When my husband and I first came to China in 2010, the plan was to stay two years. Well, we are now going on our fifth year, and we don’t have any plans to leave. It’s hard to believe that we have been here long enough to start doing Throwback Thursday posts, but we have. My goal is to go back through my files and find old pictures that never made it onto the blog and tell the story behind them. This is for a couple of reasons, including blogging more regularly and taking part in something fun, but also because I stopped blogging about daily life in China a long time ago. After about a year, life in China just became…life. It stopped feeling interesting, novel, or noteworthy. We were just two people going to work, having dinner, watching TV just like everyone else, or so we felt. But it isn’t that simple. Life here is different than it is in America, and many days it’s really hard. And our life is interesting to most of our readers, people who still live in the West., so this series is for our readers and for ourselves. So, here is our first TBT post!
Finding a learning activity for over 60 teenagers is really hard, and one of the reasons I started hating teaching. But after the first light snowfall we experienced when our first winter in Hunan, I had the bright idea of teaching the kids to make paper snowflakes. They really enjoyed the activity and came up with some amazing designs. The problem came when I tried to stick the snowflakes on the doors and windows. The kids completely freaked out. In China, white is the color most associated with death, so putting anything white on windows and doors invites death. I tried to overcome this by getting them to understand that in Western culture, that isn’t a superstition, so they should put them up anyway. But they were having none of it. I was at least able to get one picture before they took them all back down.
Have you heard this superstition or anything like it before?