Tuesday, November 12, 2024

The Kleenex Box Guitar is Part of My Culture

The tissue box guitar- with rubber bands and an old paper towel tube. Image source.

When I was a little kid, I remember making this craft: you stretch some rubber bands over an empty kleenex box, and it makes a guitar because the rubber bands are right over the hole. Very cool when you're 8 years old!

I'm American, and I made this kind of kleenex box guitar in the US. Now I live in China, and here's something fascinating: You can't really do this craft in China. Because kleenexes don't come in cardboard packaging. In China, they're in plastic.

Like this:

Package of tissues in plastic. Image source.

So when you use up all the kleenexes, you're just left with a plastic wrapper. You can't make a guitar out of that.

I'm writing about this because it's about culture. The best definition I've heard for "culture" is this: "Culture" is the things that you think of as normal, but they might not be normal for someone else. This little tiny mundane detail- that in the US, tissues are typically sold in cardboard boxes, but in China they're in plastic- and because of that, this kids' craft project has arisen where you make a guitar out of the empty box, but you can't do that in China. 

(And yes, I'm aware that my use of the word "kleenex" also says something about the culture I come from. The "correct" word is "tissue" but I grew up calling them kleenexes. Good luck having anyone in China understand what you're saying if you use the word "kleenex" though. When they learn English, they learn "tissue"- or they just translate from Chinese directly and call it "paper.")

Of course, Chinese culture has other things instead. Off the top of my head, here's one: I started learning to crochet, and I saw this cool crochet project in a WeChat post. (WeChat is the social media app we all use in China.) Here are some photos:

A toy chicken, crocheted out of different colors of yarn. The whole chicken is very triangle-shaped and the side of the body has a really colorful large flower pattern.



Cute! I need to learn how to make these!

I showed them to my husband, and he immediately said, "That looks like a zongzi."

What is a zongzi, you ask?

3 zongzi in a steaming basket. Image source.

These are 粽子 [zòng zi], a food made by taking sticky rice and some kind of filling like meat or red beans, wrapping it all up in leaves in a tetrahedron shape, tying it up with string, and then steaming it. They are the traditional food for Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday in June.

So I scrolled up on the crochet chicken post, and sure enough, the page title says this is a guide to crocheting "粽子鸡", zongzi chickens. 

I know what zongzi are, but I hadn't noticed that these chickens look like zongzi. My husband noticed right away because he's Chinese.

This is culture. The little everyday objects, which people can creatively reimagine as something else- but it shakes out different depending on what "everyday objects" you have.

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Related:

I Didn't Know I Had a Culture Until I Lost It

Tipping, Fruit, and Jesus 

Chinese Jokes Make Me Think About God

"The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" is About Being an Immigrant

Saturday, November 9, 2024

Keep Helping Each Other

Image text: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'" - Mr. Rogers. Image source.

The orange antichrist won the election. Now we're in this weird situation where we know it's gonna be bad, but we don't know how. We can just hope he doesn't actually do all the bad things he said he'd do. (Be a "dictator on day 1", etc...)

What I want to say is, there are things we can do to make this not as bad as it could be. In every crisis throughout history, there have been ordinary people, doing what they could to help their neighbors- making it not as bad as it could have been. 

So don't give up. You can make a difference. Help each other.

What I'm doing, since I'm not physically in the US, is making recurring donations to organizations that help people who will be targeted by his bad policies. This is a great way to help- if you're able, give $10/month, or whatever amount you can. Here is a list; please feel free to leave comments if you have more recommendations.

Immigration:

  • RAICES 
  • Find an organization in your local area which helps immigrants, and donate to them. I think this is really important- working with immigrants directly, getting them connected to communities which can help them and protect them.

Trans people:

  • Transgender Law Center 
  • Also it would be good to donate to a charity that helps trans people with funding for medical care, but I don't know of one offhand- leave a comment if you have a recommendation.

Abortion:

Rights/ democracy:

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Okay, I can't think about the problems of the world right now. I'm gonna look through my drafts and find the most whimsical, low-stakes blog post and that will be be next thing I post. 

Sunday, November 3, 2024

Blogaround

1. A Special Monologue for the Republican in Your Life (October 30) Video from Jimmy Kimmel, making the argument that Trump is unfit to be president. This is meant to speak to the average Republican, and mainly shows clips of Trump, so you can see for yourself what he is really like.

2. A few xkcd comics that made me laugh: Wells (October 28) and Demons (November 1)

3. Say their names: Savita. Josseli. (October 30) [content note: it's about women who died because they were unable to get abortion care] "It took six years, but there was a direct line from Savita Halappanavar’s agonizing, preventable death to the amendment of Ireland’s Constitution in 2018."

4. UNICEF warns of 'deadly' effect on Palestinian children after Israel ban on UNRWA (October 31, via)

5. Fairness in Sports (October 13) "If all the ad money spent screaming about trans people in sports were instead spent on providing scholarships, you would have far more new scholarships than there are trans scholarship athletes in the entire country." An article from a trans person, which goes through different levels of sports competition and talks about what policies actually make sense.

Also from Crip Dyke: Pro Publica has it half right. (October 19) "What was remarkable about all this was that in each case [since the 1600s] the people seeking to block some marriages argued that such marriages were anti-god, anti-family, sexually perverted or debauched, prone to illness and encouraging of drug or alcohol abuse."

6. Star Trek Retro Review: "Yesterday's Enterprise" (TNG) | Alternate Timelines (November 1) "Picard's like, 'whattttt?' Tasha says, 'I talked to Guinan.' Picard's like, 'Oh Jesus, what did she say?'" (27-minute video)

7. Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk’s Get-Out-the-Vote Effort (October 30) "But by Sunday, the door knockers were loaded into a rented U-Haul moving van with no rear seating or seatbelts, in a photo and videos viewed by WIRED. 'We were all told our transportation would be handled and we’d be in rental cars. It turned out to be U-Haul vans, and I felt embarrassed and played,' the door knocker tells WIRED."

8. PBS KIDS shows that you totally forgot existed 📺📚🦁 (August 21, 52-minute video) Oh look, it's a video about my childhood. This makes me want to find episodes of "Liberty's Kids" for my son to watch.

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