Category Archives: 21st century

Christmas Made in China

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If you are beginning the frantic countdown to Christmas Day, take a few minutes to read this lovely and thought-provoking post Minjie Chen wrote three years ago about China’s role in making our holiday season bright in the West.

“Fotang is a small ancient water town south of the Yangtze River. It is my father’s hometown.” So begins “Made in China,” a deftly written short essay and an unlikely Christmas story published in Pipa, a magazine for young learners of Chinese as a second language. The theme of the issue, dated November 2017, was Christmas.

Cover of the Pipa magazine, Vol. 5, no. 6, November 2017, a special issue on Christmas.

Launched in 2013, Pipa is a bi-monthly magazine designed for children who are learning the Chinese language outside China. The magazine title, “Pipa” (枇杷), refers to the loquat, a yellow-skinned fruit that resembles an apricot. “Loquat” is a playful rebellion against the slur “banana” for ethnic Chinese living in a Western country. Regarded as having lost touch with their Chinese cultural heritage, identity, and values, they are disparagingly compared to a banana, which is “yellow on the outside, white on the inside.” The flesh of a loquat is as yellow as its skin, implying the magazine’s ambition to connect Chinese American children with the culture of their ancestral land. (In the Chinese language, “yellow skin” is not a derogatory description: true insults come from not embracing the color, rather than using the term.)

Loquats (Image source: Pxhere.com)

Each Pipa issue is neatly organized around a theme and presented in columns featuring illustrated stories, interviews, informational text, poetry, rhymes, craft, games, and children’s writing and art. All contents, except for works submitted by children, are contributed by native Chinese writers but tailored for the limited language competency of children who are learning the language in an English-dominant environment. Pipa stands apart from most Chinese-language reading materials, which are either intended for native Chinese children or translated from popular works originally in English and other languages, or both. Chinese culture, history, and literature, as well as Chinese American life, are its main subject matter.

“Made in China,” written by Caomao and illustrated by Xiaoweiqun. In Pipa, Vol. 5, no. 6, November 2017. (Cotsen 153521)

In “Made in China,” Caomao continues: “As I remember, there the roof tiles were black, the walls were whitewashed, the trees were lush, and the aged stone pavement had a bluish gray sheen. On clear days, you could hear roosters cock-a-doodle-doo; on rainy days, you would listen to rain drops splatter. In winter, the smell of ham and brown sugar was everywhere.” (13) Farmers made a living by selling bok choy and rice and trading live hens and ducks at the market. Nobody knew how long life had been like this.

“Made in China,” in Pipa (Cotsen 153521)

Change started two decades ago when people opened factories in town, making small merchandise like toys, towels, and buttons. “Since then there were always the rumbling of machines, the honking of vehicles, and the raised voices of people speaking into phones. The odor of car exhaust hung in the air.” (14) Then, a decade ago, the locals learned a novel word—sheng dan jie (Christmas). Factories big and small began producing Christmas goods. Streams of trucks drove into town and carried away loads and loads of Christmas products. Where did they go? Someone said they would be shipped to Europe or America, because people in those places needed lots and lots of Christmas trinkets. (14)

“Made in China,” in Pipa (Cotsen 153521)

Migrant workers came from faraway places to earn a living here. They had no idea what Christmas looked like in America and Europe, but they always wore Santa hats in the factory–not for fun or to look good, but to block glitter. Once the colorful powder crept into hair, it clung fast no matter how hard you wash. Still at the end of the day, glitter covered their faces and bodies, and found its way into their ears and nostrils. (14)

“Made in China,” in Pipa (Cotsen 153521)

Townsfolks did not celebrate Christmas. From this day on, workers took their well-earned break, because no one would expect new orders after the start of the next holiday season. Migrant workers would not return until after the Chinese New Year to get ready for the coming Christmas. The town became much quieter: “On clear days you could hear cock-a-doodle-doo, and, on wet days, the pitter-patter of rain drops. Between black tiles and white walls wafted once again the delicious smell of ham and brown sugar.” (15)

“Made in China” is an exquisitely composed essay-story, contrasting two carefully edited images of life in an old-fashioned town before and after it became China’s so-called “Christmas Village.” As the manufacturing center for Christmas merchandise, Fotang (佛堂) has an uncanny name, the literal meaning of which is “Buddha’s hall.” The town is administratively part of the city of Yiwu, the seat of the world’s largest small commodities market. Though on a minor scale, the essay recalls Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005), a documentary that traces the life cycle of glittering festival beads from New Orleans back to a factory compound in rural China, where the cheap disposables were made by workers as young as teenage girls fresh out of middle school.

The Christmas story of Fotang, written at the reading level of second and third graders without compromising the beauty of the language and illustrated in warm rosy watercolors, recapitulates the massive and complex history of globalization as it intersected with a tiny old Chinese town from the turn of the twenty-first century. Caomao’s economical use of language is remarkably effective, immersing us in the sights, sounds, and smells of the water town. (The ham mentioned twice in the essay is not any average processed meat, but the prized dry-cured Jinhua ham, a millennium-old product unique to the region.) The old-town life sounds charmingly peaceful, although poverty, elided in the text, must have played a big part in transforming “Buddha’s hall” into the “Christmas Village.” Environmental costs and health risks are suggested between the lines.

It must be pointed out that the changing reality of Fotang and Chinese society is more than can be summed up by the facile dichotomy between an idyllic agrarian community then and a booming manufacturing base now. For one thing, as Fotang has been exporting Christmas products to Europe, America, and an expanding global market, along with Hollywood movies, English-language learning, and Starbucks, “Christmas” has been woven into the fabric of a largely secular Chinese society. Merchants love Christmas for introducing yet another festive excuse to encourage shopping and spending. Young families even try to celebrate the holiday with children the “proper” Western way, one involving tabletop Christmas trees and stockings. The impact of globalization has worked in both directions. The culture of Chinese-Americans’ ancestral land that Pipa hopes to channel is not fossilized in five-character quatrains of the Tang dynasty, but is an evolving organism, continually exchanging elements with the larger world, modifying and being modified by the latter.

My childhood friend complained that she couldn’t find a good stocking for her toddler son. She lives in a big city only two hours away from Fotang, but for reasons beyond the knowledge of average consumers like myself, made-for-export products are not necessarily readily available in Chinese stores. As children we used to each have a stocking from my aunt, who worked in a Shanghai tapestry factory that made and exported embroidered stockings. I put my foot into it and found it a poor “sock.” Bemused by what a sock so huge was for (Aunt never mentioned it, and now that I think back I am not sure if she knew), I still loved the bright and merry pattern of jingle bells on it and would pull it out of the wardrobe to admire every so often. My friend said she was looking for a stocking as pretty as the one I gave her in the third grade. After the phone call I placed an order for a few with felt Santas and reindeer on them from a major online store owned by a certain Princeton alumnus, planning to take them to China on my next trip. The soft stockings came in a rustling plastic bag with a sticker on it: Made in China. It’s going to be a round trip home for the big sock.

(Edited by Jessica Terekhov, PhD Candidate in English, Princeton University)

Source:

Caomao and Xiaoweiqun (illustrator). “Made in China.” Pipa: The Magazine for Chinese Speaking Kids in North America, vol. 5, no. 6, November 2017, pp. 13-15.

Acknowledgment:

Thanks go to author Caomao, illustrator Xiaoweiqun, and Jing Cheng, editor of the Pipa magazine for granting us the permission to reproduce the text (in English translation) and images from the essay.

Bulgy Bears Hibernating in Picture Books

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Few of us have encountered bears in the wild, but we know that they hibernate during cold winters when food is scarce.  To survive prolonged periods of inactivity, they must lay on stores of fat.   If the child’s work is playing, then the bear’s is stuffing.  The Katmai National Park and Preserve frame it more scientifically to nature lovers in the promotion of 2022 Fat Bear Week:

Fat Bear Week is a celebration of success and survival. It is a way to celebrate the resilience, adaptability and strength of Katmai’s brown bears. Bears are matched against each other in a “march madness” style competition and online visitors can vote who is ultimately crowned the Fat Bear Week 2022 Champion. Over the course of the week, virtual visitors learn more about the lives and histories of individual bears while also gaining a greater understanding of Katmai’s ecosystem through a series of live events hosted on explore.org.

Sorry Pooh, but bears are more closely associated with food than song in children’s books.  As foragers, they have better manners than their real-life counterparts in the woods and streams, that is to say, they can be persuaded (not effortlessly) to share food they have found. In author/illustrator Joerg Muehle’s Two for Me, One for You (English translation 2019, c. 2012), the bear gives mushrooms to his friend the weasel to cook, but they quickly start a quarrel over how three can be divided fairly between two.  Whose work is more important: bear’s in the woods or weasel’s in the kitchen?  Who likes mushrooms the most?  Who’s bigger?  Who’s grabbier? During the squabble, a fox comes along and snitches the  mushroom in contention, which causes the pair to set aside their differences and enjoy one each.  While this is a good fable for small children, the bear’s gracious capitulation to circumstances seems not quite ursine.  What bear could possibly be satisfied with such a small meal?  To eat so sparingly is surely against its best interest, at least in the run-up to winter..

Alice Bach imagines in The Smartest Bear and His Brother Oliver (1975) a  bear family’s fall feasting, i.e. the consumption of massive amounts of calories in a succession of meals, many on the scale of Thanksgiving dinners.  Mother cheerfully makes the epic shopping trips, wheeling home two carts at a time.  One of her twins, Ronald, hates fall feasting because it takes time away from his project of reading through the encyclopedia.  Were he to accomplish his goal, he would be smartest bear in the world, which would demonstrate to everyone that he’s not the same as his brother Oliver, who has an appetite for everything and anything in the fall, emptying pots of stew and bowls of pudding and plates of flapjacks and syrup and muffins and applesauce.  He is such an eager eater than he sleeps on a blanket next to the kitchen stove so he won’t miss a spoonful.

At every meal, Ronald resists.  The arrival of Aunt Bear at dinner time, loaded down with five enormous baskets of her famous  tooth-achingly sweet winter tarts, interrupts his progress through volume 5.  He says he’s really not hungry, prompting her to scold, “If you don’t eat enough, you might not sleep through the whole winter.  Your stomach will wake up.  There you’ll be, wide awake, while the rest of the bear world is cozy and plump sleeping through the cold time.”  He whispers under his breath, “You all feast without me” and plots to stay awake all winter so he can read through the last volume of the encyclopedia,, a thought that cheers him up enough to eat creamed squash, multiple slices of wheat bread and honey, and some of his aunt’s tarts loaded with nuts and dried fruits, just to be sociable.

Before the dishes can be piled in the sink, Ronald races back to his encyclopedia, thinking he can get to the Rs before the first snowfall, no matter how often his no-neck brother with the clogged-up brain tells him to give his eyes a break.  After an outburst of unbrotherly love, Ma and Pa give them their birthday presents early—a bakery truck for Oliver and a typewriter for Ronald.  Confirmed in his identity as the smart bear of the future, Ronald rebonds with his “identical” twin over an enormous casserole of baked sweet potatoes and marshmallows just before collapsing into the snug family bed until spring.   Stephen Kellogg’s illustrations celebrate the glorious excess, which humans fancy is a bear’s birth rite, although just as likely a projection of our desire to overindulge in rich foods  without consequence when the weather turns nippy.

Victoria Miles’ Old Mother Bear (2007) is more likely to satisfy readers with a taste for “truth and realities” for having poetically documented the last three years in a twenty-four -year-old female grizzly’s life, in which she raises her last litter of cubs. Several of Molly Bang’s inset illustrations show the bear family feeding quietly in the alpine meadows and hills.  The climax of this factual account, based on a real bear in the Flathead River valley of southern British Columbia, is  a series of three double-page spreads in which the mother bear fights off a male half her age and twice her size.  The culmination of the cubs’ education is symbolized by the return with their own young to the huckleberry patches their mother led them to those three summers.   The description of the old bear’s death is somber but ultimately not sad.  Toothless, deaf, and blind, she crawls into an old den on a mountainside.  The den’s roof collapses on the body in the spring and the slope is eventually covered with a lush carpet of anemone flowers.