February 14th, 2010

This past Valentine's Day, I had the opportunity to spend the morning with my friend's Mandarin class attending a service at a Chinese Protestant church in Chinatown, Boston. Why?

First, as we all [should] know, Valentine's Day is February 14th, but this year, it happened to fall on the same day as the Chinese New Year, this year being the year of the Tiger. Incidentally, both of these happened to fall on Sunday. The likeliness of all three happening at once is something that happens once per lifetime. Pretty cool.

What is interesting is that the two holiday both focus primarily on relationships; however, Valentine's Day is generally geared towards romantic ones, while the latter is usually celebrated with the family. Needless to say, when the Mandarin class I was with were waiting in line at a Dim Sum restaurant, the rooms were packed with families and relatives sitting at tables of eight or more.

Not to digress too much, but some of the food at the restaurant was...interesting. Sometime you just shouldn't ask what it is before you eat it, because I found out that the mysterious bowl of prickly matter was in fact the stomach lining of some fortunate animal. Also, there's not much meat in chicken feet.

Hope you all had a memorable Chinese New Year's/Valentine's Day!


From left to right: chicken foot, something that felt like a bone, stomach lining, and skin-textured thing.

Lesson Practice Sheets 12-15

Taiwan Memories

Something I don't speak about on a regular basis is that I was born and raised somewhat in Miaoli, Taiwan. It's pretty difficult to recall the earlier years, since I moved here when I was seven years old. But several distinct memories will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I was raised speaking Chinese, and I was probably fluent...clearly, I don't remember. But I do know that the dialect I spoke was not Mandarin; in fact, the region of Miaoli stretching up to Jhongli spoke a dialect called Hakka. Unfortunately I remember absolutely nothing regarding differences in the dialect.

At an early age, I remembered making a variety of delicacies (at least, delicacies by American standards) which include:

• 较子 (jiao3zi) - dumplings with various vegetables and meats on the inside. I vaguely remember rolling out dough to make them in a kindergarten class.

• 粽子 (zong4zi) - I have sweet, sweet memories of my grandparents giving me steamed rice wrapped in what I thought was corn husk. Evidently zongzi is a sweet rice-ball wrapped with bamboo leaves, and is treated as a delicacy popular in festivals.