Nankai Rob

1. Antiseptic

I was going for a walk last night in a big park, took a deep breath, and was surprised all over again when I realized I could smell. . .nothing. No trees, no grass, no flowers, not even dirt or dried grass. There was nothing in the air but the vague industrial tang of big-city life. I’m not looking forward to the transition back to America after almost seven years here (I love Tianjin, even though it’s horribly polluted), but as a friend retorted when I told her everything about it was going to suck, “the air won’t.” True enough.

2. Airport security

This isn’t actually ugly; I just wanted an excuse to tell this story, which once again I’m stealing from my friend Daniel. Daniel recently spent a month traveling around the Middle East and Turkey. He brought several Chinese things along to show to friends and acquaintances, among which was a special type of baijiu they’ve just started selling here in the last three years or so. It comes in small, 100 mL or less bottles with “BOMB” written in all-caps on the side. It tastes exactly like airplane glue. Daniel brought several bottles with him. When he got to airport security, they looked at the bottles and gave them back, no questions asked, but confiscated. . .his toothpaste. To recap: Daniel was given clearance to carry a glass bottle with the word “BOMB” written on it, but couldn’t brush his teeth. I feel safer already.

3. My wardrobe

I was thinking the other day about what I’d want to, or need to, bring back with me when I move to the States. As I looked at my clothes I realized I probably wouldn’t take more than about 10% of them. Tianjin beats the CRAP out of clothes. Socks, underwear, undershirts, or anything else that’s white has turned, after several years, a sickly gray from the gunk in the air. Shirt collars have been stretched into oblivion by the washing machines. Jeans and shorts crotches have been shredded by daily biking. One of my fleeces has a few mystery stains (not food, not dirt. . .what?). And bear in mind I was never very stylish to being with. At least this makes packing easier. I’m seriously considering packing three changes of clothes and burning the rest.

5. All I want is a sandwich

Last weekend I went to Subway to get a sandwich. I had a good book I wanted to finish, and was very excited to just chill out, eat a good sandwich, and read. I placed my order, and the guy behind the counter started putting it together. I asked for double meat and he nodded. Then he said, “Which meat?”

I was confused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, which meat do you want doubled?”

“Er. . .all of them. That’s what ‘double meat’ means.”

“You want all of them doubled?”

“Do you mean the ‘double meat’ offer only includes one meat?”

“Yes.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Yes, it does. It’s only for one meat.”

Sigh. I saw where this was going. If you’ve been in China long enough you can see exactly where certain situations will end up, and arguments with store employees qualify for the predictive situation category. I said, “I went to a Subway a few days ago and that wasn’t the case.”

“No, it’s that way everywhere.”

Bearing in mind, of course, that I’d just told him I’d had a completely different experience not long before. I’ve heard this argument a thousand times in a thousand different situations. Someone will patiently assure you that the way their store does it is that way everywhere, even though it’s clearly and obviously not. “No, it’s that way nowhere. ‘Double meat’ is for all of the meat on the sandwich.”

Another guy behind the counter jumped in to assure me that, no, it only meant one meat. I was pretty angry, and not just about the meat. Mostly I was angry because in China, you CAN’T argue with employees. It doesn’t happen. Or rather, you can, but you won’t win. Most people in China argue for the sake of letting off steam, not getting their way. This is because most stores still function on the old state-owned enterprise model wherein customer satisfaction doesn’t matter in the slightest. You come in, you buy your stuff, you consume your stuff, you leave. That’s how it works. The employees have no personal stake in you enjoying your visit, and for the most part could care less. And let’s face it: if you’d grown up in a place where for your whole life you’d been dictated to by parents (your own and others’), teachers, politicians, and others, you probably wouldn’t care too much about one white guy’s sandwich, either. I know I wouldn’t. And the look you get from the people you’re arguing with makes that abundantly clear. It’s the same look each time, a triple whammy of fatigue, confusion, and just straight “who cares?”

4. Future cripples in the weight room

I’ve written at length about the numbnuts in the swimming pool. It’s time now to turn to the numbnuts in the weight room. As a qualifier, I’m definitely a novice in this field. But even I know when certain things are being done wrong. So, in honor of a previous post I wrote about horrible swimming strokes, I now give you: the five worst weight-room maneuvers in China.

1. The London Bridge – Specifically the “is falling down” portion. There’s a small group of middle-aged men who come into the weight room all the time, and virtually live on the bench press. Instructions for their technique would go something like this: put far more weight than is healthy on the bar; lie down beneath the bar; hoist the bar, lower it; lift the bar, arching your back as far up as you can (ideally you would look like one half of a parentheses here); make sure all the force for the lift is coming from your abdomen and upper colon. This particular collective lift all the time, but each member has pectoral muscles that look like withered party balloons, and bellies that are pooched-out, as though all were diabetic. That tends to happen when you lift entirely with your colon. “Falling down,” indeed. I’m waiting for the day when one of them snaps his spine in half.

2. The Tarzan – You wouldn’t consider yelling and posturing to be a standard weight-room maneuver. (“Standard,” as opposed to “common.”) I’ve always thought it to be more appropriate among, say, gorillas, for whom yelling and posturing is a legitimate form of social expression. Yet somehow it’s standard here, too. The guys who lift tend to do one set, preferably with as much gasping or yelling as possible, then go to stand in front of the mirrors lining one wall and stare at themselves for at least ten minutes, usually while flexing different muscle groups in turn. One guy in particular accompanies his lifting with shouts and shrieks of such volume and intensity that when he’s working out you feel like you’ve accidentally walked into a Khmer Rouge torture cell instead of the campus weight room. I predict he’s going to be not only mute, but without effective joint or cartilage fluid in under five years due to the amount he keeps trying to curl.

3. The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar – Much thanks to Eric Carle and his beloved children’s book for this one. Anyone out there ever actually seen a hungry hungry caterpillar move? They crawl with a kind of accordion motion, drawing momentum from their rear and extending that wave-like from body section to body section, finally ending in a kind of slow-motion whip-crack at the front end. That would be precisely how 90% of the guys look on the pull-up bar here. They hang from the bar, puffing dramatically by way of preparation, then whip-saw their feet out and back, using the momentum to yank themselves up. One guy, who is admittedly VERY well built, prefers tying a ten-kilo weight to his waist with a length of chain and whip-sawing himself about like a flag in a high wind while he “pulls up.” You don’t have to be a licensed physician to guess what that’s doing to his, and their, shoulders. And as I wait for one of the London Bridge guys to snap his spine, I wait, too, for one of the hungry hungry caterpillars to shriek, then fall to the floor with his arms still clinging to the pull-up bar, shoulders ripped out of their sockets.

4. The Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em – Remember M.C. Hammer’s signature running-man dance move? (If you do, you’re over 30 and/or have horrible taste in music.) I think of that whenever I look at one particular student on the exercise bike here. He has apparently decided to create a new exercise combo which fuses vigorous biking with push-ups. He never sits down on the bike, and as he bobs up and down as fast as he can, with each down-pedal he also drops his torso and head to a near-collision point with the bike handlebars, then pushes up, eyeing his biceps as he does so. It really does look like he’s dancing. Injury prediction? His hands are going to lose purchase on the handlebars one of these days when he’s snapping down into his “push-up” posture and he’ll go head-first into the metal support rod. They’ll just chuck his unconscious body onto a pile with the other guys.

5. The Good-Night – There actually is a lifting maneuver called a Good Morning which is done almost entirely with the back, but it’s something you should only attempt if you’re a VERY experienced professional. For some reason it’s becoming more and more popular these days in our weight room. The first time I saw it, two of the London Bridge guys had set up a bar on the floor with at lest twenty kilos on each side. I was stretching on the other side of the room, and only noticed them because I heard them shouting and shrieking. I looked over and saw them straining, and I mean REALLY straining, to lift this bar while bent over at the waist. No pushing up with the legs, no bracing against something, just bending over at the waist and attempting to lift a very heavy bar. Seriously, what do these guys have against their spines?

2. No spatial awareness

I’m going to start making a list soon of the things I’m going to miss, and not miss, about China. Very high on the second list would be the seemingly total lack of awareness of other people or things. From the person swimming across my swim lane directly in front of me without looking to see if someone’s coming, to the LEGIONS of people darting out into the street without checking for oncoming traffic, to the guys smoking in the weight room and the pool. . .the list goes on and on. But how about a more interesting, and more recent, example? I was with my friend Charles (Wei Zhe) last week, and on our way to meet a friend of his for coffee we passed by a Jaguar dealership with a new model sitting proudly outside. It’s a Jaguar XL, which Charles explained stood for “extra-large” because people in China like big cars. He’s right, too. When I got to Tianjin six-ish years ago, the vast majority of the cars on the road were small sedans or those cartoonishly dangerous three-wheeled mini-carts. Now the roads are packed with BMW’s, Mercedes Benzes, and much larger models of the older, smaller sedans. Ominously, I’ve even seen the occasional Hummer, which has to be among the top five stupidest, most wasteful vehicles ever made. Especially here, where the average parking space is the size of a Mike and Ike box.  Still, people with money here are all angling for bigger, flashier cars. Never mind that the roads during rush hour are approaching apocalypse-level congestion and insanity.

3. Laser beams in traffic

As I believe I’ve explained before, I’ve compiled quite a file of nutters out here. (Cultural note: I will be going back to the U.S. in four months or so to pursue doctoral work, and I’m sure while there I’ll compile an equally thick file of U.S.-based nutters, so stay tuned for the culturally-balanced rejoinder to what must seem like an unfair emphasis on Chinese nutters.) We’ve had chain bullwhip guy, Chinese white supremacist guy, and scads of others. I would like to introduce another entry into this august company: military-grade laser beam guy and gal.

The other day I was biking to one of my tutoring jobs. The apartment complex where I teach is on the other side of an overpass. As I was nearing the intersection, I noticed two VERY powerful green beams playing across the overpass, the trees on the roadside, and passing cars. Whoever was using the lasers had a partner on the other side of the bridge, because I saw two equally powerful beams playing across objects and landmarks on my side. Typical laser pointers are only noticeable by the red dot that appears on whatever they’re aimed at; you’re really not supposed to see the entire beam. If you can, you’re looking at something MUCH more powerful than a simple laser pointer, powerful enough that if it was to hit you in the eye it could conceivably cause some damage. It probably wouldn’t be cinematic damage, of course. It’s unlikely your eyeball be reduced to the consistency of cottage cheese or bubble out of its socket like the eyes of the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it still wouldn’t do you much good. So for those who for some reason aren’t tracking with me, there were two people pointing high-powered laser-beams into and around rush-hour traffic in the fourth-biggest city in China. The question, as always, is why? And, as always, the answer isn’t an answer at all. In this case, the laser-beam culprits were in fact SELLING lasers.

Yep, on each side of the bridge, standing on the street corner, was a person (man on one side, woman on the other) wearing a small sandwich board around his/her neck, a small box of military-grade laser beams on the pavement. Nice, neat sign on the box advertising how great the lasers were. If you were to ask me what I thought might be more dangerous than shining military-grade lasers into oncoming traffic, I’d probably say, “Selling military-grade lasers en masse so that EVERYONE can shine lasers into oncoming traffic.” Then you and I would laugh about how foolish that would be, turn slowly to the street corner, and our laughter would peter out in textbook sitcom fashion as we realized that the en-masse laser-selling scenario was the one actually playing out.

5. Conversations

My Chinese tutor’s brother is a professional artist who has also studied ancient philosophy and literature EXTENSIVELY. I’d been meaning to visit him for weeks, and finally got around to doing so last week. It was a complete and total nerd-fest. I knew I’d struck pay-dirt when I saw the look on his face after I’d pulled out my copy of Li Zehou’s A History of Beauty, which is a systematic examination of classical Chinese aesthetics. Nerds the world over have the exact same expression when the conversation turns to their particular brand of nerdery. All of us look like kids who’ve been given $1,000 and turned loose in a giant mall. We proceeded to spend the next two hours talking at each other so fast that it was less a conversation than a series of interruptions. We compared the thematic focus of the Old Testament prophets and the traditional Daoists. We talked about the origin of Chinese aesthetics in the Yi Jing. We talked. . .and talked. . .and talked. And really only scratched the surface. I could tell by the huge smile on his face (and mine, too, probably) that had I said to him, “I think I’ll just sleep here tonight and we can talk about this as long as we want,” he would have been thrilled. We might not even have broken for dinner. Since my time in China is officially winding down, I want to put down on record the fact that, for as stoked as I am about doing Ph.D. work in the States, the reason I learned Chinese wasn’t to use it in the States; it was to do precisely what I did last week: communicate with Chinese people in Chinese about issues like philosophy, history, politics, or even just everyday life. That desire started when I visited a student’s family in the Shandong countryside, and it arguably peaked on a mountaintop in Taiwan, where my good friend Xuebin and I spent three hours staring down at the ocean and the Taiwanese coast, discussing politics and current events with a Taiwanese artist who was up there with us. For as exciting as I know U.S.-based grad work will be, it’s not going to improve on the rush I get from real-time conversations like those.

1. Mosquito reincarnation

At least that’s what I think is going on. For the duration of this winter, there has been precisely one mosquito at a time buzzing around my room. Never more, never less. The mere presence of a mosquito in my room during the coldest part of the year is annoying enough, but its ubiquity amps the annoyance factor into rage territory. I’ve been woken up multiple times this winter deep in the a.m., then gone on a staggering, stumbling, half-awake rampage around my room wielding a sandal (there are lots of dark sandal prints on my ceiling from the battles of previous years), hoping to crush the offending insect so hard that I’ll put a dent in the wall. And yet, no matter how often I kill it, the next day there’s another one. Or is there? Am I killing lots of different mosquitoes, or just the same one, over and over and over again? Am I living out a kind of nightmare zombie insect scenario? Are they reincarnating? If they are, it really does make you wonder what sort of crimes the offending party had to have committed in his or her previous life. It couldn’t have been horribly serious, or else s/he would have been reincarnated as, say, a male black widow spider (for those who don’t know about black widow mating habits, pay a visit to Wikipedia), or an amoeba, or a point-guard for the Memphis Grizzlies. And yet obviously being reincarnated over and over again as the same mosquito in a dorm room has to be some kind of punishment. Lifelong jay-walker? Compulsive shoplifter of the same low-quality snack product? (There has to be some kind of annoying-but-not-vengeful punishment for someone perpetually stealing Rollos.)

It’s also possible there’s more than one mosquito.

3. Ordering books

Somehow, despite the skyrocketing popularity of digital books, publishers in the West still haven’t figured out that there’s no longer a reason to price books up around the twenty-dollar range. I really don’t see the point of paying the same price for electrons that I do for paper. Chinese publishers, by contrast, sell books for WAY cheaper. Not bootlegged books, either. Since I know I’ll be leaving soon, I’ve been ordering a bunch of things online that I think might not be easy to find in the U.S., all in Chinese of course. Is there anything better than brand-new books for cheap? I think not. A four-volume set of dark comedic satire by Yan Lianke. The complete poetry of Luo Yihe. All of Lu Xun’s Za Wen (short essays and thought fragments). None of them over $10 U.S. The complete anything by a contemporary western writer would be five times that much. No snarky comments about nobody knowing the Chinese writers, either; the ones I just mentioned, if they had been reliably translated, would be considered on a par with the best writers the West has ever produced.

Did I mention the books were cheap?

4. A new kind of fried rice

Wow. Double wow. I went to a big outdoor market in a different part of town recently and stopped in at a random Hunan restaurant for lunch. Without knowing precisely what it was, I ordered the Hunan Fried Rice. Well, as it turned out, it was fried rice with bacon and chili peppers. Now I’m a huge fried rice fan. I’ve ordered it in hundreds of markets, and enjoyed almost every serving. This, however, was something special. I don’t know if this will sound superficial or not, but one of the things I’m going to miss most about China after I leave is the unexpected discoveries. I’ve been in China eight years now, and this is the first time I’ve ever had Hunan-style fried rice. There’s a reason I’ve never gotten tired of Chinese food. There’s so much of it, and it’s so varied, that I’ve never yet exhausted the possibilities.

Oh, and it’s crazy cheap, too. My Hunan fried rice cost me $1.

1. Getting accepted to grad school

Need you even ask? I applied to five schools, frankly unsure if I’d even get in, then a few weeks ago got an acceptance notice from the University of Oregon. I wish I could express how excited that made me. There’s more to this, though, than just completing a very long process of hard work and study. Last August I returned from Taiwan, and within two days of being back realized that for the first time since I arrived in Tianjin six years ago I wasn’t excited to be back. It wasn’t even that I hated Tianjin (well, maybe for a few days it was, especially when I discovered they’d bulldozed the campus market in my absence); it was more that things had simply run their course here. For those who aren’t sure what that means, let me put it a different way. A few weeks ago I was talking with my friend Inga, who’s from Ukraine and has been helping me with my Russian, and she was regaling me with her experiences on a recent work-related retreat, which included everything from karaoke to self-criticism sessions to emotional harangues from their boss. She said it was rough, but that at least it made a good story. True enough, and in past years I would have thought the same thing, but I’ve reached the point where I just don’t care about stories any more. I have all I need. And when you no longer desire stories, it’s time to do one of two things: make a long-term (10+ year) commitment or leave. Why? Because when you no longer care about having good stories, it means you’re so used to living in China that you’re starting to think like a resident, not a visitor. (Note: I mean “resident,” not “national.” That’s the truly odd thing about being an ex-pat in China. You can be perfectly comfortable. . .and yet still be completely foreign.) For me, with my degree coming to a close and almost all of my oldest friends gone, it’s time to go. But until I got this first acceptance, I couldn’t start planning. Now I can.

2. The mildest winter in years

Three (ish) years ago it snowed on November 1^st. That’s odd in and of itself because although it does occasionally snow in Tianjin, it never snows that early. What made it odder is that the snow never did melt. They temperature stayed below freezing for something like three months. And THEN it didn’t warm up enough for us to go around in one layer of clothing until something like mid-April. The year before that we had a freak snow-storm four days before Christmas, and the days after that were all high winds and temperatures that hovered around the 10-degree (Fahrenheit) mark. That’s just wrong, people, especially as it completely curbed my daily run. I did go for quite a few long-distance (i.e. 10+ miles) runs when the temperature was in the low-twenties, but I had to stop. When you run for over an hour and you’re still cold. . .I vote “nay” on that. By contrast, this year has only felt REALLY cold about three times. The majority of the season it’s actually been fairly pleasant, with the cold staying in the “brisk” description, as opposed to “Inuit Apocalypse”.

That’s what I’m calling the fifth day after Spring Festival, a day which, so far as I know, has no official title and yet somehow manages to be important enough to merit the detonation of an impressive number of recreational munitions. I met up with some friends for roast lamb that night, and from my vantage point across the street at the base of the traffic bridge, the apartment complex from which they were all emerging looked and sounded like it was being bombed. Nearly continuous flashes of light, a thick pall of smoke, concussions that I could feel from hundreds of meters away. . .and people, that’s for a holiday that doesn’t even have a name. (It might, of course, but I don’t know it, and no one else seems to, either.) It says something when the bench-warmer holiday is far louder than a first-stringer in the West.

But then we’re not really going for noise, are we? The Chinese are, or seem to be. Spring Festival is a virtuoso display of fireworks manufacturing, with every conceivable color and pattern blooming in the night sky. Arbitrary Explosion Day features mostly long strings of firecrackers that, when set off in an apartment complex, make the Warsaw Uprising sound like a birthday party at the Olive Garden.  Nor are there any rules or even social expectations for when the noise should start and stop. Hence the title for this post. On the official Spring Festival day, everything crescendos according to an unwritten, unconscious, universally agreed-upon schedule, peaking at midnight and then tapering off slowly over the next hour or so. It’s impressive. There’s nothing like it in the world. The “fifth day after” tradition, on the other hand, feels redundant, and is pretty annoying to boot. Whether you think so or not, there’s a kind of code for partying. There are times to be loud and crazy, and times not to be. If, for example, you’re doing Jello shots and karaoke inside a giant sandbox, and it’s midnight, that’s a serious party. The same scenario at 2:00 a.m. just furthers that impression, and even neighbors who don’t like what you’re doing would at least have to admit that you’re a seriously committed, though perhaps unbalanced, reveler. If you’re still doing karaoke and Jello shots at 9:00 in the morning, however, it just feels gratuitous and stupid, the kind of thing you’d expect Axl Rose to be doing after all the groupies have left and the whiskey is gone. The people setting off recreational munitions here at 9:00 or earlier on Arbitrary Explosion Day (and later, too) have that same air of “oh, well, there’s nothing on TV and work’s a cosmic blood-suck, so why not?” They have a drawn, bored air about them, and go about their demolition work with mechanical anti-joy. Most of them appeared to be middle-aged men (never women; I don’t know exactly why I never see any women setting off bunker-busters), in the standard Chinese middle-aged man uniform (slacks, loafers, micro-weave sweater, cell-phone belt holster, and beige or light brown jacket), who would walk out to the street, set the fuse of a firework off with a lit cigarette (and really, people, if you can think of something that screams “washed-up rock star” more than nonchalantly setting off fireworks at 9:00 a.m. on a Friday with a lit cigarette, I’d like to hear it), and walk slowly back without changing expression as the street buckles under the force of the detonation. You see that exact display all over town on Arbitrary Explosion Day: outside restaurants, in apartment complexes, in the middle of a busy street, wherever.

That kind of thing goes on all day, and has all the earmarks of a party that’s gone on way too long. There’s no real crescendo; things just explode most of the day, and when you’re least expecting it. That, more than anything, is annoying. You expect to be hit with shrapnel and have to run/bike for your life on Spring Festival day. Five days later, though, when you’re ready to leave your apartment building and can’t because an old man has just set off a string of perhaps 1,000 weapons-grade firecrackers DIRECTLY outside the door, it just doesn’t work. You just can’t carry on that kind of celebration that long. But they do their best.

Those of you who read this blog with any kind of regularity will not the ever-so-subtle tang of cynicism bobbing to the surface every once in a while like the occasional chunk of lemon in an otherwise well-balanced gin and tonic. Hopefully you’ve realized I actually really love living in China, and that the cynicism is simply because I’ve been here long enough that the honeymoon phase is a distant, distant memory. Keep reading long enough and you’ll get some pretty cynical material when I’ve been back in the States a while, too. I’m an equal-opportunity cynic. I’ve been in China almost nine years, and there are LOTS of reasons why I’ve been here as long as I have. One of those was on display last night.

People, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows how to ring in the new year like the Chinese. End of discussion. The U.S. is mostly a collection of wild, overpriced parties where people seem hell-bent on starting the new year by drinking themselves into an oblivion so complete they don’t even remember the new year starting. I imagine in other countries it’s similar. But last night, as I was standing outside with my friends Patrick, Danny, and Albert, watching the Chinese do their level best to detonate the world, all I could do was smile. At some point the noise, the flashes of tinted gunpowder, the hail of split cardboard shell-cases, simply wiped away anything but the immediate visceral response of the moment. Everyone on the streets was a kid again. I know I was, and had been for most of the evening, or at least since roughly the time we went outside to set off some fireworks of our own.

We went outside at roughly 8:30 or so to shoot off some Roman Candles of Patrick’s. Danny Wahl had also brought along a plastic bag full of cherry bombs, except that these, which were tiny plastic soccer balls roughly the size of a large chocolate truffle, were filled with nothing but gunpowder, and made an impressive amount of noise when detonated. At first we were content to toss them into a concrete-and-tile basin nearby which in past years might have held a small reflecting pool. The resulting echo was gratifying, but then we started looking for ways to make the explosion louder. We dropped one into a metal pipe, another into a trash can (though not when Patrick’s son Moyer was watching, because you just know Moyer would be asking to do that later on), and walked the complex looking for something else to aid in the detonation, but found nothing. Then, like the kids we have probably never stopped being, we spent the next hour or so trying to figure out a way to detonate all the rest of the cherry bombs at the same time. Sadly, our efforts resulted in failure. We had placed them all in the thick cardboard husk of a used, er, mortar would be the only word I could think of to describe it, and set the husk on fire, but this merely melted the plastic shells on the cherry bombs and caught the gunpowder on fire. Dan, Danny, and I stood there watching the thing burn, with the occasional small belch from the pyre showing where a higher than normal concentration of gunpowder ignited, and Danny shrugged and said, “Well, at least we set something on fire.” True enough.

The rest of the neighborhood, however, really knew what they were doing. Bear in mind that we were in an apartment complex with roughly fifteen or twenty buildings, all around 5-7 stories, which means everyone was essentially operating in a giant acoustic tunnel, or at least an amphitheater. So when, as was common, someone lit off a massive string of fireworks, the sound was absolutely deafening, and as this was always supplemented by a pall of thick sulfurous smoke which didn’t carry far on the light breeze, the overall effect was, well, totally and completely awesome.

A word on fireworks safety in Tianjin, too, before we get to the coup-de-gras. The fashion among men setting off fireworks is to light the fuse with a burning cigarette which they’ve been smoking during the entire setting-up phase of the operation. We looked up once to see a man unrolling a string of powerful fireworks, his cigarette smoldering just inches from the shells, and it’s a testament to the effect of the evening that we didn’t run for cover, but just started laughing and kept trying to figure out a way to blow up 20 cherry bombs at the same time. This would probably be why Shanghai and Beijing have strict (and boring) anti-fireworks laws.

And then there was midnight. I have to say here that this year was not nearly as out-of-control as my last go-round with Spring Festival five years ago. Back then, you couldn’t even hear the person next to you, even if you were inside. This year we were having a decent conversation up until abut 11:45. Still, the apex of the evening was impressive all the same. Patrick, Albert, Danny, and I went outside to catch things at high tide, and ended up in a very large courtyard area in the middle of the complex where people were shooting off EVERYTHING. Nothing small, either. Nobody had sparklers out there. It was all mortar cannons, deafening explosions, staccato pops, and flashes of light. Nobody was talking because nobody could hear anyway. The ringleaders were two Chinese men who had bought a box of fireworks, and an accompanying launcher, so powerful that when one of them shot off from the base we could feel the impact tremors in the ground and the “whump!” in our chests. You’ve probably all been to at least one decent fireworks display, but you haven’t lived until you’ve one of the big, industrial-strength variety explode directly over your head. Wow. They shot off probably 30 before we left, and every single time we shouted like little kids. We even helped put out a small grass fire that some of the flaming cases had started on a nearby hillock. That’s just Spring Festival for you.

It was bittersweet, too, because this may be the last time for quite a while I’m in town for the Spring Festival. Even if I’m in town again, who knows if it will still be this intense? Certainly this year wasn’t as intense as five years ago. In five more years maybe people will just be waving sparklers around. I hope not. My friend Dan, who left about a half hour before midnight so he could photograph the insanity from his own apartment, sent me a text message this morning which pretty neatly sums up the Spring Festival: “This is nuts. I want to spend New Year’s in China every year for the rest of my life!”

I went to my favorite tea shop with my friend Dan yesterday to buy some good white tea. When we got there, about six people were packing tiny foil bags full of tieguanyin oolong tea as though the end of the world was coming and they were taking tea to the Judgment. The owner, who looked far more harried than usual, asked apologetically if I was planning on buying anything that day. (In these tea shops, people regularly come just to drink and talk, and usually I just buy a tiny bit at a time.) I assured her I was, and she set about serving some of the white tea I requested. As we sat and talked, I nodded towards the growing pile of foil tea bags. “Is all of that going out to customers?” I asked.

She nodded, so busy she didn’t even look up from her notebook ledger. “Yes, this was all ordered for Spring Festival gifts.”

An older man who often helps in the shop got my attention and pointed to two huge garbage bags. “That’s what we’ve packed so far,” he said.

“Wow! Whose is this?” I asked.

The owner motioned over my shoulder to two Chinese men sitting and chatting at a table in the corner. I asked, “Did they order all this?”

“Yes.”

“How much did they order?”

“About 300 kilos,” she said.

Seriously, you only think Christmas shopping is stressful. Getting 200 employees gift certificates to Starbucks is one thing. Buying up 300 kilos of tea? That’s something else again.

And so it is that we approach Spring Festival Eve (Chinese New Year’s to many of you), that wonderful, glorious time of the year when families reunite, people rest from their labors, students have a chance to travel and relax, gifts and booze are bought up as though lives hung in the balance, parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in town for the Spring Festival experience. I had forgotten how it all worked. Most of you have never been, and may never be, in a major city for this experience, so I’ll describe it as best I can. The week leading up to the day is marked mostly by a daily incremental increase in recreational munitions payloads. A few days ago, for example, I was biking through an apartment complex and ran over an unexploded gunpowder cap, which went off with a bang and a flash and nearly made me wet myself. That, however, was just one of those toy things kids fling on the ground for fun. That was also several days ago. I’m listening to right now to a fusillade of large roman candles being fired off in the apartment complex. Mark that: “in the apartment complex.” In Tianjin there are NO rules as to when and where you should use fireworks. There weren’t in Beijing either, a few years ago, but then some office workers in one of the largest buildings in downtown Beijing were firing Roman candles out the window (!) and ended up burning the building to the ground. For now, we’re relatively safe. Yes, there are Roman candles being fired off, and yes they’re more dangerous than gunpowder caps, but people are mostly confining themselves to their homes. The trick is that after Beijing made it harder for people to shoot off fireworks, the sale and usage of fireworks skyrocketed in Tianjin by way of compensation. We’re about five days out, but I guarantee by Thursday it will be dangerous to bike at night.

I’ll never forget my first Spring Festival here, when my tutor asked if I was going to travel. Before I could answer, he said, “If you are, I’d be happy to come by and make sure your windows are all right.” I had no response to that, and asked him what he was talking about. “It’s actually very dangerous on Spring Festival Eve,” he said. “Many people’s windows are shattered by the fireworks.” He was right, too. Mine didn’t shatter, but I understood why he was concerned. I’ll save further comments on the subject until we get closer to Spring Festival Eve.

For now, I’m noting the subtle increase in volume and frequency of explosions, not unlike an infantry colonel in the Battle of the Bulge noting the same things in enemy artillery. In a way, though, that was simple. There was your side. . .and their side. But if everyone in the 101^st Airborne, as well as the Nazi army and all of the villagers and townspeople in the surrounding areas, had been merrily lobbing grenades about, blowing holes in trees and bricks out of walls, it would have made for a far more interesting experience. Such is life here.

I’ll give you a little spoiler. There’s one type of recreational munition here that you can literally hear across town. It goes off with a distinctive “whump!” and might be confused with a mine explosion were there a mine nearby. You generally hear those once in a long while. I’ve been hearing more and more over the past week, and as train tickets get bought up, people start mobbing the train stations, and the kitschy New Year’s products flood the stores, I’m pretty sure the “whumps” will increase.