The power’s out, so our private room is lit by a collection of tall candles, held in place by the beer bottles we’ve already emptied. The feast isn’t traditional Christmas Eve fare, but it’s certainly one of the best meals we’ve had in awhile. Fish, deer, noodles of questionable origin—“It’s made from a plant,” my friend Daisy translates imprecisely—vegetables, cold and hot.
A small Christmas miracle, our set menu includes shrimp and some meat supposedly gleaned from a cow—delicacies that stand in for my mom’s “surf and turf” Christmas Eve spread. A bigger Christmas miracle, there’s a downpour of snow blanketing the streets, which is beautiful for the ten minutes before it gets covered in perpetual pollution dust. Perhaps not miraculous, but simply amazing: Some guy is moonwalking in the street when we rush to the window to watch the snow fall.
Sara, another teacher from Drake, celebrates her birthday on December 24, and her university’s kitchen made her a fantastically huge cake to share with eleven people. As we ate, I played Christmas carols from my cell phone. The students we invited were wide-eyed with entertainment (or fear?) as we bounded cheerfully through “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow!” and turned momentarily somber when “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” came on.
I thought by now I’d seen all of Chengde’s seedy corners—there aren’t many corners at all, and few of them are exceptionally seedy—but Sara’s desire to dance lead us to the “KoKo Love,” Chengde’s only dance club. The building looks like an old bank or something similarly stately. I fell walking up the fake-marble staircase. Twice. Once when we unknowingly tried to go up without a ticket, and again after we purchased them. So, let that stand in for the inevitable slipping on the icy ramp that would have happened at St. John’s in Houghton on Christmas Eve. That’s probably the last parallel I can make between this experience and the other twenty-two Christmas Eves in my life.
The marquis behind the DJ flashed “Merry Christmas!” every few moments, as slightly chubby Chinese men threw their weight back and forth on the dance floor. A floor which, like many things around here, felt like it was about to snap and drop us into a sweaty, dusty pile on the first floor. Thankfully the men were less forward than American guys at a bar—no groping, grinding, etc—they just stood nearby and rocked their chubby bodies while smiling creepily at us. “These Chinese guys, they’re really just too much sometimes. Really, honestly, Too Much,” was Richard’s expert analysis of the situation. He, as the only foreign guy with four foreign ladies, may have made this comment after some gangster tried to buy the four of us from him. But I can’t be sure.
Sometime shortly before midnight, I covertly stole a basket of popcorn from a nearby table where a couple was making out. Cate promptly spilled the basket all over the floor, and Becky followed it up by accidentally dashing her half-full bottle of beer on top of it. Yes, at the stroke of midnight Christmas day, I was dancing in a pile of soggy popcorn, beer and broken glass while Lady Gaga was remixed China-style in a smoky club. Happy Birthday, Jesus.
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