Author: Ryan

One New Years Eve, while the villagers were preparing to once again escape from the village, an old beggar came into the village to ask for food. An elderly woman quickly gave him a bowl of rice and warned him that the monster was on its way, and he too should leave the village soon. The old beggar said, “If you let me stay in your house for one night, I have a plan to scare the monster away.” The woman was skeptical, but she was in a hurry to leave, so she gave him the permission to stay.

When I was growing up in Guangzhou in the 1990s, Christmas was only a foreign holiday. There weren’t decorations visible in the streets, except for lights on a few large hotels. The Pearl River runs through the heart of the city and on the north side of the river sat the American consulate. The city’s most famous hotel and the one most popular for foreign visitors was the White Swan Hotel, located adjacent to the American consulate. The White Swan Hotel always put the city’s most elaborate Christmas lights on the side of its building, which could be seen from miles away across the river. When I think of Christmas now, I still think of those Christmas lights I saw when crossing the Pearl River as a child. Now, more than ten years later, the popularity of Christmas has spread across China. This year, many of my Chinese elementary school friends posted pictures online of decorating trees in their offices. Christmas has not become an official government holiday in mainland China, but it has entered the cultural and commercial mainstream of Chinese society.