productivity and sugarplums

i was up early as usual this morning, but somehow didn't want to do yoga or run or ponder the moon in the still dark sky (the activities that typically occupy my time between 6:00 and 7:30 am). i almost wanted the time to be unproductive, and thought about going back to sleep. in the conversation i mentioned the other day about what 'being gentle to yourself' means, one friend said that being gentle to herself meant allowing for unplanned or unproductive time. i thought it an interesting observation. in our crowded, sunlit lifetimes we can forget to take time to just be. another friend of mine in new york used to add two-hour blocs of "do nothing" into her blackberry schedule just to remind herself to once in awhile let go. while i am not quite at that level, i need to remind myself that taking a morning to just be with myself (and my most recent whirring thoughts) is in itself productive.

'tis the season for productivity in a sense. elves are meant to be working overtime. we are encouraged to consume, consume, consume. and therein find some connection with the ineffable. perhaps not. once a upon a lifetime, one was fairly cushioned from christmas chaos in china. not so anymore, i have discovered. christmas has barfed all over beijing. that's the best way i can describe it. or at least barfed all over the shopping complex / mixed use office building in which i work such that i have to elbow my way through the ooze just to find a quiet corner to eat lunch or go to the atm or buy a snack. and even in the quiet spaces you can hear jingle bells playing. china's embrace of christmas is at once entirely baffling and utterly predictable. baffling because this is technically an atheist country* and the current christmasness is in marked contrast to the utter lack thereof when i was growing up here. predictable because, spirituality aside, if there's one thing the people's republic currently worships, it's consumerism. so i think china's dreaming of a very commercial christmas - more about sugar daddies than sugarplum faeries.

a british friend who is here with one of the EU projects recently recounted her experience around this time last year when she decided to ask a few colleagues if they knew what christmas was about. (short answer: they didn't.) she then told them the story of the birth of christ. they were amazed. "that's a really good story," one said, "but what about the fat man, santa, was he also one of the wise men?"

beijing has come along way from the bleak cabbaged christmases of my youth. i still remember the first year christmas trees were available in beijing, and my father and i were sent off to find the family tree. there was only one place to go for trees – the parking lot next to the german hotel which housed beijing’s best international supermarket - and there were certainly not fake trees encouraging consumption all over town as there are today. ba and i set out on our family kwau zi - a motorcycle inspired by German military models from world war II, with a very fetching sidecar and fake BMW insignias - with some twine in the sidecar’s small trunk. i rode in the sidecar as we set out. (i loved the sidecar.) we discovered that the christmas tree market was not very robust. nonetheless, we took our time. my father and i were perhaps not the best choice for this mission. having similarly contemplative natures, the was much to consider. the first tree we saw was excellent in a relative sense – decently shaped, not entirely unevenly distributed branches, moderately covered in needles, and at four feet high, a good size for our flat. but we didn’t want to go with the first tree we saw. we wanted to be sure that we found the very best tree. so we inspected each and every other tree in the lot, considering and commenting on their merits, much to the amusement of the staff. still not satisfied, we got back on our bike, adjusted our helmets and goggles, and drove to another place rumoured to possibly have shrubs resembling christmas trees in stock. they did not. so we returned to the original lot and re-examined the trees there. then, exhausted from all of this examining, we had a snack. eventually, we selected the first tree we had seen.

tree selected, there was the issue of transport. the plan was that we’d load the tree into the sidecar, securing it with twine. christmas trees, even petite ones, are not really designed to sit comfortably in motorcycle sidecars, twine or no twine. so i ended up riding home on the seat behind my ba, holding onto the bike with one hand and leaning slightly to the side, holding onto the tree with the other hand. this was probably not the safest way to travel. when we finally made it home with the tree hours after we had set out, my mother was not impressed. she could not fathom how it could have possibly taken us so long and was worried about the fading light for the family christmas picture. we tried to point out that we had found the very best tree in beijing. she looked from the tree to us and back again and said nothing. she didn’t need to speak, her look exposed us for having spent an entire saturday staring at scrawny, shapeless piney things in the freezing cold just as an excuse to ride our kwau zi. we didn’t care though; we were really impressed with our transport job. and the tree looked good-ish when hidden under layers of ornaments in the corner, even if the shadows in the christmas photo were longer than planned.

i am sure there is a surplus of christmas trees in beijing this year. there seems to be a surplus of everything. although the magical christmas market seems to be hiding somewhere with the elves. when i asked a server at our lunch restaurant today where she got her fabulous headpiece - a red headband with two springs supporting santa heads which bobbled delightedly as she moved - she said she didn't know. the restaurant had got it at the same place they got all of the other christmas baubles that were covering the walls and the rest of the waitstaff and she didn't know where it was. oh well. i pushed my way past the tree, the giant santa, five golden rings, partridge and pear tree blocking the restaurant's entrance, and went on with my day. i will be content to just be and not worry about productive decoration this season.

*one of my favourite alleged li peng quotes is his using china's atheism as a shield at a press conference. i cannot verify the veracity of this statement and this may very well be an urban myth spread by the active imaginations of the beijing expat community in the 1990s. it's telling even so. the then premier's statement was in response to a journalist pressing li peng on china’s human rights record and asking about how the government could justify a particular recent action. li peng calmly listened to the question, didn’t even blink, and stated: “we’re atheists; we can do that.”