Life in China 2016: A Picture A Day, November 2 – When we were at the zoo on Monday, they had a display of Chinese paper-cut monkey designs; Remember, this is the year of the monkey in the Chinese zodiac. Chinese paper cutting is a folk art that can be traced back at least 1500 years, and is still very popular today. Paper-cuts are used as decorations and given as gifts for special occasions like weddings, birthdays, etc. During Chinese New Year celebrations, the “Fu” symbol, which I wrote about with the bat post a few days ago, is a really popular decoration. Paper-cuts are usually made from red paper, but there are also ones in many colors. Sometimes they are made by folding the paper and cutting it with scissors to get a repetitive design, and sometimes a pattern is laid flat over one or more pieces of paper and they are cut with s small knife. Paper-cuts can be extremely detailed! In China, you can often see various items decorated in ways to represent paper-cuts. In my picture, the upper left and lower right monkey designs are some from the zoo display, the upper right is a sale display from back in February at the Spring Festival Flower Market, and the lower left is a large paper-cut we have hanging in our picture window. Ours has “Fu” in the center (although it is backwards here because we hung it to be read correctly from outside), and the four characters at the top basically say “Peace and safety in the four seasons.”
Life in China: A Picture A Day, February 25, 2016
A visit to Singapore: Today we visited the Singapore Zoo and the River Safari. In the Yangtze River exhibit, there was a Chinese Giant Salamander. Can you find it in the picture? It looks just like one of the rocks! These are the largest living amphibians today: They can grow up to over 5 feet long and weigh well over 100lbs. They supposedly make a noise like a crying baby, so in Chinese, they are called “wawa yu” or “baby fish.” Unfortunately, they are critically endangered because they are considered a luxury food item by the wealthy Chinese. There are many salamander farms, but the ones in the wild also continue to disappear.
