China is always twelve hours ahead. “Today” had already become New Year’s Eve in China. This morning, China’s Wednesday afternoon, was the last I expected any of my team in China, in Taiwan, in South Korea, in Hong Kong, to be at work. We had a call early in my morning and the team at the client headquarters were very thoughtful about acknowledging the holiday and about considering one year winding down and another about to begin.
In China we’d likely be heading out to Shandong. And the millennium’s old ritual of return and rest and accounting for things would be underway. And only at this time, in a manner quite ghostly would the throbbing metropolis ever quiet down, half the population returned to home, stores and restaurants and all the operations of the state, closed for the next ten days.
Here, there nothing to mark the transformation. We don’t have much of a community this year, let alone a Chinese community. My daughter wants to know why her school doesn’t get Chinese New Year off? I try to explain that Chinese are after all only two percent of the population or so and if they gave every group that made up the population their special day of acknowledgement you’d have nothing but holidays. I try to make this nuanced, but I feel like Archie Bunker.
I remind her of the time when they went to the local Chinese “international” school in Beijing. There were very few “foreigners” in the school as with any school there were some aspects of the curriculum which were excellent. Both my daughters took their Chinese to mastery as a results of that school. But the first year they were in attendance, they wanted my younger daughter to perform in the Christmas performance, which sounded wonderful until they made it clear that she and we’d be expected there at the school around eight-thirty AM on Christmas morning.
Wednesday, 02/10/21
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