Of Mooncakes

We're on the eve of our first Chinese holiday here in Hong Kong: Mid-Autumn Festival. It is essentially Chinese Thanksgiving which celebrates the bounty of the fall harvest and is a very family-oriented holiday.

There are three things you need to know about Mid-Autumn Festival.

One: we have two days off of school. (Yes!)

Two: there are lanterns hanging everywhere; many of them lit. Very cool.

Three: mooncakes, mooncakes, and more mooncakes.

A couple of weeks ago, we started to notice an increase in subway advertisements and t.v. commercials about mooncakes. Last week, we noticed that stores –grocery stores, bakeries, dollars stores, hardware stores- started stocking boxes and boxes of mooncakes. The stacks spilled out onto the sidewalks. It was then that we finally made the connection between the holiday and the mooncakes.

Mooncakes are a traditional part of the Mid-autumn Festival. People give them as gifts and serve them as desert or treats. They're a little smaller than a puffed-up hockey puck. They have a thin pastry exterior, a dense, bean-paste core, and at the very center there is usually a filling, the most traditional of which is an egg yolk. They came in a wide variety of styles and flavors.

In the ads they look delicious. I had my first one today.

It was okay.

It was really dense, rich, and not all that sweet. Julie’s comment was “Not worth the calories.”

And they’re not cheap. One mooncake can run you US$2 to US$4. The word is that after the holiday is over, you can’t give them away. I think we’ll wait until then, to truly give them a fair sampling.

Mooncakes have an indefinite shelf-life which makes them the fruitcake of Asia. It's an open secret here in Hong Kong that mooncakes are regularly re-gifted.

It’s rumored that there is one box of four mooncakes out there that has been in circulation since 1983.

If that particular box lands on my desk, I will be sure to forward it to you.

-Jack

In the Stationery Store

Let me Explain Your Heritage to You

I thought that distilling and presenting American history to a room full of Chinese Hong Kong students presented a challenge. But it turns out that teaching American history was just a prelude to the tightrope of teaching Chinese history to a roomful of Chinese Hong Kong students.

In my English classes, we are reading DragonWings an historical fiction novel that chronicles the immigration of a Chinese man and his adolescent son from China to San Francisco in 1903.

On one hand, I don’t want to assume that my students are well-versed in all things Chinese. On the other hand, I don’t want to appear as though I think I know more about the Chinese experience than they do.

Kids, when our book takes place, the emperor was a Manchu, which is why Uncle doesn’t like him. But you all already knew that of course, right?

The Boxer Rebellion was a movement in 1901 to expel Westerners from China. It’s a fairly important event in Chinese history –or at least I think so. In a reading I had put together, I’d made reference to the Boxer Rebellion assuming the kids all knew what that was. This morning, I had half-a-dozen kids ask me “What’s the Boxer Rebellion.”

Well kid, pull up a chair and let me tell you what I know about your Chinese heritage.

It’s a tricky balancing act.

I’ve been alive three times longer than they have and I am the teacher and I am better read than they are. (Well at least most of them.)

Then again, they are the ones who are Chinese.

I guess we’re going to have to figure this out as we go along and extend a lot of grace to one another in the process.

-Jack

Saturday in the Park

I cringe to think that someone visiting the States sees me doing something quirky and then reports back to her home country. Boy, you should see what they do in the U.S. When eating pizza, they flip one piece on top of another and then eat it like a sandwich. No, that’s not people in America. That’s just me.

Likewise, I want to be slow to draw broad conclusions about life in Hong Kong based on one observation. Men in Hong Kong do push-ups on the sidewalk on busy street corners. Or maybe it was just that one dude that one time.

Saturday, we were at a large municipal park. We saw a couple of old-timers doing Tai Chi in the park. Okay, I happen to know that this is pretty standard. (Although, I’m fairly sure the old guy in the stretched-out, sleeve-less t-shirt was making up his own moves).

But then we came upon this gentleman –about fifty, in cargo shorts, and with a graying ponytail- standing on a small arched bridge in the middle of the park. He was singing. Loudly. Dramatically.

Oh that’s cool, I thought. People in Hong Kong sing loudly in public in the park. I was thinking that I might do a little Tai Chi in the park tomorrow, but maybe I’ll do some loud singing instead. That’s right up my alley.

Then I saw two young Hong Kong men walk past Singer Dude. I saw them do a double take and then smile to themselves.

It made me question my earlier assumption.

As the two young guys approached, I asked them if they understood what Singer Dude was signing. They said they didn’t know for sure, but they thought it was a Chinese Opera.

Then I asked what I really wanted to know: So is it pretty normal to stand on a bridge in the park and sing loudly for half an hour? Embarrassed, they smiled, and shook their heads a definitive “no.”

Okay, I got it.

Tai Chi in the park: A standard Chinese thing.

Caterwauling from a bridge: Just some random Chinese guy doing his thing.

It was a good reminder that I have to watch my assumptions and be careful about the conclusions I make about life in Hong Kong.

Oh, I guess I can probably go ahead and give back The Sound of Music sheet music I borrowed from Elise’s music teacher.

-Jack

That's a Crock

It's the simple things in life that make me happy. Take crock pots, for example. Having to work each day until 5:00 makes getting dinner on the table a bit of a nuisance. Add to that, the challenge of grocery shopping and cooking on a two-burner stove and an oven the size of a microwave and you understand why a crock pot might make me overjoyed.

As Jack described earlier, we have been blessed with a source where we can purchase large supplies of meat at a discount. The stew meat, I have found out, when cooked in a shorter period of time can be a little tough. Hence, I am very excited because today I managed to pick up a used crock pot for a bargain price with the hopes of more tender meat in the future.

You see, I have become an avid internet garage-saler, so-to-speak. As Jack mentioned, there is a website where expats wheel and deal in all kinds of things they no longer need or want. I have tried to comb this site each day for a few things we need--especially the free listings. The challenge becomes claiming items before someone else does and then figuring out where in this vast city I might meet up with them to claim my new purchase. It's kind of like a treasure hunt.

Being the Sabbath, I must confess here, that this new Crock Pot did involve me texting during church. I'm hoping that since I was being a good steward and actually ended up purchasing it from another believer on her way out of church, there will be extra grace extended.

It all started at 6:30 this a.m. when I texted a response to an ad and asked if the pot was still available. Once we were in church I received a response that it was. I had become aware earlier that the seller was on Hong Kong Island, where we would be attending church, so I was hoping it would work out to purchase it today since it would save me a 45-minute train ride later. So, there I was, texting (only twice!) in church and setting up a time to meet her just two train stops away once the woman was out of church. Thank goodness for our detailed map of HK, because she gave me some landmark at which to meet her which was a five-minute walk from the train station.

It couldn't have worked out more smoothly. After putting in a small plug for her church, we exchanged money and parted ways. So, for US$12.00, my family will have some tender stew meat. I have to tell you, slow cookers are not common here, and to purchase one new would be about $80.00. So, yeah internet garage-sale-ing!

As a bonus, we got to explore a little bit of the city we had not been to yet, so that was fun too.

Here's to a future of yummy stews and soups!

Feel free to send me your favorite Crock Pot recipe.

-Julie

Mr. Quick & Two Monkeys

Camp

The middle schoolers all left school en masse on Wednesday morning. In a big trail of 225 students, we walked to the train station. We filled up five train cars as we rode to the Ma On Sha station. From there it was a five minute walk to the YMCA camp.

YMCA Hong Kong maintains a beautiful, five-acre facility here in the New Territories. It was fourteen kids and one teacher per cabin.

For the next three days, we swam in the pool, played ultimate Frisbee, and had cabin devotions together. We had grade-level tug-of-wars, played a round of after-dark find-the-eighth-graders, played a live-action, life-sized game of Clue with the teachers dressed as Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, Mrs. Claus, The Golfer, and so on. We hiked in a nature preserve and encountered some intimidating monkeys on the trail.

We ate camp food in the cafeteria. We sang one too many rounds of “Fried Ham, fried ham, cheese and bologna and after the macaroni, we’ll have onions and pickles and pretzels and then we’ll have some more fried ham.” We had several sessions of worship and speakers.

We roasted hotdogs and made s’mores. We had a bon fire. We stayed up past “lights out.” The kids ate all the junk food they had packed instead of clean underwear. We all got too much sun and drank too little water.

The kids did skits that included a Michael Jackson tribute, lots of prat falls, and some teacher imitations.

It was thirty years in the making, but I had my revenge on all the camp councilors I ever had. At 7:00 a.m. each morning, it was my turn to bang a large metal spoon on a garbage can lid and sing loudly and off-key “Rise and shine and give God the glory, children of the Lord!” The boys seem to hate it as much as I did when I was the one burying my head under the pillow.

Thursday, I had the opportunity to be the speaker for our evening session. I built my talk around my burn accident in July. My theme was God is in Control. I was a little anxious, but the kids (and my colleagues) responded well.

Some things seem to be the same no matter where you go around the globe. Eighth-grade boys use way, way too much Axe spray deodorant (or “deo” as they like to call it). A boy dropping his shorts on stage to reveal his pink boxers is guaranteed to get the biggest laugh of the night. And sadly, a majority of the eighth-grade girls would rather cluster up in the shade of the one small awning than put on their suits and go frolic in the pool in full view of the eighth-grade boys. Seventh-grade boys who drink coffee (with two creams and three sugars) think that they are really hot stuff.

And Friday afternoon when we were done at the YMCA which was five minutes from the train station and twenty five minutes from school, we simply dismissed the kids. Yup, we teachers all just waved goodbye as the kids fanned out into Hong Kong most of them heading for the train station and presumably home.

A strange experience for this teacher from the suburbs of Chicago.

Hong Kong is a lot more pedestrian friendly and a lot less litigious than what I’m used to.


-Jack

Choco

The Hong Kong weather bureau just announced that this August was the hottest on record. We do a lot of walking in this heat. To cool down and to reward the girls for their long suffering, we've been known to stop at McDonald's for cheap icecream cones.

Sunday, I really wanted the vanilla ice cream cone with the raspberry swirls but the picture menu behind the counter was just out of reach and the Cantonese word for raspberry was escaping me at the moment. (As I ever knew the Cantonese word for raspberry. I don’t even know the Cantonese word for hello.) After two failed attempts to communicate what I wanted, I figured it was easier to just change my order.

I went with the selection that everyone in Asia seems to understand.

Choco.

You thought money was the universal language. It’s not, it’s chocolate. I may not know what 秦 means, but I do understand what Choco is.

Better safe than sorry. If you’re not careful around here, you might get stuck with a green bean popsicle.

We’ve been eating a lot of chocolate-flavored stuff lately.

-Jack

Toto, I've a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

So there we were on Saturday night in the home of my Nigerian co-worker and his American-born wife eating Indian curry prepared by their Filipino helper. In China.

We wanted an international experience. I guess we got it.

-Jack

My Mind Has Become Animated