Chinese New Year :: This Is the Way

We just finished two weeks of rest together at home with no work, and no school, thanks to the Chinese New Year holiday that takes over the land. For many foreigners living in China, this holiday means jetting somewhere warm and far away from the cold, the billions-of-people-trying-to-get-back-to their families-migration, and the shut down of stores and conveniences all over the country. We dream of maybe doing something warm and wonderful someday too... but for the last 7 years, we have stayed put, and it has been one of the best building blocks of a life loved here in China. Here's why:

1. We have built traditions, built because they are not natural to us or our heritage, but over time spent in country and with our Chinese friends, they have become a special time of the year for us. Making jiaozi is a Chinese New Year family tradition and we love to get together with friends to master the art of securing little meat filled dumplings and then cooking them together for a grand feast. Our entire family adores this meal and we like to keep track of who has the best jiaozi making skills.

2. It's a unique time to spend with our local friends, meeting their families and being invited into their lives. We get to see them in their element, learn about their family dynamics- the good and the bad, the unique strengths and burdensome pressures.

This is my friend and her grandma. She loves to tell stories about the old days. Her life spans 7 children, and a history in China unlike any other generation. 

3. Our children get to see and practice the art of seeing a whole different way of living. 

We were brought with our friend's family to visit a local Buddhist temple. For our hosts it was more about social prestige (in knowing the head monk) and cultural affiliation. For us, it was deeply spiritual as we felt the weight of the beliefs so sunk in the hearts and minds of the place and people who were there. I prayed much of the time I was there. I grieved for anyone bound to a life where hope is tied to a god that is approached through karma and spells, through incense and offerings, none of which you can be sure are heard, or that even if they are heard are not offset by something done in your past life. I sat with the monk, and asked about his life, and the meaning of the bracelet he gave me. He does not like his life. I told him who I know, and that with Him there is a relationship that is real. I left feeling heavy with all those unheard prayers, and the man's life who for all its sacrifice can earn him nothing. I know a Man who lived the sacrifice for you! I still think of that monk.

4. We get to travel in the People's Way. At least I like to call it that. We love to take trains in China. It's an experience, and a good one. It's slow, and crowded, and full of interesting, regular old people of every shape and color of life. Our girl always, always finds some kind of friend she can talk to. And for a few dollars we get to experience the "thrill" of going somewhere, of window gazing, and of building our own store of family memories made of moments that can only happen on a slow train in China.

Why I Love Living In China :: A Book. A New Year

I just finished reading The City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell. It’s a novel about an American couple serving as missionaries in inland China during the early 20^th century. It’s a somewhat prosaic story about their love, longevity, loss, and the lessons they learned as well as the difficult things that still remained a mystery for them at the end of their lives. In many ways the story is far removed from the China of today and the way we experience life here. But there was a spirit about it that was compelling, or at least had hints of a camaraderie in it to me… like that red silk thread that adoption families talk about, an invisible connection that ties them to their son or daughter in an inexplicable but very real way.

It made me think about the powerful influence of Time in our lives. How it can bind you in a slow, rhythmic way over days and months and years to a place, or a people. To many people, there may be very little on the face of living in China that is attractive. To the naked eye, comparing it to other places in the world, this city is dirty, polluted, frustrating and difficult. In many ways the stories and lives around us are maddening, sometimes horrifying, or just plain depressing. For all appearances, it's not a great place to raise kids. And I read all of this in The City of Tranquil Light too, though to a much greater degree. Life was so different back then, far harder, far more isolating and much more physically demanding. The sacrifices were incredible and seemed never to let up.  Yet in time, as the years swept over them like the dust storms that covered the land, this ordinary couple was molded by those long stretches of time, and the shape of those years gave form to love. The hardships and people, the relationships and experiences shaped their growing love like a baby that forms slowly in the womb and one day you look upon it’s face, seeing with your eyes what has all these months been blossoming by it’s taking from your own flesh and blood.

Time gives birth to love it seems. As does hardship. And weaving in and out of these two is every relationship, great and small that you make along the way. Relationships on every level are the ribbon of light that brings a wonder of luminescence to the fabric of time and hardship. It’s the part of life that keeps you keeping on, and that sometimes makes you feel as though all the world is breaking apart. In the book, it’s the relationships that make it hardest to leave China in the end. And though my family is not leaving, as I read it I felt the pull that is always there for us, the tension that rides under the surface of emotions almost all the time: the people we love and “lose” every day in a sense because we are not a part of their lives anymore, living way over on the other side of the world, but at the same time growing ever more grateful and attached to the people we have the gift of knowing here.

Sometimes I wonder if it makes any sense that we give up knowing cousins and aunties and uncles and grandparents, so that we can instead share life with the young woman, the student, the couple. These are things I can’t weigh in the balance. I can’t see what the worth of anything really is. And I have to put it all in the hands of my Lord who feels the weight of things correctly, and simply asks me to keep seeing with eyes of faith.

It is the start of another Lunar New Year today, chu yi the first day of the first month, and the most important holiday of the year. Everywhere are fireworks and families gathering. Red chinese lanterns are strung along the streets and in windows. The doors are covered with traditional banners declaring good fortune and well wishes over the household for the coming year. It is another mysterious sort of gift to me, this sharing in a tradition that is not ours by birth or rite. We are foreign to it and at most take part in a surface sort of way. But this too was something that struck me as I read, how joining in these festivities ties you to a place as well.  And without making too much of it, I think in some small but perhaps important ways, our family has been graced with good things that we otherwise may have missed were we not able to every year celebrate the Chinese New Year.

As is the tradition, on the Eve of the New Year, we made jiaozi, meat filled dumplings representing abundance and good fortune. As I sat with all four of my children and husband at our table, the plate heaped full with steaming, crunchy jiaozi that we all love with an almost improper ferocity, I did indeed feel fortunate. I knew and know that we are blessed.

It is perhaps easiest to look around and see the physical blessings, but as I have been pondering lately from the words of Jesus, as we work not for food that spoils but for food that endures to eternal life, our eyes are ever opened more and more to the unseen realities that our ours in Christ. He who gives the food and the rain and the house and the clothes also gives the joy and faith and love. You can have joy and faith and love without house or clothes. But to have house or clothes without joy and faith and love is no life at all. This is the life that is worth living… and it is a life that is learned over time, through hardship, in the midst of relationship. This is the essence of the good life that the couple in The City of Tranquil Light knew. And in this, and their love for China,  and the slow years that grew them, I feel I too one day may, in some distant way know a part of their story.

Why I {Love to} Live in China :: Neighborhood

Every Monday and Friday morning I head out with my three-wheeled scooter and stash of grocery bags to pick up fresh goods from the market and other weekly necessities from the large grocery around the corner. The side streets are a throng of other morning shoppers. The three-wheeled bikes and scooters piled high in the back with whatever is in season are dotted along the roadside, surrounded by people from the neighborhood looking for the best bargains for their evening meal. I am a bit of an oddity, buying vegetables to sustain me for the next 4 days of meals. Everyone else is looking for one chive, a head of greens, maybe a potato or handful of green beans. The red peppers are a must have.

Grandmas are pushing little trikes with their fat grandbabies who stare at the morning melee with big, curious brown eyes,  the young women xiaojie's carefully pick through the crowd and stalls with their high heels and short, colorful dresses, old men shuffle by with pipes or a cane or both. Some sit listlessly in wheelchairs, simply gazing, out for their morning air. The house helper baomus are there, looking for the  bargains. They talk and haggle with one another, laughing and pointing out the best prices, the greens or melon that will best be suited to this day and this type of weather.

It is not sterile. It is not well lit. Something about it though reminds me of the small town we visited this summer, where in the span of one day I saw the same 5 people at the post office, the antique shop, the grocery store, on a walk in front of our house, and in a newspaper article. It's close. It's a neighborhood.

I think too, on the streets here the realities of life seem so smack dab in your face. There are no pretensions. This is not a row of clean, well manicured lawns type of place. The store fronts are open, the shop lady is there, cooking her lunch on a hot plate and wok beside the steps. The dirty laundry is literally hanging up all around you, outside apartment windows, in the back of a store, along an alley. We all air our dirty laundry for everyone to see around here. The blind masseuse stands just inside his shop doorway, shuffling in his manner that betrays a lifetime of getting along without seeing. He is there, living his daily routine out in front of you.

I am not entirely sure what it is about all this that endears itself to me. I like cleanliness and manicured lawns and a good Wegmans as much as the next girl. I don't think you need China specifically to make this happen, but I do like that it forces me not to take my life as the status quo. I have to think about my surroundings, I have to take it in and digest it and most of the time it points to a way of life so different than my own, in a way that challenges my own assumptions about what is necessary, what is worth my time, what is important, what is missing, what is the good I am aiming for and the the purposes I am striving for.

And some days, when I find I am taking myself too seriously, I just buy my fruit and go home.

Why I Live In China :: Part II

For the first part of the evening, as another man shared, he stared blandly somewhere near his knees. Then someone asked him to pray. He rose up and his voice bellowed forward, melodic and rhythmic and it filled the room in a way his frail frame did not suggest was possible. "His Name is Wonderful!" he repeated several times. And I knew he believed it in a way I have yet to learn.

He has lived in China for more than twice the number of decades I've been alive, and he has seen changes most people will never relate to or understand. He spoke of many of those changes and the testimony of faithfulness of His God whose Name is Wonderful. He has tested that faithfulness through war torn years, change of power, dark and tense years when much of life as we understand it was being undermined and even destroyed, and finally, in prison. 

His Name is Wonderful he said, and this man believed that for that Name it was worth standing in prayer before a building that was being bulldozed to the ground, because it was built for the Name. Bulldoze away, they said, we will rebuild it again. And they did, and again they knocked it down, and again they rebuilt and now it still stands. But stronger than that building is the faith of these men and stronger than their faith is the One they put their faith in. 

One of our white faces stood up to share our thanks, for being able to sit at the feet of these men as they shared their stories and their hearts for their country with us. We feel small, he said. We are humbled. Faith as small as a mustard seed can move a mountain, and though our faith felt so small it is the size of the one we have faith in that really matters. And in that, we were all brothers and sisters, perhaps worlds away in culture, experience, history, age, and maturity, but clinging to the one whose Name is Wonderful in any age or land.

And what did I learn? That perhaps a stripping away of all that seems necessary can be a purifying thing for gathering worshipers. That for some, starting a school that aims to teach from a Logos-Worldview is a frightening and important venture that is vital to the minds and hearts of the next generation, not merely another school option. That old men who look like they are sleeping, are just waiting to stand up and shout Hallelujah. That some people get geeked about rock concerts or celebrity sightings, but this is where I become a hopeless and pathetically adoring fan.

Dear Old Man, I could listen to you sing out "His Name is Wonderful" for the rest of my days, and someday... I will.

Why I Live In China

In China, there is one commodity that teems through its cities and villages in numbers greater than any other nation on earth. People. Living, breathing, eternal souls who work fields and factories, inhabit high rise apartments and simple, dirty shacks, buy cell phones and sell roadside vegetables.

It was a person that was the crowning achievement, the glorious moment that culminated God's first creative act. And it was for people that He gave the final and Greatest Sacrifice. For this reason, in all that we endeavor to care for, live for, and love before God on this earth, it is people in their teeming masses, but always scaled down to the one living soul before us in any given moment, that is of supreme importance.

Because of this rather grand statement, no matter where you live in the world, if you are under this calling, you are under the highest calling a person can answer in their lifetime. China is one place on earth where the call is almost deafening if for no other reason than the sheer numbers of people that live there, and so many of them having so much need.

This great calling also means that often what most inspires us, what lifts us to a life beyond ourselves, is the example of people who evidence some act or attitude of divine, sacrificial love. They beckon us to a love of a different quality, a costly kind of love that seems weighted with the gold of heaven. It is the kind of love that also raises the person it is poured out on to the heights of God's vision for what they were meant to be and what he gave so much to make possible.

I heard this quote the other day, from someone who was sharing about this hard work of loving people going on in China.

True discipleship takes time and is very costly time-wise.  I’ve found those growing the most were closest but there was a sense of disappointment that it took so much time.  But discipleship is sacrificial, it’s going to cost your life.  To disciple the nations is going to cost many lives.” ~Rob Cheeley

The thought was sobering and beautiful in the weight of its importance.

I sat and listened this week to two women, two teachers in our school, both Chinese. Their hearts are shaped by the Love of their Lord; and their hearts beat for humanity, specifically for their countrymen, for the humanity that teems through their China's vast cities and rural villages. There are many ways they could answer this call to love their many neighbors, but they are teachers and so this is the path their burden takes.

I listened to them and felt like a tiny grit of sand that is part of a large rock on which these women stand. I loved to watch them far above me, poised as unique individuals because they have been raised in a Chinese education system, trained in a western education system, and have hearts to reach the children and families who are mired in the struggles and pitfalls of their country's current path.

One of our visions as a team here of both foreign and Chinese teachers, administrators, and families, is to raise up national teachers who have a heart for the Chinese, have been given educational tools alongside their foreign teachers, and can go out to schools all over China, transforming classrooms from the inside out, reaching students and faculty and parents with this Difference in purpose and method.

As I listened to these two women, I could see the cost their discipleship has required of them, the pleasures they have given up and the trials they have endured and know they will endure. And all I need to do is hear one story of one child who was changed, or one family who came asking for more, for answers to their heart's greatest need, and I am sold. Sold that this is why we are here, laboring to make this school happen where we are alongside our Chinese brothers and sisters, training and supporting and sending them out as they follow the Call to Discipleship, their hearts bleeding for their country. They do not see their lives as their own, but their trust is implicit and the reverence they have for the importance of their task deepens my respect for them.

My daily work is simple and compared to the vision above it can also seem pretty small. I don't sit in the rural classroom with the migrant worker's child. But she will. And she will teach others to do the same. One waters, another plants, but it is God who makes it grow.

"If you can't feed a hundred people, feed just one."
- Mother Teresa

Jiu Zhai Gou

 

Dear me, it's been nearly a week since we got back and I put up this pic as a preview of the review I planned to write about our trip. I should be on to other things by now. Instead I will just say that this week has been a very very good one and for all the time I could have been sitting and writing or uploading pictures, I am glad I was present elsewhere, even if it was merely talking with my Man or finishing a chapter of Pollyanna to the kids (she sure had that glad game down, she did).

This trip we took to the Min Shan mountains of Sichuan at a stunning and increasingly well known place called Jiu Zhai Gou, was every bit the winter wonderland retreat I was expecting it to be, with a few little hiccups and standard traveling-in-China mishaps.

I had hired a driver with his car to transport the kids and I on the 8 hour drive to the valley, with the plan to meet the Man there where he had been attending a conference for three days. I wasn't too nervous about the drive on my own with the three little ones and thought in passing that this strange calmness seemed somewhat uncharacteristic of me. Well, I certainly had no idea what was in store.

Forty five minutes into our drive, our poor middle guy unleashed all of his breakfast and dinner from the night before into his lap, my hands, and nearly all his half of the backseat. The driver was extremely magnanimous, and the other two children became half-angel for the remainder of the trip, which was almost entirely filled with a sick little boy dry heaving in the front seat. Yes, I considered turning around-- but not until the point when it would have taken us longer to return than to keep going. It was not an easy day, but somehow we made it through without losing our sanity or our spirits.

After a restful evening in a hotel bed, lots of water and some juice, the little man recovered nicely and was ready to dive into snow drifts and snowball fights the next day. We discovered our room did not come with breakfast as we had expected, and as you soon discover when you head to remote places in China (as in, any city with less than 10 million people), the food options for westerners and especially their children are very limited. We were also housed in a small mountain tourist village, that was entirely closed down for the season. Our breakfast came from a small corner grocery (imagine an unheated storage garage with utility shelves and a few plastic crates of apples) and consisted of crackers, imitation hostess cakes without the cream filling, and apples.

The park itself did not disappoint however. Breathtaking heights of snow-covered peaks, their harsh rocky pinnacles thrusting themselves into a pristine blue sky. The valleys were blanketed with tall, stately pines laced with piles of white that glistened in the sunlight (sunlight!!) and sent such a muted quiet over the landscape that you could hear the snowdrifts falling off heavy boughs, and the crunch underneath your feet, and sometimes the thoughts of the person next to you. I stood there, watching my kids melt snow down each others necks and peg their dad with balls formed in their increasingly frigid fingers, and imagined all our friends sunning themselves on the beaches in Thailand, and did not envy them one bit. I love the mountains, always have, and always will and even if my lifestyle and situation has changed and I can't explore them on a pair of skis, or hike them on the weekends, I will soak up their every gift without remorse. 

Gazing at aquamarine waters and frozen waterfalls, Tibetan villages and prayer wheels nestled in the banks of the cold, clear river, is not always easy for children. They were troopers for the most part, but the misshappen bus schedule that left us stranded high in the park one day and required a several kilometer hike along the road with cold hands and wet feet was a trying moment for everyone. It was nothing that hot chocolate packs and the reward of a hotel pool (even if it was barely tepid temperatures) couldn't fix however, and for me, even these small inconveniences, along with losing a cell phone and the unpleasant breakfast situation, couldn't outdo the goodness this beautiful place was doing for our nature-sore eyes.

One of the best surprises and provisions of the trip was a local Tibetan restaurant recommended by a contact at the hotel. At first the doors were locked, and I was nearly ready to wring the taxi drivers neck thinking he had dropped us off in the wrong spot, but we soon found the lights were on and we merely had to knock on the door (our cell phone, with the owners number on it, had been lost). The atmosphere was absolutely charming and delightful with a large woodburning stove in the center where you gather to drink hot barley tea and warm your fingers and toes. The food was outstanding and some of the best we have had here to date. The children, even the picky ones, all found several things to love and devour, and no one was disappointed when we returned for a second round the following night.

After the debacle of a road trip that got us to the Park, we decided to change plans and fly everyone home, even though the cost made us dig deeper than we had originally planned. Overall, we were still grateful for the option and arrived home intact, with everyone healthy and happy and with another long, many-legged trip under their belts. I was proud of our little guys and the way they have learned to be flexible with food and travel, accomodations and circumstances, even more-so than their parents sometimes, though I was reminded that often their reactions are grounded in those they see in us.

Back home in the gray, damp, cold weather of the city I am still living a little off of the respite of those beauty-filled days. I am seeing the goodness in our choice to stay in country for this long break though. It has been good for our family, for our marriage, for our rest and need to regroup and gather ourselves for the next few months ahead.

All We Had Was Backpacks

 

The day after Christmas, we traveled down into the heart of the city to spend a couple hours assembly-line fashion, packing backpacks for a project undertaken by a local Relief Organization that was providing mittens, socks, hats, and school supplies to some of the poorest children in Sichuan province. The day after that, I was lovingly sent off by my husband and children to join a small group that would travel to two schools, and two registered churches in the province, where we would distribute the bags and see some of these communities firsthand.

There were many things about this trip that I was thankful for. The opportunity alone to get out of the city and see the mountain towns and people was enough on its own. Added to that the chance to talk with workers (like our leader, Joy) who are on the ground full time with these people and hear about the issues, concerns, victories, and struggles they are dealing with, as well as hearing the needs and hopes of the local leaders in their cities was something I am rarely able to do, but so thankful for and inspired by.

It was also eye opening on many levels. China is vast and complicated. Many things you hear are true in one place, but not another. So to hear how things are being done, and what the true needs are, was in some ways different than the way things are often presented in media or from decades old realities that are not always the case anymore.

Mostly though, I was just humbled to be in the presence of so many children who treated us as though we were offering them the moon, when all we had brought was simple backpacks with a few necessary items. They lined up to greet us, three thousand strong, and stood in the bitter cold as we bundled out of the bus and were offered hot tea and seats at a long, red table high up on stage. It is the standard practice in China, to do things with grandness and formality far beyond what the occasion may call for, even at a poor school in a rural town. And it is our duty to accept it all with graciousness, and allow them to treat us as honored guests, though I felt more like a sham who should have brought far more to deserve all this attention.

The backpacks mostly went to the poorest of students, and to those who are labeled as China's Left Behind children. These are children who are the victims of a cultural phenomenon of migration by working adults to the cities, where they go from poor rural areas with little opportunity, to be able to provide for their children and parents. Studies estimate that there are about 58 million of these children in China, living with aging grandparents or any family that is able to care for them, and often even being left to board at the schools they attend.

I went into the dorms of some of these children. Plain, unpainted concrete walls, black with mold, and long narrow rooms with no electricity lined on both sides with rustic metal bunkbeds, a simple slab of wood for a mattress and a quilt or two for bedding. This is all they own, besides the pencil and notebook and schoolbooks in their backpack down in the classroom.

 

We also visited a small woman and her fellowship. The small room, open to the outside was half filled with mostly old men and women, and she cried grateful tears as she told of their Christmas service which had gone so well, and had allowed them to go out on the streets. They sang, offered us more hot water for our freezing hands to hold, and shared with us their burdens and needs that they asked us to join them in remembering. It is remote there. Not many workers want to come. It is hard work, and slow- lonely at times.

The aging group is without a generation to follow it, and the young children are without a generation to parent them. It is a burdensome thing to see.

The church calendar traditionally celebrates Christmas for 12 days. On the fourth day, December 28th, we celebrate the Commemoration of the Holy Innocents, which is to remember the atrocity of Herod as he slaughtered all the two year old's in Bethlehem in an attempt to destroy the threat of the Messiah he had heard about. As I hugged these children who smile at me so willingly, but whose lives I can't imagine, the words of Bobby Gross, as he described the significance of remembering Herod's evil act, came to mind.

" To remember Herod's atrocity is to strip sentimentality from the birth of Christ. On this day we confront the evil in our world, the violence of the powerful against the weak, the sorrow of those who suffer injustice and the very real darkness into which the light shines."

Yes, Christmas is far more than just remembering it as Jesus' Birthday. There are real powers of darkness and suffering going on here. And there is a very real light that has come into the world and is coming again. It is not just a nice analogy.

Just as we shouldn't look at the manger with sentimentality, so we shouldn't view these children in that way either. There are many things about their lives that I am too far away from to understand or make conjectures about. But I am thankful to follow in footsteps of those who are far closer, and do what I can to be a hand or a foot or even just a big stubby toe.