Once Upon a Halloween in China

My one twinge of regret when I flew to China Autumn of '06 was that, for the first time ever, I would completely miss Halloween (even Puerto Rico has trick-or-treaters nowadays).  Little did I know that I was about to have the most intensive Halloween of my life.  For the private school I taught at wasn't just content to teach English with genuine American instructors, no--this place was all about cultural immerson, and as everyone worth their salt knew, that meant that these middle-schoolers were going to celebrate Halloween, dangnabit!

As such, Ken and I threw together a slap-dash, super-simple ppt. ("In this slide we see American children in scaaaaary costumes!  And in this one we see a haaaaunted house...  And in this one we see...candy!--no, no, you can't have any, that's just a slide on a screen").  We presented it over 20 times to over 20 different sections.  The whole shebang was only about 20 minutes long, followed by the first 20 minutes of Monster House on a pirated DVD, and then class ended.  While Ken gave the lecture, I carved a Jack-O-Lantern in the background, for the childrens' assignment was to carve a pumpkin of their own by October 31st, and I was showing them how.

That is, from fearing I wouldn't get to carve a single lantern that year, I carved more in one week than I had in near my entire life.

And with what factory-efficiency did I mass-produce those Jack-O-Lanterns!  It was probably the most American thing I did in China, for better and for worse.  A quick kitchen-knife around the stem, scrapping out the guts with brute strength, then stabbing out 3 triangles and a mouth.  There was neither care nor craftsmanship, only a need to crank out as much product as fast as possible.  My pride was not in my skill, but in my speed.  The U.S. work-ethic in a nut-shell, ladies and gents!

So imagine my astonishment when those Chinese children, who had only learned about Halloween the week before, not only carved Jack-O-Lanterns, but carved (doubtless with the aid of their parents and their fine-carpentry sets) some of the most exquisitely detailed pumpkins I have ever seen in my life!  Flying dragons, elegant calligraphy, portraits of old Confucians with their every wrinkle subtlety traced into the skin--and all this for pumpkins that would rot in a week!   To my shame did I fail to take pictures of them.  Yes, it is in the land of sweat-shops and cheap-production, of all places, that the tradition of careful-craftsmanship and beauty-for-its-own-sake still lives! 

Halloween night proper, Ken and I finally finished watching Monster House (you can only watch the first 20 minutes so many times before you are filled with an irrational need to witness the ending) and placed a lit Jack-O-Lantern outside.  The next morning Ken got up early for a jog, only to find that someone had turned its face around--superstition still lives in the Middle Kingdom, too.  Ken turned the face back around and then went running.  When he returned, he found the pumpkin on the ground, smashed to pieces.