大连: Fun at the Pier

Dalian, being a coastal city, has a lot of fun places to hang out along the water. One such place was Sun Asia Ocean World, a sea park that ran along what seemed to be some kind of carnival dock.

I'll be honest, compared to its American equivalent, the park was a bit grimy and lackluster, even in a city as shiny and clean as Dalian. But as one could easily guess, and one has definitely read in my blog, there is a large difference between Chinese and American standards of quality.

大连: Jiaozi Making!

Dinner on Sunday evening was a sumptuous feast of 饺子 (jiǎozi), more commonly known in the United States as dumplings. My friend's mother was patient enough to teach me how to shape the very famous little dumplings and seal them for steaming. She prepared the filling, of course, as I am not yet ready to advance to that stage of jiaozi preparation. The filling was a mix of chopped-up pork and some unidentified greens, which you can see in the bowl below (ignore the odd face):

The next step of jiaozi-making involves preparing the small doughy pancakes that will eventually become the pouches for the pork filling. If you look at the cutting board, you can see the small sections of dough waiting to be rolled out into flat pancakes:

And now... for my attempts at making the little shapes you see on the round tray above:

Then, after some steaming and waiting, we see the final result in the bowls at the far edges of the table:

Yes, I am now a jiaozi-wrapping pro... kind of. I can say, though, that my jiaozi were particularly good (as were all the other jiaozi in the bowls). While consuming my jiaozi, I learned that jiaozi actually has a lot of fortuitous meaning in Chinese culture. They're eaten specifically on the Chinese New Year, known as the Spring Festival, as part of the celebration of a fortuitous year. So my host parents explained to me, eating jiaozi together had particularly good meaning. I was so thankful for their willingness to offer me the experience of making traditional jiaozi with such a warm and open family. Someday, maybe, I'll learn how to make my own jiaozi and serve it up to my family. We'll see what they think about that.

P.S. See the cake in the middle? It will be my friend's birthday in a few weeks, but she'll be at college, so her parents wanted to celebrate. They literally just put the cake on the table, told her to cut it, and we started eating it along with dinner. No song or anything. For all the ceremony surrounding other aspects of Chinese life, it seems that birthdays do not get the same spotlight treatment they get in the States. Bad when you're young, good when you're old.

大连: One Family's Dynamic

Note: A few months flitting about various locales in China, and a few books read on Chinese society definitely don’t make me an expert, so please don’t take my words as absolute truth. These are simply my observations and my attempt to categorize them into transmittable ideas for those back at home who will never have the opportunities I have been blessed with to experience such an incredible culture first-hand.

I feel like the dynamics in a Chinese family are as varied as those all across America. After all, people are all different, so it would follow that the families of one society, although very similar across the board, would have different micro-structures. In China, these differences are further amplified by the uneven way in which modernization is happening across the country. A rural family and an urban family have their differences, and even within the category of urban families, the poor and the wealthy obviously have their differences too.

I had the pleasure of staying with the family of a Chinese friend this weekend in Dalian, a modern coastal city. They were a perfect example of the blend of modern and traditional that coexist in Chinese society. The parents were both very easy-going and willing to talk about any subject, even government. Notice I said, “both.” It seemed to me that even though the father was “head” of the household, the mother did not play a subservient role. She was respected, as she should be. Both she and her husband run their own separate companies. Yet at the same time, my friend explained to me, she was very traditional and conservative with the way she looked after her daughter. My friend cannot get her ears pierced nor wear make-up, and is expected to wear clothing that, relative to her age of 21, is fairly juvenile. To be fair, this only stems partially from tradition; the other part is that the mother does not want her only child to grow up (according to said child). 

In another strange juxtaposition of modern and traditional, my Saturday evening went from shopping at some of the most luxurious designer stores in the world to burning paper money on the side of the street to honor dead ancestors. Allow me to digress. Saturday evening, as I explained in a previous post, my host parents took their daughter and me to Dalian's most ritzy mall, where we browsed around stores like Louis Vuitton, Fendi and the like. I was already aware that this family was comfortably adjusted to a more materialistic consumer culture, as they had picked me up in a fully-equipped BMW sedan and then introduced me to their very Western-style home:

In addition, they had taken me to a Western restaurant for dinner, and while I obviously loved it, they also greatly enjoyed the international buffet themselves. I admit, I didn't see much of the traditional Chinese culture I had read about up until this point. Then, as we were driving back to the apartment from the restaurant, I saw various groups of people huddled about little fires along the sides of the streets. I asked my friend why there were so many people with their own little fires going, and she said that they were worshiping their ancestors. Apparently, this past Saturday, November 6th, was the first day of the tenth month of the lunar calendar, a day where Chinese traditionally burn paper money to deliver to the afterworld for both their ancestors and their own use when their time comes.

I was thinking that it was pretty interesting to observe from inside the car as we sped along the road back to the apartment. But then we stopped. The dad got out, went and bought something, then got back in the car. We continued to head back to the apartment. Then, on the long road leading from the main road to the apartment complex, the dad pulled along the side of the road, and we all got out. I circled around the car and saw him pull out HUGE stacks of paper money, along with three bottles of alcohol. I then watched as they walked over to the sidewalk and began to burn each sheet of paper money, one by one. It was so fascinating to watch. There was no real ceremony or ritual to it; just slowly feeding paper to the fire. Each of the family members did take a bottle of alcohol and spread it around the fire in a circle. What an eerie contradiction. Here was this modernly-dressed family, straight out of an extremely modern car, doing an incredibly old Chinese ritual on the sidewalk of a city street. I helped a little bit when stray bills flew away, so I guess I have a few dollars waiting for me in the afterlife. Otherwise, I just watched it all slowly burn away, guaranteeing my host family a fortune in the life to come.

Other experiences, in a nutshell, included going to the health club inside the apartment complex and having to deal with naked females of all ages parading around the locker room. Nudity in single-sex shower areas is apparently the norm in China, something that completely shocked me the first time I walked into Peking University's gym locker room. Also, the father very much enjoyed encouraging me to drink basically anything and everything. Wine and some kind of coconut alcohol at dinner, beer at lunch, and more coconut alcohol for the train ride back to Beijing. Oh, and then there was the dumpling-making session I had with my friend's mother. That, however, is yet another post to come...

大连: First Impressions

Aaaaand we're back. Apologies to any loyal followers of my blog out there, I was blindsided by a midterm season that was more intense than expected. The good news is that even though I didn't post, it doesn't mean I don't have a ton of material to share with you all!

We'll go reverse chronological again, so I can explain some of my more illuminating experiences while they're still fresh in my memory. So first, to the just-concluded weekend...

This past weekend was incredible. My Chinese friend and I travelled to her hometown of 大连 (Dàlián), which is... actually, I still don't know where it is, so we're going to Google Map it and find out just where I spent my weekend.

Well, look at that. You see Dalian, right there on the tip of that protrusion coming down from the north? I guess I could have swam over to North Korea if I really wanted. But that would involve some minor risks, so it's probably best I didn't try. Who would want to leave Dalian anyway? It's a beautiful, well-kept city, and more modern than I anticipated. It's a bit of a vacation town, very clean and accessible, and definitely nowhere near as crowded as Beijing. And due to the city being occupied by eight different Western powers and one point or another, the buildings are riddled with all different styles of colonial Western architecture. Dalian is also home to what is supposedly the largest public square in all of China. The mood in the city was incredible; everyone seemed so festive. That might also be because they typically don't have to deal with problems such as poverty; Dalian is one of the wealthiest cities in the country:

Example A: The parking garage of my friend's apartment complex could have been a fully-stocked Mercedes Benz car lot.
Example B: When said friend's parents took me shopping, the first three stores we hit were Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton. In response, I ushered us over to Sephora where I bought a ¥50 ($7) container of glitter. Yes, I am a high roller.
Example C: There are a variety of foreign restaurants (which usually denote the presence of disposable income) in the city, including a Western-style buffet on the ground floor of the Shangri-La Hotel, where my friend's parents treated me to dinner Saturday night. The selection was amazing: steak, chicken burritos, nachos, tossed salads, cheeses, fresh fruit, spaghetti carbonara, rolls and rolls of sushi, a chocolate fondue fountain, cakes, pudding cups....

Yes, I think I'm ready to go back to Dalian, at least as a guest. Guests have it made when they go to China. True, many cultures put an emphasis on making guests feel at home, but few cultures that I have encountered roll out the red carpet the same way that the Chinese do. During breakfast the first day, my host family noticed my affinity for peach juice. That evening, while my friend and I were buying her some boots, the father went to Carrefour and bought multiple boxes of peach juice, both for me to drink during my stay and for me to take back to Beijing. What's more, they watched over my every bite, concerned that I hadn't eaten enough or had enough to drink, and ready to offer more at a moment's notice. They drove me around the city for over an hour just to make sure I had seen all I wanted to see. And they were infinitely patient as I tried to understand their rapidly-spoken Chinese and respond in kind. It helped that their daughter knew enough English to be a helpful translator.

So there you have it, my first impressions of Dalian. Much more to come, including a visit to the Chinese version of Sea World, making my own Chinese dumplings, and observations of Chinese familial culture.