Bricks has completed its first year, with your support.As we look forward to 2009, it is good to look back and say, on behalf of those you helped,
THANK YOU for helping to build us build a Great Wall of Charity in China, Brick by Brick.
Bricks has completed its first year, with your support.As we look forward to 2009, it is good to look back and say, on behalf of those you helped,
THANK YOU for helping to build us build, in 2008, a Great Wall of Charity in China, Brick by Brick.
Shijiazhuang, a city I often visit, is now liberally painted with “chai’s”, a character with which I am familiar with from earlier days in Beijing. It means “for demolition” and various buildings are already in the process of being knocked down. Unlike in Beijing, where important historical cityscapes were sacrificed to modernity, in provincial Shijiazhuang only rows of nondescript buildings are disappearing under the jack hammer. The pattern is familiar from my Beijing experience. As a business closes, everything that one could imagine being reused is stripped by hand and what is left for the demolition team is already a naked shell. Since the closures are not coordinated, a line of denuded shops will be interrupted, incongruously, by a still functioning haberdasher or noodle seller working away among the ruins. When the demolition teams who follow on have finished their work, the brick salvagers arrive and cart off the poor quality bricks to be reused elsewhere. The economics of this seems to make little sense, but it clearly is of some profit to someone or the rubble would simply be transported to landfill. I am sure that, if compared with the price of a new brick, the difference would seem trivial to even the thriftiest of westerners. It is a measure of the topsy turvy nature of this economy that a person can eke out what one might call a livelihood from this work and that there is a value for salvaged second hand bricks. Continue Reading »
The pity is that this growing irritation with Xmas distractions me from the Advent season that is unfolding around me…. It reminds us that before we sing “Gloria” for His Birth, we need quietly to pray “Maranatha” (Come) for his return among us.
This year I find myself irritated by the completely sanitized Christmas Holiday that has been imported here, whereas in previous years, I was merely amused by it. Since the end of November, the tree tops (artificial) have been glistening and children have been listening to sleigh bells, if not in the snow, then in the shopping malls (snow being a minor part of the Beijing Winter). The decorations will stay up until after the Chinese New Year Holiday where the incongruity of red lettered “Merry Christmas” signs in January will be lost on a population who does not understand English anyway. Shops have stars, and snow scenes, the most saccharin of carols and the inevitable Santa Claus, with only the occasional, forlorn angel, bereft of context, failing miserably to announce the miraculous Birth of the God-Man in a stable in Bethlehem. I found a rather dowdy but very large “Christmas” display with an untraditional, slim Santa as its center piece (I think he was a mannequin in a former life) particularly depressing for some reason.
For 50 years I have listened to the moan that Christ is been drained out of Christmas. I understand the concern but even the most vestigial of Christians in western countries retains some sense of the connection between the tinsel and the manger. In China that vestige has been lost even before it was found. Instead we are left with shop assistants in red bobble hats and dreadful Christmas muzak everywhere because of some association foreigners make between a jolly guy with a beard and a good time. Despite myself, I have joined the ‘put Christ into Christmas’ campaigners. Continue Reading »
A young woman is spending a year in China and discovers a country that a lot of Westerners (and yes, even expatriates living in China’s mega cities) often don’t get to see and appreciate.
In circumstances which bordered on the bizarre, I encountered what hitherto I would have too easily dismissed as the rabid end of the Chinese Church support groups. These organizations are usually anti-communist, have a particular vision of Church and are not in touch with the totality of the situation here. “Till now, I had known the personalities by reputation only, and since my own circle was broadly out of sympathy with their agenda, it was easy to bemoan their inflexibility, and wish them to the sidelines of the encounter with China.
Mary and Joseph (not their real names) were active in the Chinese “Catholic Action” of the late ‘40s in China. Young, articulate and committed, they helped organize the Church in the early days of communist rule. Such ‘anti-social’ behavior did not go unnoticed and they were assigned to prison and labor camps for 8 and 13 years respectively. In the latter years of their incarceration they were able to meet and decided, despite earlier intentions to religious life, to marry. Sometime after their release, they were able to leave China and settled in the US where they are active in a very vocal, if very conservative, Catholic organization. Listening to their story, told without rancor, I felt a growing awe of their unassuming heroism. It seemed fantastic, given my romantic, “come rack come rope” vision of martyrs, that two Confessors of the Faith should be masquerading as a retired couple in Stamford, Connecticut. Continue Reading »
