Dong Bei Winter Wonderland

We started with a fine day that got rudely interrupted by the white stuff, coming down enough to cover the ground white. That’s our third this December since the second snow day last week that put on hold my scheduled health and errand saunter out.

The fluff looks like goose feathers descending without a hurry, a sight to behold by this essentially tropical heart. Oh, places I’ve lived before includes the prairies of Canada, around the windy city of Chicago and the Great Lakes, Maine’s Bar Harbor to the beltway of D.C. and the swath from the Potomac to the Pecos of the Southwest, so snow is hardly novel to my experience. It is just that watching it from the warmth of a floor heated by piped water coursed underneath ceramic floor in a gated community apartment of the suddenly resurgent China into the world of comfort and ease is a bit too rich for my plebeian blood.

Four years ago, with Saipan garment factory workers contacts awakened to the fact that they invested an enormous amount for a USA address, nowhere close to sunny California, which they could not easily go to past INS, had to work hard and under austere living conditions for three years just to recoup investment, only to see years of savings in one mistaken palm itch at Tinian’s casino. (I’ve written of slides into drugs, prostitution and despair previously so I shall not do an encore since this is a reflection on winter.)

Anyway, my host family’s son was to enter Shenyang Aerospace University on an aeronautic engineering major so I applied to teach after the CNMI PSS would not have me back. A year later, figuring out why the son never bothered to come to the faculty housing, I discovered that he went to another school sans mother and grandfather’s knowledge or consent.

I was hired to lecture on micro and macro economics to foreign students from third and first world countries and I got excited about sharing my experience in development on the social process of economics, politics, and culture. The head of the Economics department, however, just wanted econometrics and perusing textbooks on the algebraic equations. I decided that the discipline was observed in the academic setting but irrelevant to actual socioeconomic policies.

Shunted to the English department, I sounded like a native English speaker for students to listen to. I taught students how to live a human life rather than how to make a living, and I found a new audience of those who were relieved not to worry about cramming to pass standardized test but more concerned about their ability to learn.

Communal China struck me on the first snowstorm on campus. I discovered that each class had an assigned space to clear after snow blankets the area, and ladies and gentlemen from one-child-families who would not raise a pinkie to clear the dining table at home suddenly shoveled snow, broke encrusted ice, and enabled the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic. There was posturing and prancing around in the doing but they did get the job done.

The practicality of clearing the pedestrian walkways struck me as more than just making work. This gained credence in my walk to my old dwelling where I skirt around the university campus on underutilized back roads before getting to the main thoroughfare. The snowplow took some time working the back roads into its schedule but workers pronto manually swept a clear sidewalk for pedestrian traffic. Foot traffic took priority over cars, a refreshing practice I hope communal China will not lose.

Two Sundays before Christmas, business went into high gear to get the public in a shopping mode. One of every 10 folks on the sidewalk walked around with a pointed but droopy red hat in full regalia of red felt white-fur trimmed attire, promoting something. I stopped a few times to bellow my best St. Nick’s “Ho! Ho! Ho!” to the hired help, not sure if they knew who they were supposed to be portraying. The whole three block commercial place looked very Christmas-y sans the manger scene and Macy’s parade, but the lit trees were fitted with all the trimmings like Chicago’s loop of memory.

In our neighborhood, right around the lit bulb-strung former summer fountain, a mother, a grandma, and a 2-year-old boy tried out a new remote-controlled dump truck equipped with a front loader that loads snow balls. The mother was having fun trying out the toy while grandma tried to cheer the young boy to participate. He did not look the least curious at all. He asked instead to be carried on mama’s back, ending the outing.

I discovered that sleepy heads in my university classes spent hours in dark and crowded computer rooms where they play their DotA (e.g., League of Legends) hours on end. It would not surprise me if our bored young nouveau riche heads that direction.

That’s probably why I still teach in TeCHinASIA where abundant technology in life is short on promise. Me, I still gaze fascinated at the white fluff that descends from the sky and the wonder of me wondering.