Halloween. Ironically, one of the few American commercial holidays not exported to Shanghai. In fact, not only is Halloween not celebrated in China, but many people haven’t even heard of it. The concept of dressing up in silly costumes and begging one’s neighbors for candy is completely foreign.
Our visiting faculty has three small children whom we love and adore. It was too much to know that they would miss out on this time-honored tradition. Therefore, we took it upon ourselves to make Halloween come to life in Shanghai. We set out to recreate the excitement of Halloween night for the three youngsters.
Everyone pitched in to make cookies, decorate the sunshine room and organize games. We even invited some of the neighborhood kids to join in the fun. One of them, Charlene, has come to several events at the Jia. Her mom, Helen, runs one of the local restaurants where we eat lunch. They’re the nicest family. Helen is always fussing over us and helping us with our Chinese. She’s like the Jia mom. It was wonderful to share Halloween with Charlene. Even though it was difficult to communicate, she made sure to show us she was having a good time.
The party started with trick-or-treating for the kids. They went room to room around the Jia, begging for candy and then raced down the street to some of the local businesses Helen had recruited to help. Then we all convened in the sunshine room for more sweets and pumpkin carving.
The pumpkins turned out to be a bit of an issue though. First, it was insanely difficult to find pumpkins. Our RAs and the party-planning committee had to scour the city just to find a few small pumpkins. When they arrived, we immediately noticed they were oddly colored and extremely hard. Then when we finally tried to carve them, we found that they were far too solid to cut into. Eventually it was determined that it would make far more sense to smash the pumpkins and then carve them, so a few students went up to the roof and had a contest throwing them down three stories in to the courtyard. The goal was to hit a target drawn on a large piece of cardboard. In the end, there was an enormous mess of pumpkin and no winner. All the same, it was a fun Halloween. I think everyone enjoyed themselves and it was wonderful to have created a piece of home here in Shanghai! Well that’s all for now. More from Shanghai soon! Zai Jian Peng you men!
