Chinese Thanksgiving

Last year for Thanksgiving my two co-workers and I went out to a restaurant and had to eat substitutes that we were used to for the traditional meal. Instead of turkey we had chicken feet, instead of mashed potatoes we had potato wedges, and instead of pumpkin pie we had a roasted pumpkin. 

This year for Thanksgiving I was able to find a turkey thanks to a new co-worker who knew of an online foreigner meat store. I decided to do a thank you dinner for my TA's and friends. 

First, if you are American than you know we buy things by the pound and the rest of the world uses the metric system. When the meat store advertised a 4kg and 6kg turkey, I decided to buy the 6kg turkey because I thought it wouldn't be that big. 

IT WAS THIRTEEN POUNDS!

The circled thing is the bones. I have no idea if I did a good job or not. Does it look okay?

  Now I had to figure out how to cook my monstrosity. They don't sell what we consider traditional ovens in China since 90% of the foods here are made in either woks or rice cookers. The ovens they sell here are toaster ovens and I knew that my heavy and giant turkey wasn't going to fit in my toaster oven, even if the store said it would. I immediately looked up recipes for rice cooker turkeys and they actually have a few! Since we work on Thanksgiving Thursday and one of my friends doesn't get off work on Sunday until the evening, I decided to have the dinner on Sunday night instead of the usual lunch time. 

Since I have never met anyone that cooked a turkey in a rice cooker I knew that I had to test out a few recipes first, which I did with a chicken. This is the recipe I chose for the potatoes, vegetables, and turkey. For the gravy I chose to do this recipe. 

To fit the turkey into my rice cooker I had to butcher the beast by myself, which was a first for me. I then had to do cook the turkey in sections. It only took 30 minutes to cook the turkey that was in the rice cooker, but I had to do it five times. I started at 2:30 pm and got done at 5:30 pm. While the turkey and vegetables were going, I made apple crisp and apple pie. To my sadness I forgot to put the flour in the pie, so it came out soupy but people still seemed to like it. I included vanilla ice cream as a topper as well. 

The "drained" pie

For drinks I made apple cider which was a big hit! They don't have the drink in China and almost two containers of apple juice were gone by the end of the night. I also had Czech wine, Sprite, Coca-Cola, and my friend brought rice wine. Another friend made banana and chocolate muffins to share with us. 

My friend Susan brought me flowers.

Overall, I was incredibly pleased with my Thanksgiving. I had cooked everything and it was all delicious! My friends asked to take some of the leftovers home with them which I was very happy to do. 

I also taught them about the wish bone which they found very fun and exciting. A few mentioned they wanted to try it with chicken bones. 

At one moment, I was looking out at all my guests eating and chatting and laughing and I got emotional. It was fulfilling to see people I loved eating the food I made and having a good time. Even though I wasn't around my American friends and family, at least I could eat turkey, mashed potatoes, apple pie, and roasted vegetables like I could in America and I could still feel loved. 

Your Lucky Numbers Are...

If you have ever gotten a fortune cookie then you will know that on the back of the fortune they will have a list of lucky numbers. You can read about how 110 people got lucky with their numbers here and the history of the fortune cookie! (Spoiler: they aren't Chinese.)

Even if fortune cookies aren't Chinese, I have found that every culture does believe in lucky numbers and they vary by region. 

In America, you will know that a lucky number is 7 and an unlucky number is 13 and the "devil's number" is 666. 

In China, lucky numbers include 520, 888, and 666 and an unlucky number is 4. 

Wait? 666? The devil's number?

I know right? Why is 666 a bad number in the West and a lucky number in China?

How are any of these numbers lucky or unlucky?

Let's start with America. 

Western lucky numbers have to do with the Old Testament of the Bible. Seven is the number of days that it took God to create the universe, therefore seven must be the most perfect number (Got Questions). 

What I was told when I was in Catholic school is that the number six, the number right below seven, must be the most imperfect number and "un-God like." If it is unlike God, then it must be the devil's number. If you are Christian than you may believe there are three parts to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If the devil wants to mock God then he would chose to use the symbolic three for his number, 666. There is also the fact that the Book of Revelations states that an evil beast will number 666 (Schorn, Joel).

What about 13? There are a lot of theories actually. Since our days are set on a 12 hour system, it is believed 13 would be odd unbalanced, therefore unlucky. 13 also isn't divisible by a single number, making it unbalanced again.  Judas was said to be the 13th guest at the last supper, the man who betrayed Jesus. Similarly, Loki, the god of mischief, was the 13th guest at Valhalla (Maranzani, Barbara). 

For Chinese, the lucky numbers are actually homographs with Chinese words. 

520 in Chinese sounds like "wu er ling." "I love you" in Chinese sounds like "wo ai ni". The reason 520 is lucky is because it sounds like "I love you" in Chinese. If you are ever invited to a Chinese wedding, you may find the number all over the venue. It is also why May 20th is the Chinese Valentine's Day. 

The number four sounds a lot like the Chinese word for death "si" so the number is highly avoided. 

Six sounds like "lucky" and eight sounds like "rich." Nine sounds like "long" so by saying 999 you are wishing someone a long life (Attract China). September 9th is also a day where Chinese people go to visit and honor their elders. 

Putting numbers in threes together is like tripling the good luck. Since four is an unlucky number, you will only see 666 together and not 6666. 

The next time you are buying your lucky numbers at the lottery, maybe you can try Chinese numbers alongside your American numbers. 

  

 Works Cited

Attract China. (2014, November 19). Symbolic Meanings of Chinese Numbers. Retrieved from Attract China Blog: http://www.attractchina.com/symbolic-meanings-chinese-numbers/

Got Questions. (2018). What is the Biblical Significance of the Number 7? Retrieved from Got Questions: https://www.gotquestions.org/number-7-seven.html

Maranzani, B. (2013, September 13). What's so Unlucky About the Number 13? Retrieved from History.com: https://www.history.com/news/whats-so-unlucky-about-the-number-13

Schorn, J. (2013, October). What is 666 in the Bible? Retrieved from U.S. Catholic: https://www.uscatholic.org/articles/201309/what-666-bible-27901

What is in a Name?

If you are in your mid-twenties or older than chances are you have friends, family, and co-workers your age having babies. Usually the top question asked is, "Do you have names picked out?" In China they don't ask this question. Why? Because they have...

*Astrology*

I thought it was really interesting and will share my very basic knowledge on the subject. 

In Western culture we typically name children after relatives or after religious figures. Even if you aren't religious, there is a good chance your name is related to the Old or New Testaments of the Bible (John, Luke, Mark, Sarah, Mary, Elizabeth as a few examples). 

In the Chinese culture, names are picked out based on the year, month, day, and time that a child is born. A baby could be named as late as a month after being born. If you are familiar with the Zodiac years you will know that there are 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac and each year is related to an animal. 2018 is the dog and 2019 is the pig. 

The animals are rabbit, tiger, rooster, dragon, snake, mouse, pig, sheep, monkey, dog, ox, and horse.

Then the year is broken up into the five elements of nature: earth, wood, fire, water, and metal. Fall season is metal, winter is water, spring is wood, summer is fire, and earth is between seasons (The Five Elements).

Then on each day there is a specific item related to that element. I tried finding a calendar online that had a comprehensive list of what each day relates to what element and all I could find were fortune telling websites where it wanted me to pay money. The closest I could get was this chart below. In fact, most Chinese people will go see a psychic who can tell them the names they should pick based on the Five Elements Calendar. 

This is also where the idea of Chinese medicine comes from

HOWEVER I do have a friend who was named based on this theory and this is what she told me. 

My friend was born during the wood element season and on her specific day was the day of the forest. Then the hour she was born was during the cedar tree. So her name means Girl of the Cedar Forest. She told me that there is a belief that being named after an element that is the opposite of the day you were born brings permanent bad luck. If her family named her after a fire element when she was born on the cedar forest day, she could be in deep crap right now...according to this idea. 

If you ever get a chance to be an English teacher, then you will sometimes be asked to give people an English name. I got to name a lot of my first grade students and a few people's babies. I try my best to translate the Chinese name to an English name but it is nearly impossible to get it right. 

My best example story is a woman who asked me to name her daughter. When I asked what her daughter's name meant it was something along the lines of, "Girl of serenity and strength of a great and deep lake." I told her we don't have names that could incorporate all those meanings but could get one of those. I offered the names Marissa (means ocean), Audra (strength), or Serenity (take a wild guess). She was really disappointed that I couldn't get all the meanings in and decided to wait on giving her daughter an English name. 

Usually when I name Chinese people I try to go by the sound if the meaning is something that doesn't translate well. For example if the name sounds like Jia then I might name them Jaiden or Jay. 

I have noticed that some Chinese people who choose to name themselves might make simple mistakes or not realize that the name sounds odd to a Western person. 

For example, not all names are gendered in China so they may choose a typical boy/girl name without realizing. 

Real names that I have encountered: Carol for a boy. Rex for a girl. Both have now changed their names. Now they are Carter and Abigail. 

Or they may pick a name that sounds cool but seem silly to Westerners. 

Real names that I have encountered: Boom, Poker, Hulk. 

Chinese people usually want an English name because their names are hard to pronounce for those who don't speak the language. You can read it about it in this blog post!  They would rather choose an English name they chose than have a person continue to mess up their real name-which is sad and we can go into the colonial implications of all that later but that is the short version of why they want English names. 

But guess what? Sometimes Westerners will be given a Chinese name! I do have a Chinese name which I got written on a stamp. The name they gave wasn't based on the calendar but based on the sound of my name (just like I name my Chinese kids). It is pronounced zhuo shi (kind of like Chelsea). The name means "exquisite poetry" which makes sense for an English teacher!

What is in a name? As Juliet would say, if we called rose by any other name it would smell just as sweet but maybe translating the Chinese name Graceful Rose of Wonderful Serenity into an English name would just lose some of that wonderful context. So I hope being called just Rose is okay and all the rest of the meaning can be gotten through personality. 

Source:

The Five Elements (Wu Xing). (n.d.). Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/astrology/five-elements.htm