[Oe List ...] Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life: HappyThanksgiving

Wed Nov 24 00:00:15 CST 2010

What follows is a different take on the American T-day heritage, but serendipitously ends with the Beattie quote that Paula and Nancy uses, and John Cock has on his daily reflection.

The article will be in the Saipan Tribune (www.saipantribune.com), Life and Style section tomorrow.

It was written here in the cold of Dong Bei in the Manchurian hinterlands across the Amur River.

The usual caveat: if curious, welcome; if not, meet you at the next bend.

Dong Bei Trek 8: Cyrillic Thanksgiving in Amur Mon Ami

There won’t be any turkey beheading on this side of the Amur River today, nor a basted bird for the dining table.  Any Byzantine Christians coming from Blagoveshchensk across the river will be fasting (if they follow the Melkyte tradition), and secular Russya of the Far East may not even be that religious.  

We are kind of partial to the Native American ‘turkeys’ who were invited by the pilgrims for the first harvest feast, later were handed the Word, gained piety, herded in the Veil of Tears march to Oklahoma, and lost their land!  Not a fair exchange, would you say?  But T-day is a blessed Hallmark day, and we would not want to disappoint the egg hunters and Disney, would we?

Heihe was the first frontier posting of Manchu warriors in Manchuria prior to the ascension of the Qing dynasty into Zhongguo’s imperial throne.  My 70-year old host mother in Shenyang grew up here and prior to our trip, she swore it was a one-street settlement with nothing much but peasants, loggers, fishers and weeping willows in the river in the summer.  Winter time, the folks gather for games of chance indoors as this time of the year, the sun rises at seven and sets at four, and down raw bai jou liquor fermented from fruits and grain in buried jars.  They play a dozen variations of mah jong, and with the advent of cards, they have as plentiful a variation of poker as a Louisiana gambler in the bayou.

The spanking new rail station that welcomed us attests to Deng Xiaopeng’s economic reforms. Blagoveshchensk and Heihe are bonded as a Free Trade Zone where commercial and trade traffic between the two cities are unfettered.  If Hanguel and Putunghua were the sole signage in Yanbian, Jilin southeast of here, this area by the Amur favors Russya.  We’ve so far learned to recognize the Cyrillic letters for market, pharmacy and restaurant.  Thank God for a semester inKoine Greek, we are not too lost in the Slavonic alphabet.

But the effect of American imperial mindset had affected us as well since we came to this zone thinking that we would easily and effortlessly spend a day across the river on the Russian side, take a few pictures for our friends at PIC and Pavel at the front desk of the Marianas Resort, and gain a few bragging points with the brethren and sisterhood at NMPASI for having been to Russia.  No dice.  I did not do my homework.  There are no Russian diplomatic offices on this side of the river, and Uncle Sams or Noynoy’s passports do not gain us a yard beyond the border.  A day trip, I was advised, may cost four hours just hustling immigration officers, so a trip was not promoted.  I suppose, now we have more time to enjoy Russia-in-China in Heihe.

We tried going to Vladivostok from Hun Chun in Yanbian last February but we had limited time, nor we aware of the ‘visa’ hustle, and Suifenhue northwest of the Russian port city is also a crossing border town but that is another 24-hour train ride via Harbin, so at the moment, we are considering a trip to Qiqihar (pronounced Chichihar, so Pinoys may refrain from giggling), or Allah be Merciful, Manzhouli of Neimongol (Inner Mongolia) where we might learn to face Mecca five times a day.  Rail cost is cheap; time-consuming, yes, but we are tourists, and if we did not have time, we should not be here!

Besides, we discovered Heihe’s Zhong Yang Shang Ye Jie, a shopping promenade for both the Russian and Chinese nouveau riche as well as unwary foreigners, not unlike Wangfujing in Beijing, Nanjing Road in Shanghai, and Harbin’s Moscow of the East Zhong Yang Shang Ye. Heihe also has a Russya street where all items are allegedly from across the Amur river.

On the sleeper train from Harbin, we were billeted with a couple of Jilin businessman who had very limited English but appreciated the fact that I kept notes on an Apple Macbook.  It appears that Eve’s bitten fruit is a status symbol of either the schooled (not necessarily knowledgeable), or the well to do, so we gained a few notches on the social status scale.  Anyway, after I found out that I could not join the Blagoveshchensk day trip, I decided to explore Heihe’s offerings, and I ran into them on Russya street.

On their query, I revealed that the chocolates all looked like they were produced by Cadbury, and that the Russian beers were similar to the ones I would find in a supermarket in Milwaukee. They laughed.  Not unlike the rest of world that comes to China to produce what passes for a native product in their own local, the offerings on Russya street are China made with Russian labels claiming varied countries of origin.

Jia is the term used for ‘fake’, or ‘inauthentic’, and the businessmen used the term to label everything in Russya street.  Sure enough, when I picked up a can of Kenya Koffee, the ingredients may have come from the slopes of Kilimanjaro, but the manufacturing was definitely Zhongguo.  Contemporary marketing based on fakery has reached this frontier town of Manchuria.

Thanksgiving Day in Heibe is non-existent but then, thanksgiving in Saipan that I am missing is just as much an exercise of inauthenticity as the chocolate bunnies and colored eggs liberally scattered in many commercial places, hardly representing the real spirit of thanksgiving of the soul.

We may be cynical about the economic ethos of our time, but we are sure grateful to be alive, from any nook and cranny of this planet.   
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. (Melodie Beattie).  
L’achaim!

-----Original Message-----
From: Lynda Cock <llc860 at triad.rr.com>
To: 'Order Ecumenical Community' <oe at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Wed, Nov 24, 2010 1:43 am
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life: HappyThanksgiving

Paula's Jawale Thanksgiving story reminds me of our Indonesia story when Doris (Rettig) Conway and I worked so hard so hard to have a traditional Thanksgiving feast.  We shopped at the US Commissary for turkey, dressing, and pumpkin pie ingredients.  
We also had green beans with mushroom soup and fried onion topping and cranberry sauce.  Shortly after the food was on the plates, a couple of the young men left the table and returned with the red hot sauce and some left over rice to give our "bland" meal a little zip.  We were a bit crest-fallen, but it left more for us to feast on the next day.  

Lynda 

From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Paula Philbrook
Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2010 8:50 AM
To: OE DIALOGUE
Subject: [Oe List ...] Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life: HappyThanksgiving

Thank you Sandra.

I have always love the celebration of Thanksgiving!  From waking at 4 am to start 10 birds in the first floor kitchen at 4750 to a late night celebration in Jawale with Dennis and Amy Jennings.  (We had a roll and a slice of canned ham and we sang "Now thank we all our God" with great gusto")  

This past Saturday, I sat with Hannah (17), Leah (15), Lela (25) and Marge (82).  We were planning Thanksgiving over breakfast.

Eight years ago we began having our feast on Friday.  It gave me an extra day to prepare and allowed us to invite people to join us who could not attend on Thursday.  So we called it Alternative Thanksgiving.  This year, they made an invitation only facebook event to invite everyone.  

The menu-Abundance without going over board- Our image a tablespoon of everything.  
The space-do we have enough chairs-where can we set up the appetizers?
The decor-who will do the center piece and iron the gold napkins?
The dialogue-our tradition has been to begin with each person sharing a thanksgving from the past year and the Mayflower Compact with ORID.  As we planned the discussion we decided to ask  "If you were boarding a boat today: Who would you want to have in your boat? What would you be leaving behind or moving away from?  Where would you be headed or moving toward? 

I have been living with this quote: 
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. Melody Beattie
Let gratitude unlock life's fullness for you this year.
Paula

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