Hand Turkeys

Thanksgiving can be one of the loneliest times in China for an expat. Your friends and family back home are eating Turkey and drinking too much wine. How do you duplicate that here?

Last year, when I was teaching English to college students in Changzhou, a city just and hour outside of Shanghai, me and the other five American teachers had a big Thanksgiving feast with a lot of our Chinese friends where we even managed to whip up apple pie and stuffing.

But in rural Xinjiang, I’m probably the only American in hundreds of miles, so a feast of any kind was out of the question. I thought I’d celebrate by teaching my classes about Thanksgiving. It’s tough, though, when the only the only turkey the students know is the country and their English skills are very basic.

I started by telling them the old stories about cooperation between the Native Americans and the early settlers, though I also felt compelled to note that things didn't go so well between them later. I talked a little bit about the kinds of food people eat during the family feats, but I couldn’t simply name the food. I had to describe the ingredients and how they are made. My students eat plenty of potatoes but none of them mash theirs, and butter is something only used by the ethnic minorities It seemed like a copout to just say something tastes like chicken. Maybe if Columbus had actually made it to Asia Thanksgiving would involve a lot more rice.

But I knew that this wouldn't really capture the spirit of Thanksgiving. I decided that even though my students are college sophomores I’d do what my grandmother used to do with her kindergarten class. I had them make hand turkeys.

I bought colored paper, scissors, glue and crayons from a local store and brought them to class. I told the class that when I was in elementary school we used to cut out paper in the shapes of our hands and then decorate them to look like turkeys.

I made an example of one for my oral English classes but my skill hadn't improved much since elementary school and my turkey was mess. The students, though, got the idea.

Soon everyone was cutting and pasting intricate designs. I don't know what they teach in Chinese elementary school but arts and crafts is probably a priority; all the students knew exactly what they were should be doing. I hadn’t bought extra paper, so they cut scraps to make legs and feathers for their paper turkeys.

Some students made their gobblers very personal. One added a cartoon to the side of the page saying she shouldn't have argued with her father. Another student titled her picture "Love Story" and made two turkeys one bearing the message, "I am a gentleman," while the caption below it read "Dear, give me a chance to take care of you forever!"

Since the students probably don’t know exactly what a turkey looks like—other than it looked vaguely like a hand-- many of the turkey were quite interpretive. A number closely resembled chickens, while others looked like phoenixes or characters from Chinese legends. Some students inverted the colors so that the paper was orange and the turkey white. A few students imagined their turkeys as enormous beasts and drew small people ridding on top of them. One turkey appeared to be on fire and more than a few were glowing.

On Thanksgiving in my home in Washington D.C., we talk about what we’re thankful for. I tried that too. I asked each of the students to say, in English, one thing they were thankful for.

A lot of them named their families and friends. Several said they were thankful for their country. A few, with a mixture of earnestness and brown-nosing, said they were thankful for their teacher. One said she was thankful for the Chinese Communist Party, while another who I think is a Communist Party member said he was thankful for God., Maybe most appropriately for Thanksgiving, one girl was thankful for good food.

In the end I told them they could bring the turkeys back to their parents, a time honored tradition, or I would be happy to keep them. I'm planning on putting them up all over the walls in my apartment. I might not a have a real Thanksgiving turkey, but I think these will do.