A Birthday Remembered

Reading through old files on my computer today, I came across this piece written around the time of my birthday while living in China. 

Tomorrow is my birthday again ... over two decades later.

Remembering that birthday in China from the comfort of my American living room has been a delight. I've chuckled throughout the remembrance, reassured myself that I could only do it because I was young, and wondered about the current status of restaurants, drains, and heating in China. Please come to my party and enjoy this sweet birthday memory with me.

 January 14, 2002

Inner City Fuzhou, Fujian, China

Dear family and friends,

The year clicked over to 2002, and the Chinese population automatically upped their ages by one year. At least that is how one friend explained it to me. January first is the universal birthday. The Chinese are masters of keeping everyone on the same page. For instance, even though the country extends further east to west than the United States, there is only one time zone which in America would mean it’s the same time in New York City as it is in Los Angeles. So in true socialist fashion, on January 1st they all moved up a year.

In fact, this birthday thing is even more interesting because many Chinese gauge their birthday from conception, so on the day they leave their mother’s womb and enter the world, they are already one year old, or thereabouts. When someone mentions age, I wonder—is that really how old you are? Or is your age from conception? Or is that the January 1st universal birthday? The Chinese are an enigmatic and mystifying people.

I had to wait a week until January 8th  to click up a year, too. I was actually born into the world on the 8th, and my parents began counting my age from that date. No mystery there. Despite encroaching age, I feel great, not even one minute of illness in China ... Mao’s Revenge has skipped me. That in itself is a miracle, considering sanitary conditions. Consider, for example, these two examples.

The Chinese have a disconcerting habit that makes me shiver and quicken my pace, in one direction or another when walking through the city. I call it the “Chinese national anthem.” It can be heard at any hour of the day, in any place, at any time ... restaurant, bus, theater, close quarters ... and it results with most foreigners, at least, coming to focused attention. The anthem is about to begin when a person coughs a bit and then starts to roll that cough out of their lungs up through their throat at which point (I never look)...I hustle as fast as I can away from the inevitable end of this guttural emptying of the saliva glands. I’ve never been hit, but there have been a few close ones. Bikers are the most dangerous. They pass at a clip with the wind in their faces, and an unsuspecting pedestrian can really get an eyeful. When I was a child I played that sidewalk game, “step on the crack, break someone’s back.” Well, the game here is hop, skip, and jump around the heaps of sputum on the sidewalk. Hence, the custom of removing your shoes whenever you enter a house. Everyone, always, removes shoes at the door. The sputum and shoe removal make for plenty of local color.

The second sanitary problem has to do with rodents of which there appear to be a small nation. Now, I have a cat, Oreo, back in Pennsylvania whom I treasure. He’s fat, sassy, and loves a good romp after critters in the backyard, but I wouldn’t want to see that prize feline tangle with these fellows. They have taken over the country and are currently vying with the ruling politburo for control. I was in a tea house the other day, and one strolled, not ran or sought cover, he literally sauntered past our table in the middle of the floor. No scurrying along the wall for these brutes. 

Our trash heap behind my apartment building is just that... a heap. No dumpster. So it attracts its share of rodents, but the real heartbreaker was finding out that my favorite restaurant, the local greasy spoon of the neighborhood where I dine at least twice a week because it reminds me of a Chinese version of our Clarks Summit Gourmet Diner, hosts a variety of these long nosed, long tailed patrons on a regular basis. Hence, another custom and often repeated mantra from the Chinese, “If food drops on the table from your chopsticks, leave it there.” Easy for them to say. Most of what they eat with chopsticks makes it to their mouths. I could go hungry.

So my fifty-third birthday finds me healthy but evidently aging. One of my young Chinese teacher friends has adopted the title “Jo Ann’s Chinese Son,” and the faculty refers to him in that way. Daniel has been my translator and right hand man. He’s the guy I call for emergencies if Ming Guan, my neighbor, isn’t around. One day I had a spider in my apartment. Spider is a gentle term for this creature whose span appeared to dwarf a human hand and its exterior was black and furry. I had no doubt of how he gained entrance. The plumbing from the sink in the bathroom falls directly, straight as an arrow to the sewer, covered only by flagstones, which runs along the street. All any self-respecting spider from the street sewer has to do is walk up the pipe. I gained a new appreciation for those crooked neck pipes under our sinks at home. The children’s ditty “the itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout” has taken on new meaning. So this Charlotte roamed up and down the walls of my apartment. I made no attempts to swat her with my towel or throw a shoe at her, fearing retribution. Instead, I called my knight in shining spectacles, Sir Daniel, who knocked him on the floor and slammed a book on him, creating a mess beyond civil description.

Anyway, Daniel gave me a lovely Christmas/birthday gift ... long underwear. When I gently probed the reason for this intimate gift, he said that if I am his Americna mother, he should give me what he would give his own mother ... something to keep her warm in winter. Nothing shows love here more than long underwear on a cold day in China..

Without central heating things can get nippy. Another of those famous unwritten Chinese rules is that only homes north of the Yellow River are heated. Everything south of the river is unheated ... no matter how cold it gets. It’s the rule. My best reading time happens when I crawl into bed at night, but in the winter in southern China when I crawled under the covers for warmth to read, the heat of my body and the cold of the air worked together to fog up my glasses, and my breath formed a cloud around my head. No reading in bed in winter.

Despite cold temperatures, the Chinese have this thing about “bad air.” The temperature might be 40 degrees Fahrenheit near the East China Sea in mid-winter, but the windows must be kept open. Every room of the school has its window open, rain or cold. In fact, we teach and the children learn with coats and gloves on and a wind whistling through, but we’ve blown out that bad air. Even the taxi drivers zip around town in cold weather with the windows rolled all the way down. Now, if you ever visit my home in mid-winter, you know I have a fireplace and room temperatures that have made visiting Jamaicans break out in a sweat. The other day I got in a taxi, and the windows were up! I took a closer look at the driver to make sure that he was really Chinese. He was. Not only that, he had the heat blasting. I curled my toes up to the dashboard, and I was tempted to say, “Just ride me around town, honey, until I warm up.” What a birthday treat! Maybe he has a thyroid problem too.

Besides adding another year to my age, I crossed some kind of line with language. For seven months now I have been deaf and mute in a country whose tongue I have been helpless to discern. Mrs. Chen, the school’s gatekeeper, and I have a lovely relationship of waving arms and pantomine. Whenever I leave the school grounds, she and I go into our friendly gyrations which communicate something while we both jabber away in our own language. The other day as I was leaving, Mrs. Chen started waving to me, and she said something that ... I UNDERSTOOD! I stopped in my tracks and looked at her, wondering what she had done with my favorite gatekeeper, but it was still Mrs. Chen, and she had asked me (another famous Chinese question), “Where are you going?” We jumped around and hollered some more in that wonderful moment of revelation. Trouble was: I didn’t know how to answer her, except with another pantomine.

The birthday festivities were unforgettable. The girls in my weekly Bible study group know that my favorite Chinese food is dumplings (phonetically, “joutsa”), so they took me to a “joutsa” house, kind of a Chinese version of Perkins Pancakes or Howard Johnson’s with fifty varieties. There were “joutsa” with duck and mushroom, pork and cabbage, shrimp and vegetables, even peaches. A dumpling lover’s heaven. After the dumpling house the Suns from across the hall piled into my apartment with birthday cake and my name written in Chinese characters ... those sweet people. 

It’s always blessing upon blessing here, and it’s unquestionable that I am receiving more than I am giving even though I ask the Father daily to make every moment among these dear people count for Him and matter for their eternity.

The school term ends here in one week, and then the nation settles down to the serious business of celebrating the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, the most significant event of their year. Another blessing: my son Bryan and my friend Donna will come here for the holiday. I am so eager to have my two worlds meet and to show Bryan and Donna the wonders of the Middle Kingdom and the work for the Highest Kingdom.

Getting older certainly has its up side.

Remembering fondly all of you who are aging along with me and looking to the ultimate celebration.

Jo Ann