Dumplings and Lanterns
Today is Chinese New Year and, for me, the festivities began with a dawn raid on Marks and Spencer to liberate food for our celebration-for-two. Rural Cumbria does have Chinese takeaways but our nearest Chinatown is in Manchester, which is not only a hefty drive away but is also well beyond lockdown reach. As a result, this Lunar New Year is one of many international festivals that we celebrate at home with creativity and with as global a mindset as we can manage as lambing season begins with snow on the high fells and all the water troughs frozen solid.
I say that we celebrate with creativity but today that just means a meal deal: two starters (mushroom steamed buns and vegetable spring rolls) and two mains (crispy chilli beef and hoisin duck noodles) along with prawn crackers and extra chilli noodles to satisfy Liam’s need for carbs. My wine of choice is a 2019 Raso De La Cruz from northwest Spain because I liked the description of its flavours: ‘forest fruits and wild herbs’. And because it was £5, reduced from £7.
A day in the kitchen making Chinese food from scratch with our godsons and nephews would be a lovely home-homage to all the students that I have taught from Hong Kong and mainland China but this is a time of clumsy compromises and a meal deal is better than nothing.
Today marks the start of the Year of the Ox, a zodiac animal known for its hard-working, earnest nature. As this oxen year begins, I find myself thinking of one student in particular. Hong Kong was Justin’s home but his parents wanted him to have a British education and so he found himself in an English boarding school. In the four years that I taught him, Justin never met a single deadline and – somehow - he manged to turn every literature essay into a discourse on some tangentially relevant aspect of history. On one occasion Justin arrived in my lesson wearing a fur hat of the style worn in winter by The People’s Liberation Army; on another day, he derailed a whole GCSE lesson by arriving late and responding to my question about his tardiness with a description of how he had been cut out of his school-issue raincoat by a caretaker using a bolt-cutter because the zip had become stuck at knee-level. My carefully-planned lesson dissolved into tears of mirth during Justin’s blow-by-blow description of his entrapment. Classroom disorder continued as he launched into vehement curses at Britain’s appallingly rainy weather that necessitated garments as dangerous as the raincoat. During his A Levels, Justin arrived back at school after the summer holiday to inform me that my choice of Jane Eyre as a text had almost got him arrested when he was discovered reading it during a train journey in mainland China. Justin is now a history graduate working in the real world but he occupies a place in my Ex-Student Hall of Fame because he was so good-natured that I never succeeded in being convincingly cross with him.
One way of marking the fifteen day celebration that is the Chinese New Year would be to take a lesson or two to explore Europe’s Chinatowns and their representation of the culture and communities of the Chinese diaspora. In the UK, we have Chinatowns in London, Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool and Birmingham. France has Chinatowns in Lille, Lyon and Toulouse as well as two in Paris, the most famous of which, the Quartier chinois in the 13th arrondissement, grew from the settlement of ethnic Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s. Hamburg is a sister city to Shanghai and there are Chinatowns in Berlin, The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Several Spanish cities have Chinese districts with Chinatowns in Barcelona and Madrid, and Portugal has Chinatown da Varziela on its northern coast.
If I could box up and store away the pandemic for one school day then we could have a cross-curricular celebration of Chinese New Year. History and Geography could do a double act to explore why and when Chinese people migrated to Europe. We could explore the cotton and silk trade, the importation of tea, porcelain and opium, and the journeys made by Chinese labourers and seamen. We would also need to consider colonialization and the migrations that took place after the end of empire. In English lessons, students could experience some of the literature in translation that has emerged from China or work independently to make presentations on the origins of Europe’s Chinatowns. Meanwhile, the Modern Foreign Languages department could take a break from Europe to investigate simplified and traditional Chinese language. The Art Department could teach a lesson on calligraphy to allow students to form some Chinese letters, and perhaps the Maths team could evaluate how statistics are used to depict the dimensions and identity of a nation with such a huge population. And – time allowing – there is all sorts of work that an Economics Department might do in relation to China and its evolving global identity.
In technical terms, there are many ways in which this teaching unit would satisfy the current Ofsted Inspection Framework (published May 2019). The Chinese New Year lessons would represent an ‘ambitious curriculum’ with plenty of ‘demanding work’ for students; activities would demonstrate ‘a positive and respectful’ school environment and an ‘understanding that difference is a positive, not a negative’. The much discussed need for the development of ‘cultural capital’ would be evident in the way that our New Year learning encouraged an understanding of ‘cultural influences’, of ‘different cultures’ and of ‘the things we share in common’. I would much rather, however, focus on specific details of the learning experience provided by this China Day.
So, according to celebratory custom, staff and students would be invited to wear lucky red to mark the new beginning symbolised by this spring festival. Lunchtime would see the dining room transformed into a street market of food stalls offering regional and ethnic dishes, including yuan xiao rice dumplings for dessert. These lunar-white filled dumplings represent the full moon and the reunion of families to make a loving whole. Togetherness is central to the Chinese New Year celebration so we’d finish the day with a gloriously coloured paper Lantern Festival and a grande finale of the most environmentally friendly fireworks that we could find to scare off monsters and any looming bad luck.
Some monsters are hard to scare off but Liam and I made a pact that neither of us will mention Wuhan at any point today. We have read about, listened to and debated the origins and spread of Covid-19 often enough over the last year. Instead, we will take Bruno for a dusk walk to see if we can catch a glimpse of the barn owl hunting along the railway line as it has in the last few days. Then we will light the wood-burning stove, eat prawn crackers and toast all the Chinese students that I have taught with Spanish wine.