After the lull in Zhengzhou of the Chinese New Year and the Spring Festival, the city is slowly coming back to life. It’s as if the entire city itself tucked itself away for the winter for a couple of weeks, and now is slowly crawling out of it’s cocoon. Ever since the New Year, most of the shops around town have been closed and completely deserted as everyone travels to their hometown to spend time with family and friends, but the streets are steadily building momentum as people come back from holiday and prepare to go back to work and school. Shopkeepers are working busily to clean, reorganize, and even rebuild their work spaces. Our favorite place to buy Joutzi is scrubbing away at the outer tile walls and putting in a better glass-enclosed doorway. The hair salon down the street is pulling up tile to lay down a more modern arrangement. Even the guy with the fruit stand has reorganized his little hole-in-the-wall to better display his not-so-fresh fruits to the passersby on the street. Even the willow trees that line the roadways throughout Zhengzhou have started to turn green as their buds anticipate the coming warm weather.

Yes, spring is most certainly on it’s way to China. There’s no telling if another cold spell will hit the city, but nonetheless things will gradually become warmer from this point on, and even the steady rains that signify the changing of climates are welcome.

Today is the close of China’s Spring Festival, marked with its own holiday: the Lantern Festival. This is the day that the city shows off it’s own huge fireworks display in two locations across town to accommodate the crowds, and (hopefully) the rest of the home-bought firecrackers will get used up during the course of the night. Although the constant pounding isn’t quite as persistent as the New Year itself (at least not yet), the entire city still seems to be in on this simultaneous course of explosions. The night sky is still lit up several times a second by fireworks being set off across the city of six million, and there is the constant noise of children (and drunken men) setting off firecrackers outside our apartment windows.

It is a significant day in China because it symbolizes a change - the end of something old, and the simultaneous start of something new. Today is a day that all the demons and ghosts from the past year can be chased away by loud explosions, and a celebration of a fresh start can sweep an entire nation.

Likewise, I too am celebrating both a beginning and an end. Today was my last day of winter vacation and tomorrow I will start teaching my lovely 120 middle school students again for their second semester. I have been blessed to be able to keep the students (and the schedule) that I had last semester so that I can continue developing relationships in a society that by its nature takes a long time to trust.

Also, this past week I had my six-month marker. I’ve officially been living in China for half a year. It’s an amazing and somewhat frightening concept to behold - one that a year ago I never would have dreamed of as possible. And yet now, here I am… appreciating a Chinese city-wide display of fireworks from my bedroom window. Although I am slightly nervous about teaching my students again, I am vastly content. The depression that I expected after my family left never settled in and I can only speculate it is because my heart is satisfied with where I am now and what I am doing. I half expected to beg to board the plane back to the States with them, but when the time came… I was actually ready to get home. And by home, surprisingly, I mean Zhengzhou.

Outside, the city is celebrating its new year. Inside, I am celebrating the joy and peace I have found in this foreign land I live.

Happy Lantern Festival, everybody!
Love from China,
Rachel
 
(this is a really old picture)