Chinese New Year Decorations (plus highlights from this year's 春晚)

Chinese door banners for Year of the Horse. Image source. 

Yesterday was Chinese New Year's Eve, and my husband went and bought decorations for our door. We took down last year's decorations from our door and put up the new ones. These decorations are called 对联 [duì lián]- it's a horizontal banner that goes across the top of the door, plus 2 vertical banners. They have Chinese phrases on them about having a prosperous year.

See, here's something that I didn't *get* until I'd already been in China for a while. The Chinese New Year decorations that people hang on their doors are not the same thing as the concept I have in my head of putting up decorations for various holidays. It's not like, say, Christmas decorations in the US, where you put them up in December and then take them down in January, and if you still haven't taken them down in February, people will start to judge you. Like Christmas is over, why haven't you put your decorations away yet?

The banners we have taped on our door are not like that. Personally, I find it makes more sense to think of them not as "Chinese New Year decorations" but "decorations that we have up all the time, and we replace them at Chinese New Year."

(I just asked my husband "so, this is different from Christmas decorations, where you take them down after a month, right?" and he said, "Why would we take them down? This is our wish for the year.")

There *are* Chinese New Year decorations that are temporary, like the red lanterns hanging outside our apartment building. Those will get taken down when the holiday is done. But the ones people hang on their doors are different. 

It's an example of a subtle cultural difference. How people from different cultures might think they're talking about the same thing- holiday decorations- but they're not.

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Also, last night was the big New Year gala/ Spring Festival gala on tv, which is called 春晚 [chūn wǎn]. I like to post the videos from my favorite performances every year, so here they are:

Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!

Chinese dragon, with the text "2024 Happy New Year." Image source.

Happy Chinese New Year! New year's eve was on February 9 this year, and February 10 is the first day of the year of the dragon. 龙年大吉！

Some links related to Chinese New Year:

1. 3 Surprising Things From This Year’s Spring Festival Gala (February 10)

And here's the video of the French song mentioned in the article: 法语音乐剧首登春晚！《巴黎圣母院》选段《美人》太动听 「2024央视春晚」| CCTV春晚

2. 舞蹈《锦鲤》搭配周深的《大鱼》演绎生命的灵动与绚烂 「2024央视春晚」| CCTV春晚 (February 10) Video of the goldfish dance performed at the Chinese New Year gala. The dancers fly around on cables, very cool.

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And links about everything else:

3. Psychology of a Hero: ALADDIN (February 7) 25-minute video from Cinema Therapy. "Aladdin's best self is the one who helped the street urchins and who promised to set Genie free, but then out of fear of losing everything, he rescinds his promise to Genie, he lies to Jasmine, and he just keeps hurting people."

4. 'Obviously Sudokus Only Use Integers'... Hold My Beer!! (January 16) 1-hour-18-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, this one is amazing- it needs algebra. My favorite part is when Simon tries and fails to remember the word "epsilon"- "Oh gosh I used to be all over that stuff when I was young." So relatable. 

5. Tracy Chapman & Luke Combs Deliver Gripping Performance Of "Fast Car" | 2024 GRAMMYs I posted about this last time, but here's the full video.

6. Eyesores or Heritage? Shanghai’s Ubiquitous Laundry Racks (February 13) "Walk around any corner in Shanghai and you will likely see these clothes racks, especially outside traditional lane houses and high-rise condos built in the 1990s." This is so real.

7. Banana Prices (February 9) xkcd comic.

8. Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage (February 6) [content note: abusive marriage] "Domestic abuse addles the brain. A victim may begin to believe she deserves this kind of treatment, that she could perhaps stop the abuse by her own efforts—if only she were better, prettier, smarter, holier. Through this lens, I have begun to understand the complexity of this elderly woman whose livelihood depended on her teachings about marriage and whose theology shifted so that it matched her reality of suffering, obedience, and surrender. Perhaps she feared the consequences of divorce on her career or reputation."

9. Georgia Senator Vows to Protect Girl, But Then Runs Away After Learning She Is Trans (February 17) "That’s when Kotler spoke to Senator Summers about how she was there with her kids to 'talk to legislators about keeping her kids safe.'"

Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!

Chinese New Year decoration with rabbits, for the year of the rabbit. Image source.

Happy Year of the Rabbit! 兔年大吉！

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1. 'It was a beautiful moment': Moore County drag show goes on despite power outages (December 5) So, some conservatives were outraged about a drag show, and then there was a power outage- and then one of the people who opposed the drag show tweeted "The power is out in Moore County, and I know why." I find this SO FASCINATING, because yes, I have been in many situations where a Christian says something- something that if it was really true, would be very alarming and maybe we should get law enforcement involved- but nobody takes it that way. (The example that comes to mind is people saying, "I'm such a bad sinner, if you all knew what I've done, you wouldn't even want to be in the same room as me." Or a speaker I saw at a Christian event who said, "I've broken every one of the 10 commandments"- and immediately my brain was like "oh my goodness, she had sex???" and then my second thought was "WAIT, 'do not murder' is one of the 10 commandments" (!!!!!!!) and then my third thought was "well Jesus said that being angry at someone is as bad as murder, so I'm sure that's what she meant.")

So- "The power is out in Moore County, and I know why" and then she was so surprised when the police showed up at her house. Because, she meant it like, obviously God has heard our prayers to stop this drag show, and God has answered by causing this power outage, and this is such wonderful news, it's so exciting to see God working. She had no idea that, to normal people, it sounded like she was saying "I committed a crime." Her mistake was tweeting it where people outside of her Christian bubble could see it.

2. Wards of God (December 2022) "They have families. And those families are really struggling, maybe. And sometimes they’re struggling primarily because the state is intervening oppressively, but either way they exist."

3. Idaho’s ‘faith-healing’ exemption has led to more senseless child deaths (January 19) [content note: child death] So... I'm not sure if changing the law will help here. If "your kid might die" isn't a good enough reason for parents to go against their religious beliefs, then why would "your kid might die, and then you'll get arrested and charged with murder" be a good enough reason? I assume these are parents who love their kids and also really really believe that it's wrong to get real medical care, and that if they "obey God" then God will magically save their kids' lives. (Or, if God doesn't save them, well, it was "God's plan" so it's okay.)

I'd be interested to know if other states which do not have a "faith-healing exemption" have fewer children dying in these kinds of situations. Or, maybe if they arrest other people besides the parents- people who pressured the parents into refusing medical care, people who might fear "I'll get arrested" more than they fear "the kid might die."

But definitely some kind of action needs to be taken to stop this. Children have a right to real medical care.

4. Nonviolent Activism, Stress and a Major Victory in Oklahoma: On Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s Motion to Delay Executions (January 19) [content note: death penalty] "I don’t ever intend to sit back and let government killing of its’ citizens ever become an easy process."

5. The Humble Power Box That People Line Up To See (January 20) "A power box in Lujiazui, Shanghai's financial hub, has become a popular check-in spot."

Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!

Chinese-style art with a tiger. Image source.

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! Today (February 1, 2022) is the first day of the Year of the Tiger.

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1. The Miracle Sudoku (posted 2020) It's a 25-minute video of a British sudoku expert solving an incredible sudoku, and the best part is his reactions, how he gets more and more delighted and amazed by the puzzle as he goes along. This is fantastic.

2. Don't know if you all saw Christianity Today's article "‘They’ Is Not a Pronoun for God" (it's not worth reading, but here's the link). I just... like why even bother responding- I've moved so far past this, and the world has moved so far past this. You don't need to sit around with people who believe exactly the same things as you and study ancient documents to make rules for how everyone else should live- "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" Come into the big queer kingdom of God, where trans and nonbinary people can experience how life-giving it is to be called by their correct name and pronouns.

It's just so obvious to me that God is genderqueer and nonbinary. They/them.

3. What Does John Locke Say? (The Fox Parody) - @mrbettsclass (posted 2013) This is AMAZING.

4. One Chaste Marriage, Four Kids, and the Catholic Church (posted November 17) Well this is totally fascinating, especially from an asexual perspective.

5. ‘Are You All Right?’ (posted January 26) "Well, if you’re in Hamtramck, Michigan, you’re in luck. Officials in that city are keeping careful track of neighbors in need. Those officials don’t understand that this is what they’re doing, mind you — they don’t seem to understand what they’re doing at all. Those befuddled officials seem to think, instead, that what they’re doing is keeping careful track of which of your neighbors are in violation, threatening the sick and distressed with various punishments rather than offering to provide them the neighborly assistance they require."

Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!

Chinese New Year design with a cow, "2021", and "新年快乐" [xīn nián kuài lè]. Image source.

Happy Year of the Ox, everyone! Tonight (February 11) is Chinese New Year's Eve. (Chinese New Year is also called Spring Festival.) 2021 is the year of the 牛 [niú] which is a cow/bull/ox/buffalo/etc but seems like everyone's translating it as "ox" in English. *shrug* (I contend that "Year of the Cow" is equally valid.)

This year is weird because the Chinese government strongly encouraged everyone not to travel for the holiday (the biggest holiday of the year). There are rules about "if you travel, you need to have a covid test within 7 days before your trip." So the 春运 [chūn yùn], the largest annual migration of people in the entire world, is way down this year. ("春运 [chūn yùn]" is the Chinese word for "the massive phenomenon that is everyone's Chinese New Year travel", see, there's an actual word for it.)

I am in Shanghai, and usually Shanghai is fairly quiet during new year holiday because a significant proportion of Shanghai residents aren't originally from here, so they all leave. Not this year though. This year we are staying.

However, in China there are tons of migrant workers- which means they come from a poorer area and go to big cities to get better-paying jobs- and it's common that they leave their children back in their hometown to be raised by the grandparents. Typically migrant workers only get to go home and see their families/kids once a year- at Spring Festival. So seems like a lot of them are traveling anyway, even though this year it's much more difficult and they run the risk of getting stuck in a lockdown or quarantine somewhere along the way.

Anyway that's the situation here. Hope the Year of the Cow is better than the Year of the Mouse. 新年快乐！ [xīn nián kuài lè]

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And here's the latest blogaround:

1. Disney Parks To Revamp Jungle Cruise Attraction, Responding To Racism Charges (posted January 25) Okay, yes, that ride is definitely racist.

2. I’m Sorry, What Is Going on With GameStop and AMC? (posted January 27) Yep, I had the exact same question. (About recent happenings with reddittors buying ridiculous amounts of GameStop stock, to screw over the short-sellers.)

3. These Creationists Learned a Weird Lesson from Sloths (posted January 29) LOLOLOL

4. On the Trail of COVID-19 in Shanghai (posted February 4) In January/February there have been something like 21 locally-transmitted COVID cases in Shanghai. This article is about how disease experts did contract tracing in response. At this point it seems like that outbreak has petered out and that's that.

5. Christopher Plummer, Actor From Shakespeare to ‘The Sound of Music,’ Dies at 91 (posted February 5)

6. How Isaiah converted Israelites to secularism (posted February 8) "Prayer, worship, and stomping through the doors of a church are all dismissed here as meaningless, wholly insignificant in comparison with the paramount duties God enumerates and describes — all of which seem to be things that white Christianity perceives and portrays as 'secular.'"

Happy Year of the Pig!

A red image of a pig, in the style of Chinese paper cutting, with the text "猪 2019 Year of the Pig." Image source.

Happy Chinese New Year! This year, February 4 is New Year's Eve and February 5 is the first day of the new year.

2019 is the Year of the Pig~

So happy new year everyone! Wishing you happiness in the Year of the Pig! 新年快乐！猪年快乐！

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Related:
This post I wrote in 2014, which gives an overview of Chinese New Year traditions: Happy (Chinese) New Year!

Top 20 Posts From 2018

A cat happily standing on a laptop keyboard. Image source.

Happy 2019, everyone! It's a new year! So here's my round-up of the top posts from 2018, here on Tell Me Why The World Is Weird.

Top 5 posts by pageviews:

1. Globophobia "In reality, the efforts to 'desensitize' me to loud sounds communicated to me that my pain didn't matter. That I would just have to accept it when something hurts me, and I shouldn't react or expect other people to care."

And part 2: "But in college I finally surrendered all to Jesus, and I accepted what everyone else had been telling me for my whole life: It's wrong for me to protect myself. It's wrong for me to expect people to care about my pain. It's wrong for me to claim I have needs different from those of a 'normal person.'"

2. Dr. Strange's Ways Are Higher Than Our Ways "It’s too easy. Too convenient. This line of thinking can be used to excuse any kind of atrocity."

3. Feminism 101: Toxic Masculinity and Fragile Masculinity "Really? Masculinity, which is supposedly so strong and tough, can be destroyed by the mere act of holding a purse?"

4. Asexual and "Impure" "Worked so hard fighting my desires, couldn't even let my guard down enough to actually feel those desires and realize none of them were sexual attraction."

5. They said it was about "valuing our bodies." That was a lie. "Better to just pretend that my vulva doesn't exist- that's what a good, pure girl does, right?"

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And here are a few other good posts from the year:

1. "How Far Is Too Far?" My Story, And What I Wish I'd Known "Like... the idea that I could write you a few lists of all the physical things we did in each of these relationships, and that you could learn anything meaningful from that information alone... that's absurd. It's laughable. But that's the entire focus of purity culture. How far? How far?"

2. From "Virtues Morality" To "Boundaries Morality" "Virtues morality isn't able to diagnose situations where it's not worth your time and effort to 'help others' because you already tried to help but they refused to cooperate, or where your attempts to 'help' aren't going to work anyway, or where people aren't treating you right and therefore they don't deserve your help, or where it comes at such a huge personal cost to you that it's not healthy."

3. Reading US History Inerrantly "And just as I had trained myself to read about the Canaanite genocide without ever thinking 'hey, maybe this was a bad thing that God commanded here', I read about the kidnapping, sale, torture, beating, and murder of African people without ever thinking 'hey, maybe it's actually NOT true that this country was founded on principles of liberty and justice for all.'"

4. This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To "Furthermore, it is DISGUSTING to pray that God would violate these people's wishes."

5. In Your Anger Do Not Sin (a Hulk fanfic) "Yes, he knew- in an abstract way- that his sin had killed Jesus, that every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God, that his sinful nature was a dangerous thing that shouldn't be taken lightly, that it meant he deserved nothing good, he deserved to die and go to hell... but today his sin had literally turned him into a huge green monster."

6. Great Wall (Qinhuangdao, China) "I know what you're thinking. 'Perfect Number, you've been living in China 5 years, and you haven't shown us pictures of the Great Wall! What gives? Cough 'em up!'"

7. Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales (Master Post) "In November 2017, I decided to do a rewatch and analysis of all the VeggieTales movies, because they were an important part of my childhood in Christian culture."

8. Miss me with your "we are all sexually broken" hot takes. I'm asexual. "I never had the desire to have sex, but I lived in fear that my romantic desires were an indication that I could potentially be so sinful as to desire sex."

9. "You Don't Want Justice": Here Are the Receipts "Living in a constant state of anxiety because you truly do believe that God would be well within their rights to just kill you at any moment."

10. Don't Invite Anybody From 'Desiring God' to Your Funeral "You call this 'good news'? No- If you think it's a good thing that someone stood up at a funeral and announced that the dead person is in hell, then you are FOREVER DISQUALIFIED from telling us what is or isn't 'good news.'"

11. A Post About Masturbation "Just because we're in love and I fully intend to spend the rest of my life with him, why on earth would that mean that he needs to be present every time I stimulate my genitals?"

12. A Little Story About a Mission Trip and Money "Nobody ever said the reason I got to go to China is because I knew a lot of rich Christians. Even though that's the truth."

13. What Sex Is Like (According to Purity Culture) "You may be asexual if you don't get why everyone says it's THE BEST FEELING EVER to do things with their partner's genitals, but you assume it will be self-explanatory once you try it. Yeah, turns out it's not self-explanatory."

14. Cut Out the Middleman (or, why I am the master and commander of my own life) "Because if it's actually me picking which god to follow, then doing what that god tells me to do, why not just cut out the middleman and do what I think is right in the first place?"

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Happy new year everyone! I've got some good stuff planned for 2019 on the blog~

Happy Year of the Dog!

Red silhouette of a dog, with the text "2018 the Year of the Dog". Image source.

Happy Chinese New Year to everyone! This year, February 15 is the night that we all stay up late to ring in the new year.

2018 is the year of the dog, so go pet all the dogs in your life and tell them they are good dogs.

新年快乐！

Everyone is Talking About the Stampede

All the screenshots in this post come from videos linked in this article, which lists the names of the 36 people who died.

You may have heard about the stampede in Shanghai on the night of New Year's Eve, where 36 people died. You guys, I live in Shanghai. Some of my colleagues were actually there at the Bund when it happened (you know, along with 300,000 other people). (The Bund, or 外滩 [wài tān], is a massive tourist-y area in the center of Shanghai, right by the side of the river. I don't like to go there because white people always get harassed by people selling stuff or working a tea scam.)

Here's a picture I took one time when I was at the Bund. This is the iconic skyline of Shanghai, on the opposite side of the river from the Bund. You can see the Oriental Pearl tower on the left and the bottle opener building on the right.

And people are all talking about what happened. My colleagues are talking about it. My students are talking about it. Apparently someone knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who died there. People are talking about how awful and scary it is that something like this could happen. There's been a lot of talk about the cause (usually accompanied by a shrug and a comment that "China has too many people"). At first we thought there was someone throwing fake money and everyone was rushing to get it, but it turns out the fake money thing was unrelated. Now people are saying the problem was the massive crowds with very few police officers to keep things organized or do crowd control. And apparently the stampede happened on a set of stairs, when a huge crowd was trying to go in one direction and another huge crowd was trying to go in the other direction.

There was a time in the past when if I had heard the news "there was a stampede in Shanghai and 36 people died" I would have chalked it up to "well you know in those less-developed countries, stuff like that happens" and, feeling totally unable to relate to the people who were affected, I would subconsciously think they were worth less than me, so it's more okay that they died. (Now I see this as a form of blaming the victim; in other words: "Well that's what you get for living in a country that's not as good as the US.")

Here's a picture of the crowd, taken before the stampede happened.

But now I can relate to them. Now I'm very familiar with what it's like to be in a huge crowd of Chinese people. They're just regular people. Sure, we don't really have the concept of personal space here, we're used to being crowded together, we're used to being pushed, we're used to being packed into subway cars during rush hour. We live different than Americans, and maybe it was those differences that created an environment where a deadly stampede could happen. But we are still just people.

(However, you can't entirely blame this on China's ridiculously large population. Stampedes have happened in the US too. And yes it is possible to hold a massive event with thousands upon thousands of people and keep everything organized and safe.)

I read a few of the names, from the list of people who died. 5 years ago, those names would have seemed to me like nothing more than a mass of unfamiliar and unreadable characters. And it's easy not to care when you can't identify the humanity in something that comes across so foreign. But you guys, now I can read Chinese, and it hits me that each name there is so unique, each one is a whole person. Most of them were young people, in my generation, and that just makes it even worse because my generation was created by the one-child policy. Their families didn't just lose a child; they lost their only child.

The people that died were just like me. It could have been me or my colleagues or any of my students. Without a doubt, there were people taking selfies (or 自拍 [zì pāi], in Chinese) on their iPhones just minutes before being caught in the stampede. I can relate to that, so I know there's no way this can be twisted to make it seem somehow okay. There's no reason that these deaths are any less awful than if it was me or my friends who died. There's no platitude you can offer that makes it sound not-so-bad. There's no way to distance myself and dehumanize the victims, as if the world were just and they somehow deserved it.

It's just luck and probability that keeps us safe and alive. Just because tragedies like this are so incredibly rare, when you consider the entire population of the world. God doesn't protect us- if that were true, then we'd have to believe that the victims were less valuable, less worthy of protection. But we are all people.

Years ago, I would have reassured myself that the people who died were so different from me, so it's okay. But no. It's just not okay, and there's nothing you can say that could make it okay.

But we keep living. (For those of us in Shanghai, we keep living, still with no personal space, still pushing people to get on the bus.) Every day there's a microscopic miniscule chance of dying in an accident- God won't keep us safe, only blind and senseless probability will. But we need to just keep going, do our best, and try to make the world safer for everyone.

On January 1, people left flowers at the site where the stampede happened.