Qing Ming: Tomb Sweeping Day. Beginning this year, the Chinese government has re-arranged the system of national holidays. Instead of three "golden weeks" of public transportation mayhem, we now have a range of one-day holidays. Work units are already leaning toward the long weekend approach that is popular in the U.S., cobbling in an extra day of leave if necessary, to be paid back at another time. Some of the current roster of holidays are historical/political (e.g. International Labor Day) and others are traditional, based on the lunar calendar (e.g. Qing Ming, long unrecognized under Communist rule.)

This year I celebrated Qing Ming with a walk in the park followed by tea with a colleague and his girlfriend. My walk is documented in video:



From my journal:
Tea with Li Wei and his cute girlfriend. He is a nice kid, a typical young Chinese guy: humorless bore. During our tea, the girlfriend sometimes yawns, sometimes rolls her eyes at me. He bores her, too. He just talks and talks. NBA, capitals of US states . . . on and on. He stumbles upon the issue of Sept. 11 and suddenly veers to Tibet, informs me that recently China experienced terrorist attacks in Lhasa. He fills me in on some details, from the Chinese nationalist perspective. He apparently assumes I live under a rock and know nothing about any of this. I ask with feigned innocence, why does he refer to the people of Tibet as the “Tibetan ethnic minority?” I get a huge, bombastic answer about the various Tibetan peoples who inhabit Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai as well as the so-called autonomous region. Their linguistic differences. Blah, blah. I ask him if it isn’t true that many Han Chinese were once Buddhist. “Never!” he shouts, looking horrified. I ask him why I see temples and pagodas everywhere I travel in China. Oh, he concedes, yes. But never Tibetan Buddhist!