Michelle at the Chinese-immersion Yu Ying Charter School in Washington, DC. The characters behind her read, “心想事成” (xin xiang shi cheng, may your wishes come true)

The First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, her mother Marian Robinson, and daughters Malia and Sasha will be visiting China for the first time this month, from March 20 to 26. They will tour Beijing, Xi’an, and Chengdu on an education-themed trip, visiting schools and touring sites with China’s first lady, Peng Liyuan.

China Tea Leaves is sure the Obama ladies will enjoy climbing the Great Wall and cooing over the pandas in Chengdu. We hope they will also take some time to visit the parks of both the capital and the Sichuan city, where I’m sure Michelle would be proud to see the thousands of Chinese folks who exercise everyday in the public parks. I for one will be following her blog of their trip to hear her experiences with the young people of the Middle Kingdom, and hope to see some photos in the coming weeks of Michelle and her mom dancercizing in Tiantan or People’s Park.

China Tea Leaves loudly applauds Michelle’s message to broaden one’s education through travel and cross-cultural learning, more important than ever in this interconnected world. May they have a safe, uplifting and unforgettable trip.

Travelers around the world can learn about Xi’an, Chengdu and Chinese culture by downloading a China Tea Leaves travel guide for iBooks. Stay tuned for more about our time in Beijing as we look forward to the release of China Tea Leaves 北京 Beijing later this year.

The past week and a half has seen not one, but two, inconceivable tragedies sadden millions across China, Asia, and the world. Our hearts are with those who lost loved ones in the violent attacks at the Kunming Rail Station, and those who still await answers in the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. The victims, friends and families, and rescuers will continue to be in our thoughts and prayers.

On Friday, March 7, the Marco Polo Hotel was host to Shenzhen’s first International Women’s Day event, organized by Bonnie Horibata and Sangeeta Ghose of BSV Events & Publications. This half-day celebration marked International Women’s Day, which each year on March 8 celebrates women and their strengths around the world. This honorary day gets more recognition in China than it does on average in the US, and usually women in China get half a workday off when the holiday falls during the workweek. The US and other countries celebrate events throughout March, as Women’s History Month was built around the international day founded in 1911.

Shenzhen’s international event was a morning of inspiration and support for each other’s professional and creative endeavors. A panel of speakers included Hilary K. Robie, an American architect with AECOM, Betty Jin of Uber Asia, and Heidi Olson of the Sunshine Academy. Local products and organizations were displayed by women entrepreneurs, and I was fortunate to be included representing China Tea Leaves in this wonderful group of women.

A brunch rounded out this positive morning of celebrating our beautiful strengths of compassion, collaboration, and creativity. This was a special time to share our personal experiences in China and different perspectives with each other, and I look forward to this day becoming an annual tradition. Read more here about the event on Shenzhen Daily.

 

This week marks the Longtaitou (龙抬头) Festival, the second day of the second lunar month. This means the dragon lifts its head, truly waking up the springtime after its nominal beginning at Chunjie (Spring Festival or Lunar New Year). Here in Guangdong province the late and quite cold winter weather we endured in February has thawed into more normal temperatures, with quite enviable highs around 18-19C (64-66F).

The other side of the Chinese calendar, the solar calendar, puts this week as the start of the Insects Awaken solar term  (惊蛰 jinzhe), ending their winter hibernation.

Traditions surrounding the Longtaitou Festival include eating spring pancakes, honoring the Dragon King who controls the spring rains, and getting a haircut. In one ancient custom, farmers offer a container of grain on the land, outlined by circles of plant ash drawn on the ground. (Pancakes and ashes? These are familiar images this week for some of us westerners too.)

Another food to celebrate Longtaitou Festival is popcorn. In an old legend about the festival, the Dragon King was punished by the Jade Emperor for making rain against his orders, and held under a mountain unless the golden beans would blossom. Some villagers creatively recognized that dry corn popped looked like the blossoms of the golden beans, and so on the second day of the second month they sold popcorn (玉米花 yumi hua or jade-rice (corn) flower) in the streets. The Jade Emperor freed the Dragon King, who made abundant rain fall for a bountiful year’s crop.

Celebrate Longtaitou Festival throughout China by visiting villages beginning their yearly planting. Kaiping in Guangdong province and its distinctive towers are most picturesque in an annual sea of yellow rapeseed blossoms. Or visit the ancient altars in Beijing where the emperor would make sacrifices and perform rituals so that the empire would have a plentiful harvest. Or look around the old capital Xi’an or Chang’an for traces of Wu Zetian, whose claim of the throne as the only empress in Chinese history played a part in the story of the Jade Emperor and the Dragon King.

Or at home, whether in China or abroad, make popcorn! And living in Shenzhen with no microwave, we have discovered that maybe the best way to make it is actually in the wok! Heat an ounce of good peanut oil, add a couple ounces of plain dry popcorn, cover with a lid and shake until you hear the popping, one by one, then crescendo and finish. Top with a bit of melted butter and kosher salt, and you’ll never miss the microwave packets again.

The Shenzhen Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism is formally concluding this week. Over the past two months, this cross-border exhibition has been exploring the theme of Urban Borders through a series of studies and exhibits by international groups and design organizations.

The Shenzhen venues are two upcycled spaces, one a warehouse just next to the Shekou Matou Port, and the other a former glass factory. The program of the event invites you to visit both venues, beginning at the port warehouse, then make the pilgrimage to the glass factory, redubbed the Value Factory.

The Border Warehouse contains “pavilions” created by various countries, and displays that analyze aspects of historic and modern cities. Some spaces are filled with photographs or renderings highlighting a certain city, while collections of modern media or lo-fi materials mingle to give a sense of the contemporary city. A shelter made out of construction workers’ hard hats sits in one space, a path made of discarded street signs wanders along the floor in another, computer renderings reimagine New York and Shanghai, and people tag their hometown villages in an interactive exhibit with QQ numbers.

The connecting road between the two venues takes you on a 2k walk through Shekou, past new and old warehouses and shipping yards. Here you’re made aware of Shenzhen’s roots as a manufacturing center nestled in the subtropics of south China, the Chiwan mountain and its ancient fort in the distance.

The Value Factory is the former Guangdong Float Glass Factory, here a deftly preserved gallery space with further exhibits, education spaces and a cafe. The main hall looks over the sheet glass manufacturing space, subtly lit and humming with abstracted factory sounds. Curator Ole Bouman’s statement about Shenzhen’s industrial past and the Biennale glows in red lettering over the entrance, reading in part, “This past now wants a future – and this future has a chance to unfold once again in this factory, by harnessing the Shenzhen Biennale’s regenerative energy. A factory where ideas are born, designs are made. It is here that human drive creates value. Welcome to the Value Factory.”

Here’s hoping the Value Factory will long remain open as an example of creative reuse for the world’s changing cities, alongside the myriad statements that Shenzhen, as a manufacturing, economic, and creative power city makes to the world.

The Biennale’s official closing ceremony will happen today, February 28, but the organizers have just announced that the exhibitions will remain open until March 14. To visit, begin at the Border Warehouse just west of the Shenzhen Port and Shenzhen Metro station Shekou Port (蛇口港 shekou gang) or find more information here.

Today, February 14th, is a very special day throughout China. Not only is it Valentine’s Day (情人节 qingrenjie), it is also the Yuanxiao (元宵), the Lantern Festival and the fifteenth and final day of the Chinese New Year celebration.

Every year on the Lantern Festival, glowing lanterns are paraded about, and young and old take a walk under the full moon, two weeks after the new moon of the first day of the New Year. And as many Chinese fairy tale couples meet under the moon or amongst the stars, this day seems like a most natural alignment of festivals, east and west.

The Spinning Maid and the Cowherd are one famous couple of Chinese folklore, separated by a river of stars and united once a year by a bridge of magpies. Their reunion is celebrated at Qixi Festival in August, known as Chinese Valentine’s Day. Another major holiday, Mid-Autumn Festival, falls on the full moon of the harvest season, and remembers Chang’e, the goddess of the moon, and her archer husband. Western Valentine’s Day is celebrated in China too, now the most popular holiday for treating your sweetheart to something special.

So today and tonight throughout China, couples are strolling under red lanterns and the full moon, the last fireworks of the New Year popping overhead. Gifts of red roses and chocolates may be enjoyed alongside tangyuan (汤圆), the traditional sweet glutinous rice dumpling soup of the Lantern Festival.

Here are some of the best places to feel the glow of Lantern Festival and celebrate love too.

In Hangzhou, see all kinds of lanterns in the street fairs, and remember the love story of Bai Suzhen and Xu Xian, with a bowl of tangyuan with your valentine on the banks of West Lake.

Shanghai’s Yuyuan Garden is a perennial favorite for the festival, with its classic narrow streets strung with thousands of lanterns.

Visit Xi’an’s Tang Paradise for impressive lanterns in the romantic Tang dynasty park, and see the sites of the real-life love legend between Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei, and some of the oldest references to the Spinning Maid and the Cowherd. You can read more about these famous Chinese legends in China Tea Leaves 西安 Xi’an.

Some of these lantern festivals will be going on through the end of the month, so visit now to celebrate and enjoy the season!

China Tea Leaves is bringing in the year of the horse in Hangzhou, home of the beautiful West Lake. In leaving Shenzhen at this time of year, we join the millions of people who return home to be with the their families at this most special time in the Chinese calendar.

We want to encourage travel to this beautiful land; we want to bring the beauty and the mystery, even the strangeness, to the West, to bring our appreciation and love for the culture we’ve found a home in for the past year and a half. We of course want to sell our books. But today, we want to revel in the catholicity of humanity, its universal commonalities. And also in the stories that make China unique even in the midst of this universality…

She has spent the last ten evenings, after work, on the internet. This in itself is not so uncommon, but she has been going to just one site, clicking and refreshing frantically to find a ticket to return to her home province of Hubei, return to the spicy dishes, the winter snow, and most importantly her mom and dad. The trip will be 18 hours by train, plus three hours by bus. But first she must battle the millions attempting to win the same lottery. She must first get a ticket, and she can only start 20 days prior to when she will want to leave. She has 7 days off for the new year, and her company doesn’t provide vacation. Her family is counting on her to be back to bring in the new year.

It’s the eve of the new year, and after a family dinner of pasted meats, he gathers around the television set to watch the Spring Festival Gala on CCTV, an annual state sponsored extravaganza with singers, dancers, acrobats, comedians and magicians. The family counts down the new year together, while sending chat messages to friends and family that cannot be there. This year, there’s a new twist on the tradition of passing out hongbao, red envelopes filled with Lucky Money. Tencent, Shenzhen based maker of WeiXin or WeChat, now allows users of its popular social media app to send each other electronic hongbao. Simply link your bank account, enter a total amount, and send to a group of friends. Then thanks to the magic of a random number generator, those who tap on their red envelopes will get a chance amount. Each family member keeps half an eye on the television set while Sophie Marceau, the French actress croons La Vie en Rose, and tap enthusiastically on their iPhones and Samsung phablets, chatting and giving hongbao, relishing in friends near and far. Relishing in a time to relax, eat, and celebrate the family.

Some cannot make it home. She is in San Francisco, far away from her parents. As is often the case in China, she is an only child, and the loneliness of her mother and father is great. She works at a Sichuan restaurant, but she is from DongBei, the northwest of China. She cannot get the dumplings she would eat in her home city of Qingdao. So after work, she gathers with her co-workers, older women from Hong Kongese families that emigrated long ago to the United States, and younger men and women who have come to try and study in the US and start a new life that for whatever reason escapes them in China. They share hotpot, and stories, and laughs. But each of them misses fireworks, the flavours, and family of home.

She and her husband have not been to their home village for twelve months. They have not seen their only son in that same time. They have come to Guangdong province to work in the factories and send home money to their parents, who are watching over their child. When they get home, after standing for 10 hours on the train, they will fuss over him, they will dress him in a special, fur lined vest, and cry over him. He will begin to remember them again.

We stand on a balcony, two laowai, foreigners, looking out over the Hangzhou’s West Lake. It is New Year’s Day. Surrounded by Chinese families, eating snacks, drinking tea. One table is facetiming their daughter who is at school in the States. The grandfather begins singing, oblivious to the other tables. There is laughter and joy all around. We are happy to share in this great festival that so celebrates the family. We feel, despite being so far away from many that we love, at home.

To learn more about some of the Spring Festival traditions, see niangao in the south, dumplings in the north, and good fortune all over.

New Year’s altar, with red paper wishes for blessings, gold ingots, Taoist immortals
and fruits of prosperity

Last evening was the chuxi (除夕), the Eve of Chinese New Year. Families gather from all corners of the country to feast and see the old year out together. Chances are there will be a bit of chaos too, made up of a crescendo of fireworks, kids begging indiscriminately for a hong bao filled with money, and the ever present CCTV New Year’s Eve Gala, probably watched by at least 700 million viewers.

Many foods will be present at the table, filled with meaning and wishes for the new year. In the south, sticky rice cake and sweet tangerines are popular. The name of the rice cake (黏糕 nian gao) sounds like 年高 nian gao, each year higher and higher aspirations. Juzi tangerines are found on topiaries decorated with ribbon and red envelopes, common around Guangdong province as the name sounds like luck (吉) in the Teochow dialect of the eastern part of the province.

Northerners are partial to dumplings, and make them by the dozens in a small slipper shape, which looks like the ancient silver currency, the sycee or ingot, another popular symbolic decoration. These get gobbled up at midnight with wishes for a prosperous new year. They might also serve long, uncut noodles, symbolizing longevity, the 寿面 shou mian a common feature at any birthday feast.

Xi’an has some of the longest, widest and tastiest noodles of all. Ring in the New year of the Horse with China Tea Leaves Xian, and stay with us to hear more stories surrounding Chinese New Year and how China Tea Leaves finds themselves this Spring Festival in Hangzhou, home of Bai Suzhen, ancient temples, secluded pavilions, and the heavenly West Lake.