How Chinese People Stay Warm in the Winter

The Nanjingese are professionals at staying warm in the winter, in constant fear of catching a cold, because catching a cold is just so 麻烦 (troublesome). Although catching a cold actually has nothing to do with being cold, they actually still have the best system against catching a cold. They leave the doors and window open, so houses and buildings are not stuffy hotboxes where the cold virus can spread easily. They don't spend a lot of time inside with the heat on, so the cold virus doesn't have more opportunity to spread. Regardless, Chinese people hold fervently to the belief that being cold and eating cold food makes you sick, so they bundle up like no one else in the winter time. Here are some pictures I've taken around Nanjing, where the average temperature has fluctuated between 20 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit this January.

I feel so bad for Chinese babies, who are subject to incredible bundling lest they get sick, or horror of horrors, someone thinks you're a bad parent because your kid isn't bundled up to the point where they look 3 times fatter and their faces flush red from being too hot.

Chinese kids are little fat bundles that can barely move during the winter. They wear an outer layer like an apron, a full-scale bib, so their parents only have to wash that outer layer instead of the whole coat. 

How I'm Staying Warm This Winter

Life is cold these days. My house is like everywhere else in Nanjing: drafty and cold. Buildings in Nanjing aren't built with insulation, let alone indoor heating, properly sealed windows, or any sense of design that hints at keeping a house warm in the winter. Even the wealthy, with their huge windows and big open living spaces that aren't conducive to keeping warm air in, only turn on the heating function on their air conditioners when it gets below freezing. Everyone says, "Just wear more!" All cities South of the Yangtze River are planned this way. From what I hear, in the North, on the other hand, they have central heating systems in almost all the modern buildings, but often lack proper air conditioning and roast in the summer.

My house is over 300-years old, with cement floors on the first floor. The bedroom is on the second floor, with a thin metal roof covering wooden ceiling beams and windows that don't completely seal. Because the houses don't have any insulation anyway, many families, including me, keep the windows and doors open during the day. Electricity is insanely expensive, and keeping the heating on would be foolish and wasteful in a bedroom that has no insulation whatsoever. When it gets below freezing, my roommate and I turn on the heat function on the air conditioner, which blows out hot air, in the evenings. This has little to no effect unless you are standing in front of the air conditioner, and the temperature in the room drops immediately when you turn it off. Besides being expensive, turning on the air conditioner also drys up the air, leaving my eyes and throat itchy. Chinese people also rarely turn on the air conditioner for this reason. Point being, in Nanjing, no matter where you are, the temperature inside is the same as the temperature outside.

EDIT: The air conditioner broke. My landlord, despite the fact that she is my roommate's mother, is showing little interest in getting it fixed. I have little hope, considering she has followed through on 0/5 of her last promises. 

Many of you already know how cold I am... all the time. I am a wimp when it comes to the cold. Even in my dorm last year, I would wear my winter coat when doing homework. This is specifically one of the reasons I moved in January. I need to toughen up and get over myself. I'm bracing myself for February, the coldest month in Nanjing. Here are my strategies for coping this winter:

This green "hot water bag" is my lifesaver. Made out of rubber and covered in felt, I fill it up with boiling water every couple of hours and carry it with me everywhere I go. It's like a portable heater that sits on my lap when I'm on my computer and cuddles with me at night. When I'm typing, my hands go numb and immobile. I just hold this for a minute to warm them up so I can start typing again. In the background, you can see my blankets. A trifecta of warmth, it consists of a soft, fluffy blue blanket on the bottom, a pink quilt folded twice over, and a heavy woolen blanket on the top.

Happy Year of the Dragon!

For many Chinese, the month surrounding the 15-day chunjie (春节, or Spring Festival, known as Chinese New Year in the West) means the annual chunyun (春运, or spring wind) when the millions of undocumented migrant workers in the cities come out of the woodwork and embark on a massive migration home to the countryside to celebrate the new year. One by one the family-owned businesses and restaurants close down and the street food disappears as the migrant workers return home. The owners of my favorite neighborhood noodle restaurant a few houses down from me returned home to Anhui Province last week for chunjie. Anhui is a poor, landlocked province about 4 hours to the west with a primarily agricultural sector that many of Nanjing's migrant workers call home. Here is a picture of that noodle place on my street, all closed down:

All locked-up for chunjie

 Here are some pictures of what my neighborhood looks like when everyone closes up shop for chunjie.  *A note on vocabulary: chunjie refers to the 15-day Spring Festival that begins with the first day of the lunar new year, welcoming the upcoming spring season. New Year is also used in Chinese to refer to this holiday, usually when referring to New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. However, both terms are, for the most part, used interchangeably in Chinese. 

I was sad when I woke up one morning and the steamed bun place was shut-down. Wishing the owners a happy new year with their families! 

"We Chinese are obligated to return home for chunjie, it's not optional. Returning home is an observance, it's a rite, you know, for us to honor the relatives in our hometown by personally wishing them a happy and fortune-filled new year," explained Grandpa Shen, a 75-year-old neighbor and life-long resident of Old Nanjing. Grandpa Shen and I have one more thing in common besides our street address. Though our reasons are different, he and I both will not be returning home for chunjie. Old Nanjing is his home and always has been. During chunjie in Nanjing, only the locals are left, known as bendiren (本地人, or indigenous). The locals....and, well, me.

Preparing for the New Year

"You must be so homesick! Aren't you going home to celebrate chunjie?" asked the Auntie that sells tofu on the back of a freight tricycle in the old city of Nanjing. Auntie rides down the narrow, winding alleys of Old Nanjing several times a day to emphatically announce the price of tofu at 500 grams for 1.5 yuan (that's about a pound for 25 cents). At my doorstep yesterday morning she told me to stock up because today was the last day of business and she'd be taking a weeklong break to celebrate chunjie, or the Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese New Year in the West.

The residents of Old Nanjing stock up as if they are preparing for a blizzard. Their pantries are stuffed with rice, potatoes, carrots, and other staples in preparation for the 15-day long chunjie from January 23rd to February 6th, when most businesses across the city will shut-down for at least a week. 

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve and everyone is in the holiday spirit. Here is my fully stocked refrigerator in preparation for Spring Festival, full of tofu, eggs, peanuts, almonds, bananas, almonds, broccoli, and bokchoy. I panicked in fear that I would starve to death. Note: This is worthy of a picture because I normally don't keep much in my kitchen--I just buy fresh whatever I need for that day at the market in the morning. Also I don't actually keep my refrigerator plugged in because it's cold enough in the kitchen: 

My neighbor, Big Brother Guo, warned me that I wouldn't be able to buy any food for a week, so he took me to the local market to buy the food featured in the above picture. I am so excited because he took me to a massive underground market near my house that I didn't even know existed. I'd walked past the entrance countless times in the past 4 months, but never knew that it was a market. I've been buying my groceries from the mobile vendors that ride down my street everyday, but I was thrilled to find this market because it has an incredible selection of vegetables and a huge variety. Plus a dumpling and meatball tent. Nice. Very Nice. I'm so excited to be shopping there for the next 6 months. After the New Year, of course. There were, as was to be expected, various somewhat frightening sights to be seen: 

Chinese word of the day: 

贵族- gui4 zu2- literally "expensive nationality," aka aristocrat

Snapshots of Daily Life at the Park in Old Nanjing

I spent the afternoon reading and writing field notes under this pagoda

The woman with the turquoise collar is singing loudly and poorly into a microphone in this picture while elderly men stand around listening. Much to my dismay, karaoke in the park has become quite popular among people that have zero singing ability.

The retired people of Old Nanjing lined up against the City Wall, taking in the warmth of the sun on this frigid winter afternoon.

Some guys hang out in the sun next to a little bamboo forest.

Playing cards attracts a crowd

A New House for a New Year

The neighborhood is abuzz with the news of the little foreigner (小老外) moving into town. When I got up this morning to go to the public toilet, I was stopped by people on the street to ask if I was all moved in to my new house. One of the shop owners called out to me, "Hey, you're not wearing the hat that you bought from me! Aren't you cold?" As I was walking back, Grandpa Cao called out to me from his tiny chair on the side of the street surrounded by his caged birds: "I heard you moved here!" I responded with an affirmative and asked him if he knew my roommate, Xie Rui. "She and I live together," I told him, and he nodded in approval.

One of my mahjong friends, Grandma Tang, asked, "Will you be going home to celebrate the Spring Festival [Chinese New Year]?" I responded that I'd be staying in Nanjing for the Spring Festival because Americans don't celebrate that holiday, so going home in the middle of January would actually be quite meaningless. Besides I couldn't afford the plane ticket. She was shocked. "You don't celebrate the Spring Festival?? That's terrible!" I explained that we celebrated Christmas and the Western New Year instead. She still couldn't believe that we didn't celebrate something as important as the Spring Festival. Her friend responded that it was terrible that I couldn't afford the ticket, and that earning money is bitter and laborious (For my Chinese speakers, she said "苦钱," which means 辛苦的挣钱 in the Nanjing dialect).

My friends in the neighborhood all knew I was moving, of course, since most of them either helped me find a house or helped me move. There is often a lot of neighborhood gossip, since people frequently will tell me things in a whisper about other people's family situations, and it seems like I've been the hot topic these days; everyone knows about me moving to Old Nanjing.

Many of them don't understand why I moved into an old house (老房子), though they usually nod in agreement after I explain to them that I'm researching the culture and social behavior of the people of Old Nanjing to better understand how urban reconstruction affects Chinese society. They always agree when I say that high-rise apartment buildings changes interpersonal relationships and I'm investigating this change. I explain I want to better understand the person-to-person relations (guanxi, 关系) in Old Nanjing, which I can only do if I myself am a member and resident of the community and can personally witness the affects of demolition on residents' day-to-day lives. Luckily my friends now understand this really well (they've heard my schpeal probably more times than they would like), so they will explain in the dialect or in better Chinese than me if we are together and someone asks me. At first this annoyed me because I wanted to explain myself, but then I realized that they can explain it better in a way that other residents can more easily accept, so I always let them explain for me if it's appropriate.