![]() The variety of apples popular at Christmas is red, a color that symbolizes prosperity and good luck. Christmas Eve in Mandarin is ping an ye, nomenclature that stems from the popular carol “Silent Night,” which is translated as “peaceful night.” The word for apple in Mandarin is ping guo, and some call it ping an guo, a homophone for “peace fruit.” There are bare-bones versions stenciled with figures of Santa Claus playing the saxophone, and more extravagant ones wrapped in red cellophane with a bow tied on top.Īpples are everywhere: They bejewel gigantic holiday-themed installations at swanky shopping malls.īut why apples? Chinese people have an inclination for auspicious-sounding gifts. Apples are everywhere: They bejewel gigantic holiday-themed installations at swanky shopping malls, are sold from the back of trucks at makeshift night markets, and sit patiently inside vending machines. Over just the past 10 years, apples have emerged as a Chinese Christmas icon: exquisitely wrapped fruit with images of Santa Claus and stenciled “Merry Christmas” greetings in cursive. What we did not eat at that time was apples. ![]() Despite all the formality of decking out the table with freshly cut flowers and using mismatched forks and knives to eat, we kept our Christmas dinner relatively simple, as if these were all cultural props and we were doing our best to mimic what we saw on screen. My dad, the only cook in the family, would whip up a whole Christmas dinner infused with Chinese imagination: Shanghainese borscht, a tomato-based riff on the Slavic classic that no Ukrainian would recognize a fruit salad doused in mayonnaise, bearing an uncanny similarity to ambrosia thinly cut steak in black-pepper sauce topped with a fried egg, a dish that arrived in China via Taiwanese chain steakhouses that sprouted in the late 1990s. I’d begged my parents to set up a plastic tree in our small home. The images of affluence and abundance stuck in my head: the emerald-green Christmas tree with a blinking star crowning its peak, almost touching the ceiling the colored lights twinkling and the swirling tinsel the mountains of presents under the tree, wrapped in decorative paper and cheerful silky bows. Christmas movies were big hits in China so were soap operas with holiday episodes dubbed in Mandarin and Mickey Mouse comic books translated from English. Growing up in a nonreligious household in Nantong, China - a bustling city of nearly 8 million people - I didn’t celebrate Christmas until I immersed myself in the exports of Hollywood.
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