By now everybody has heard about the bombings at the Boston Marathon today.  Boston is not technically my hometown, but I grew up 40 miles away.  Boston was the center of our universe.

If you are from New England, then you know that today isn’t just marathon day, it’s also Patriots Day.  It’s easy to mock Patriots Day as a Mass-specific excuse for college students to take a day off and drink.  And it is. But it’s also the biggest public holiday in Boston.  People come to the city in the morning, catch the early Red Sox game (first pitch is at 11:00 a.m.), get drunk, and then stumble downtown to watch the runners puke their way across the finish line.  I’ve done it.  And so have thousands of other people.  It’s our weird Revolutionary War version of Mardi Gras.

A bombing is a tragedy always. But hitting Boston on Patriots Day is a blow to who we are. This is a day when everybody is out in the streets enjoying what is usually one of the first semi-warm days of the year.  It’s the beginning of spring.

And some asshole or assholes decided to blow it up.

This morning, I heard a story on WBUR about runners who after finishing the race just kept running.  They ran to help the wounded. They ran to the hospital to give blood. They ran to give comfort to those who had just witnessed the world being shattered in front of their eyes.

26.2 miles and they kept running.  Damn.

One of the hardest parts of living abroad is knowing that there will be times when we want to reach out to loved ones and be a comfort to family and friends. There may also be times when we ourselves are in need of comfort and those who we have turned to in the past are now many miles away.

Suddenly our little world of petty Lao Whines, of firewalls and bad air, of dead chickens and floating pigs, all seem so ridiculously petty and insignificant.

Today is a day to think of the people of Boston, the victims of this tragedy, and those who risked everything and ran toward an explosion because that’s just what you do when people need help.

Today really was Patriots Day.

Anyone who has flown to or from China knows the drill.  Flight attendants on international carriers are often very…particular about following the safety guidelines.  Many upwardly mobile Chinese tend to believe that rules are for other people.  Hilarity often ensues.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines confirmed Friday that one of its aircraft traveling from Beijing to Amsterdam was suspended from taking off after six Chinese passengers quarreled with flight attendants on Wednesday.

The Netherlands airline told the Global Times Friday that “there was an incident with Chinese passengers on board and that the aircraft returned to the gate,” but refused to reveal more details on the incident.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China was not available for comment by Friday due to the week-long Spring Festival holidays.

Six passengers, all in first class, were late for boarding and refused to wear their seat belts as well as turn off their mobile phones when the aircraft was preparing to take off from the Beijing Capital International Airport for Schiphol Airport, the Beijing-based The Mirror reported on Thursday.

A passenger on board surnamed Lin said in the report that he heard a fierce quarrel and a middle-aged female passenger speaking rudely and threatening to take photos and expose the photos online.

The report said the captain of the flight refused to take off until the passengers were taken away by airport security.

For some, the problem is unfamiliarity with the basic protocols of air travel.* And there’s always going to be a few people who, regardless of nationality, are just assholes.**  I flew back from Kunming this week and as soon as the wheels hit the tarmac in Beijing, the flight attendants were running around playing “whack-a-mole” with passengers who assumed that since the plane was not in a death spiral it was safe to get up and open the overhead bins.  I thought I saw one attendant actually tackle a dude.  And this wasn’t a language issue.  This was Hainan Airlines (one of my favorites) and Chinese passengers.

On Weibo, few are buying the “language barrier” excuse.  Most of the comments are deriding the KLM passengers who were removed from a plane, complaining that such boorish behavior is a loss of face for other Chinese travelers.  Others speculated that they must be members of a corrupt official family.  Still more lamented that money rarely seems to buy good manners among the 暴发户 baofahu, the Chinese term for the nouveau riche.

That said, in a lot of these cases language barriers do make the situation worse.  There are several unpleasant things that recur every year: my annual prostate exam, renewing my visa, and at least once every twelve months willingly placing myself in the surly and sometimes openly hostile embrace of United Airlines.

Say what you will about Chinese carriers, most of the staff speak a foreign language.  They might not speak it well, but they have functional communication skills in important topics like “coffee or tea?” “would you like a newspaper?” and “sit down, sir before your pink wheelie suitcase falls out of the bin and gives somebody a concussion.”   (Okay, I made the last one up but you get the idea.)

United Airlines? Chinese passengers are lucky if even two of the cabin crew speak their language.  Or any language other than English.  The route to and from Beijing must be a primo gig because the crew is always a senior group of hardened and jaded attendants.  You imagine if you met one out on the town, she’d be croaking through her menthol smoke about how she once made out with Neil Young.***

On my last flight on United, there were the usual shenanigans with people ignoring the rules.  I know this pisses off the attendants but the response was hardly a soft power win for the USA.  One attendant asked a passenger to put his seat back up.**** When he didn’t understand her, she — how predictable was this? — just talked louder and slower.  Then she started threatening him.  All the while the dude was looking around to see if anybody could tell him why the women with the horrible bottle dye job was screeching in his general direction.  Finally another passenger — a Laowai — translated for him and he complied.

So it goes both ways.  I have a hunch that the level of entitlement among passengers in the first class cabin on a flight from Beijing to Europe ranks somewhere between “God” and “The guy who has pictures of a naked Xi Jinping holding a goat.”  It’s the same impulse that causes drivers here to speed up when approaching a cross walk. (If pedestrians don’t want to be hit by a car, then why don’t they just stop being poor and buy their own car?) At the same time, international airlines, American carriers in particular, can do a better job about staffing their planes with more people who can communicate across cultural and language barriers.

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* h/t @MissXQ

**Why can’t this be the first line of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

*** YJ once found half of a worm in her salad on a United flight. When she showed it to the flight attendant the response was “that sometimes happens.” After fuming silently for a few minutes, YJ turns to me and says, “Don’t ever bitch to me about ‘Chinese service standards’ again.”

**** By the way, one of my ALL TIME pet peeves — the compulsive recliner. I can’t even speak rationally about this.

This is an actual email I sent to my students today.  I thought it also might be useful to any first time Spring Festival-ers out there.  

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Tonight is the beginning of Spring Festival.  It’s one of the craziest, happiest, and most exciting nights in the Chinese calendar, and I hope that you all have fun tonight celebrating the Year of the Snake*.  As you are doing so, there are some things you can do to stay safe and healthy.

Be careful with fireworks.  Think about the kind of attention Chinese manufacturers usually give to such things as “Quality Control” and “Product Safety.”  Now look at the explosive device you are holding in your hand and which you just bought from some dude in a tent on the side of the road.

Fireworks are part of the culture and they can be fun, but every year the emergency room is filled with horrible injuries. They are often the kind of injury that will mean answering to new and interesting nicknames like “Lefty,” “Three-Finger Joe,” “No Scrotum Li,” and “Holyshitwhereisyourleg Wang.”

Be careful not to get caught by friendly fire or become collateral damage.  I’ve seen people throwing exploding firecrackers out of fifth floor windows into the street below because it was “hen renao.”  I’ve also seen people who are a little confused about which angle is suitable to fire a bottle rocket (Safety tip: That would be UP!).  When walking around the city, keep your eyes open and be ready to hit the deck.  Seriously.

Be careful with the Baijiu.  First of all, it is perfectly appropriate (preferable, really) to say “no, thanks.”  Your host will not think you are being rude if you decide to stick to Sprite.  On the other hand, they WILL think you are being rude if you projectile vomit on their new sofa while sexually harassing their cat.

Second, baijiu is very much a “buy the ticket, take the ride” experience.  Once you get on that train and it has left the station, it can be hard to get off.  If you don’t think you can handle it, don’t start.  Remember that it is something of a game in China to pressure people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do just to be part of the group. (See: Revolution, Cultural)

Finally, NEVER get into a car with somebody who has been drinking.  The Beijing government is getting tougher about drinking and driving, but attitudes toward driving under the influence here are lax by US standards.**  Caution is also necessary when traveling around the city or walking in the area around campus.  It is an unfortunate reality that many drivers today and tomorrow will be lit up like a forest fire.  Be especially careful of black Audis.  Just trust me on this.

Have fun. Stay Safe. Happy New Year.

- Jeremiah

P.S. Yes, your host family will make you watch the 春节晚会. No, it’s not your imagination or the baijiu fumes…it really is that bad. Yes, it’s even worse this year than last.*** No, members of China’s ethnic minorities do not spend all of their time dancing and singing about how much they love the Party even if that’s what your host sister told you she learned in school.  Yes, that is Celine Dion. No, I have no idea what she’s doing there either.  Finally, yes…you MAY make fun of it. Everybody does.

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*As Zodiac animals go, only people who were actually born in the Year of the Snake get excited about it.  Souvenir sellers are especially hurting because let’s face it, everybody wants a stuffed monkey.  Not everyone is cool with a toy serpent.  Also there’s some history here.  Past Snake Years are 1989 and 2001.  ‘Nuff Said.

**Although last week a cop was so pissed at a petulant drunk driver that he pulled his gun.  The cop is now a hero on the Chinese Interwebs.

***Score bonus points with your hosts by asking them if they think the show will be the same this year without Zhao Benshan.

So this week we ran it back.  It’s weird to do a show twice but listening to the show I was struck by how similar the two takes were.  The second time didn’t have quite the same energy as our first effort, but I thought the answers were more polished in its current incarnation.

Enjoy.

Cross-posted at Rectified.name

For most of us 春节 chunjie or “Spring Festival” is an opportunity to enjoy a delicate mix of high-proof alcohol and shoddily made explosives.  There are also dumplings and television specials so neutered they make the Lawrence Welk show look like “Kid Rock Night” at Cheetah’s.

Speaking of neutered, has there ever been a blander term than “Spring Festival”? What the hell does it even mean? It’s held in the middle of winter. In North China that means we celebrate spring by huddling around in weather that is so goddamn frigid the sheep start voluntarily walking up to chuanr guys and saying, “Seriously fucker, let’s just do this.”

For thousands of years it was simply the New Year, at least according to the moon.  So what changed?

Well, the calendar for one.  On January 1, 1912 Sun Yat-sen declared the founding of the Republic of China.  One of the perks which carried over from the old imperial era was that the founder of a new government gets to decide on the calendar.  Sun chose the Gregorian calendar and to avoid any confusion declared January 1 “New Year’s Day. This required a re-branding of the Lunar New Year as something else and “Spring Festival” was born.  Of course by the time Spring Festival 1912 rolled around Sun had already traded the presidency to Yuan Shikai for a bag of dumplings and a vague promise that Yuan “would honor the democratic process or some shit like that.”

In 1928 Chiang Kai-shek decided to take it a step further and tried to sync the lunar and solar New Year holidays, declaring that henceforth Chinese New Year/Spring Festival would be held on January 1. This was another one of Chiang’s brilliant “But that’s the way they do it in Japan” ideas.  Japan still does it, in China it lasted a year.  Spring Festival 1929 was held according to the Lunar Calendar.

When the PRC was established in 1949, Mao decided to keep the Gregorian calendar and with it the name “Spring Festival” to refer to the Lunar New Year.  Over time however many of the more colorful customs associated with Lunar New Year such as the burning of the Kitchen God or visiting a temple to pray for luck and fortune gradually succumbed to government campaigns against feudal superstition.

During the Lunar New Year 1967, the first “Spring Festival” of the Cultural Revolution era, workers were encouraged to turn in their train tickets and celebrate with overtime. Village loudspeakers blared messages telling farmers that nothing said “New Year spirit” like digging irrigation ditches.  For the next thirteen years, few dared to openly celebrate the Lunar New Year. Instead people enjoyed new traditions like “turning in your neighbors for thinking mean things about Mao” and “Whack a Teacher with a 2×4.” Good times!

In 1979 an op-ed appeared in the People’s Daily asking “Where is Spring Festival?”  The next year the fireworks returned.  In 1983, the first 春节晚会 Spring Festival Gala debuted on CCTV and had people immediately wishing for a return of the Cultural Revolution.  Two hours into the first broadcast Deng Pufang tried to throw himself out of a window.

Stupid name or not, it is a special time.  Over the next few days, families will gather to eat, drink and remind everyone of all the horrible shit they’ve done to each other over the past year.  Then the whole family goes outside and to toss lit firecrackers at loved ones.

I love it.  Even if spring still feels like it’s months away.