally come to an end, and the family could relax together, but today this has been replaced with new modern reasons: college, work, retirement, etc. Families rarely get a chance to come together and enjoy a meal.

And there were me and my roommate facing a the most vivacious 91-year-old I'd ever met. She showed us the Sudokus that she'd had finished that day, she peeled passion fruit for us, and she did stop talking for a minute. The rest of the family was there. The mother packing the last few dumplings. The father trying to find a way to open the iced tea bottle. The two brothers sitting across from us with their wives discussing work, school, and work. It was a family.

I remember reading somewhere that back in the 70's and 80's (and earlier I'm sure) that as soon as winter hit Beijing, the corner stores selling vegetables, fruits, and eggs became vendors of white cabbage, nothing else. And cabbage was the only food there was. But, our table was a spectrum of colors. Peanuts, seaweed, calamari, shrimp, tofu, tomatoes, edamame, and pork-stuffed dumplings. Endless bowls of dumplings.

And somewhere between the 45th and 46th dumpling your mind begins to see something new.

Amongst all the reports of dangerous toys, paper stuffed steamed buns, and Steven Spielberg's qualms with China's human rights, where are the reports about the "2nd most important holiday of the year?" With pollution shortening the lifespan of some amazing percentage of Chinese by 10 years, where are the reports about grannies that fill out Sudoku puzzles like they were the address section of an application? And with foreign businesses wetting their pants over cultivating Chinese youth's growing consumer culture, where are the reports about two foreigners sitting awkwardly, unsure how to act, how to speak?

China has changed but it is not in the midst of extremist revolution. The people here are excited about the 2008 Olympics, they greet foreigners with interest, and they have the time and food to gather and relax. There is brightness in Beijing, it's not all propaganda. The Western media spends a lot of time focusing on the negative in China, and they do have a lot to choose from, but it is not as dark as their forecasts purport. Political oppression, pollution, corruption, they are all problems but humans have an interesting ability to find happiness despite. Is it adaptation? Cultural relativism? Or simply optimism?

Perhaps, something you don't hear in the media very often is that the Chinese can laugh despite the exhaust that chokes Beijing. While the one-party-rule democracy here attempts to control information and expression at times, they don't dare touch the volume dial of Chinese laughter, conversation, life.

I guess what I'm saying here is that Beijing and China is not a dangerous or sad place. The emotion of fear doesn't rule, as the media insinuates. While the quality of life might not be as good, the taste for life has not diminished. The values of culture, morality, and society are not hiding from the CCP and neither are their people.

So, gazing at the moon as we walked back to study hundreds of vocab words, I felt fed up. Dumplings can do that to you, but so can biased reporting. The language is hard, the culture is hard, and the life is hard for any reporter who must live in China or Beijing, but beyond that is an abundance of life. (or maybe it's not the reporters but the companies they work for, or perhaps the demands of the consumer, who knows?)


probably a lot of typos, missed words, and grammatical errors, but i've been speaking chinese for four months straight w/o an ounce of english. forgive me.