Chinese culture considers Bamboo lucky because Bamboo is the Chinese symbol for strength.
Bamboo demonstrates strength by growing fast and adapting to new environments. Because of this, many in China see Bamboo as a symbol of luck, which explains why Bamboo is often given as a gift.
Bamboo Flute Music & Beautiful China
In fact, Bamboo is the most popular plant in China. Most Chinese, even in high-rise apartments, have Bamboo plants around in small pots.
Bamboo represents the spirit of summer, simplicity and humility, and respect for elders among other things.
Painting Bamboo goes back centuries. Musical instruments have been made of Bamboo.
China’s first cannons were made of Bamboo.
Painting Chinese Bamboo
My wife has planted Bamboo in the yards of every house we’ve lived in. When my father-in-law visits from China, he has his picture taken in front of the healthiest, tallest stand of Bamboo in the yard.
In Feng Shui, Bamboo is a symbol of strength, fortitude, and rapid growth. When given as a gift, Lucky Bamboo is said to be at its luckiest.
Chinese tradition also gives meaning to the number of stalks given as a gift. Two stalks is a symbol for love, three or six represent happiness while five or seven impart health. The more stalks there are, the more luck there will be.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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If there ever was an expat author in the Middle Kingdom whose enthusiasm and love of life was as contagious as Cecilie Gamst Berg’s, then that person has yet to be published.
Part travelogue of a directionless backpacker, part bedtime stories of a frisky European babe who enjoys seducing young Chinese guys “out of the festering prison of virginity,”
Blonde Lotus is in fact one in the same person. Gamst Berg, via her alter-ego protagonist Kat Glasø, accidentally arrives in late-1980’s China (“all I wanted was to be on the train; I had no interest in the journey’s destination, Beijing”), back when the mighty bicycle was still king of Peking and foreign tourists were a rare sighting.
Expecting a people with “long, billowing sleeves, reciting poetry and plucking at stringed instruments,” what Kat finds in New China instead are street corners populated with shady money changers and young hipsters whose knowledge of English is limited to the words ‘Okay-la’ and ‘Sex!’ Lulled by their charming incessancy, Kat shrugs her shoulders and good-naturedly gives it to them – the money AND the sex. “How could so many men find the women of a race attractive, and so few women find the men the same,” she ponders postcoitally over a shared Zhongnanhai cigarette.
Queen gweipo (devil woman in Cantonese) Gamst Berg is an unpretentious, fun-loving writer with nothing to prove. She’s not out to save China as so many a self-righteous foreigner here are (“I hope this country never modernizes” Kat admits in one of her many blunt moments of sincerity), she’s not trying to force feed them Faulkner (“I loved books and he never read one”), nor is she out to land a career in journalism like the rest of us.
No, the author is clearly just looking to have a good time (“We were young, stoned and in China”), and maybe learn some Putonghua while doing it, and therefore spares us the sappy, sympathetic observations and “deep understanding” of life in China that makes most Laowai Literature such a torture to read.
Conversely, nor is Gamst Berg out to tear Communism apart, vilify Chinese people or point and laugh at the “strangeness” of their culture, a common last-resort for some western travel writers (whom I refrain from naming as a professional courtesy) who don’t want to admit that they have learned nothing about the Chinese during their stay here.
Indeed, while her fellow expats spend their time in China sitting around at bars “shouting out orders in English, and when they weren’t understood, complained loudly to each other about how stupid the Chinese were,” rather than join in, Kat moves tables, literally and figuratively, to the Chinese side of the bar.
Instead of whining about China’s infamously filthy public toilets, Kat hangs out in them (smoking dope), then laughs when there’s a line of squeaming girls waiting to use the stall.
Rather than bitch about the People’s Republic’s chaotic queues at its railway stations, she jumps right in, elbows swinging, with the rest of the seething proletariat.
Our Blonde Lotus ain’t no saint, and she would laugh in your face if you dared suggest it. “I wanted to experience everything and sleep with everybody…” confesses, nay, asserts the Norwegian-born Kat Glasø – and then proceeds to actually do so, from coal-and-petrol-scented industrial North China all the way down to the steamy islands of Hong Kong, her final destination.
Throughout her candid memoir, the author employs an uproarious combination of reluctant intellectualism (“learning Chinese was better than being in love because there was no danger of waking next to the Chinese language wanting to kick the f*cker out of bed”) and ribald hedonism (“I felt something push into me, shudder and expire. Was it an asparagus?”) that is sure to win Gamst Berg as many fans as frighten them away.
If Blonde Lotus is a window into China, then that window has been fogged with the sultry breathe of its occupants. If it is a work of reportage; then the author was too distracted by eating, drinking, smoking and playing cards with the peasantry to be concerned about making the front page. And that nonchalance, that self-depreciating humor, is exactly this novel’s charm.
Blonde Lotus is a refreshingly unserious memoir of an infectiously upbeat young woman (this reviewer’s favorite line in the whole book: “Ha ha, life was perfect and made for me!”) who, lost in China and unsure of what she wants to do with said life – as many of our kind are – inadvertently ends up making a new, better one for herself.
In the U.S., Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner once said, “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer difficult questions: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?” Source: Theocracy Watch
The answer to Justice O’Conner’s question is the reason why China’s government keeps such a close watch on religions and decides which ones may practice there.
In the past, Roman Catholic Popes told the kings of Europe what to do, which led to the persecution and eradication of the Cathars.
There are more examples of religious corruption such as the Inquisition, the Crusades to the Middle East, China’s Taiping Rebellion, and the wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe.
What I have listed in the previous paragraph is a brief example. The list is long. For thousands of years, religions have waged wars on each other and on those who do not join.
Then consider how many major religions there are. Why does it have to be so complicated? After all, there is only one God.
As it is, “China is a country with a great diversity of religious beliefs. The main religions are Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism… According to incomplete statistics, there are over 100 million followers of various religious faiths, more than 85,000 sites for religious activities, some 300,000 clergy and over 3,000 religious organizations throughout China. In addition, there are 74 religious schools and colleges run by religious organizations for training clerical personnel.” Source: Chinese Culture
If you visit the previous link, you will discover that China does allow people to worship God and join religions.
However, China reserves the right to decide which religions and cults may be destructive and keeps these groups out of China such as the Falun Gong cult.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
“I think it’s worth remembering that China has parties other than the Chinese Communist Party (e.g. the CPWDP), although (of course) this does not make China a ‘multi-party state’ in the sense of the term. But observing how the CCP interacts with these other groupings can be revealing.” Source of comment from: Sino-Gist
My Response, There is also the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF). I wrote about that at Women’s Rights in China.
Then there is the China Youth League and other representatives from various democratic parties, which must be referring to the CPWDP, and patriots and democrats without party affiliation; (c) representatives of people’s organizations; (d) representatives of the People’s Liberation Army; and (e) representatives of minority ethnic groups with a population of over 1 million each. Source: China.org
Another segment of the population where the Party finds new members, are freshly minted millionaires and billionaires of China’s successful capitalists.
Many of these representatives may not belong to the Communist Party or have voting rights, but they do have a voice.
Just as most Western corporate business is conducted on a golf course, in China these nonvoting members express themselves at meals and banquets in conversation with voting members.
These non-voting members are sort of like lower management in a corporation who take advantage to express their opinions and suggestions, which may be heeded by a voting member of the party.
Non-party members, who are of a like mind, will be noticed and possibly asked to join the party, which is an invitation few in China would reject since it means joining the ruling Party of more than 70 million.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Music in China is traditionally associated with ritual observances and government affairs.
In 1999, Chinese archeologists unearthed what is believed to be the oldest know playable instrument – a seven-holed flute fashioned 9,000 years ago from the hollow wing bone of a large bird.
To establish the age, a U.S. chemist at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory analyzed data from carbon-14 dating done in China on materials taken from the site.
The 9,000-year-old flutes were “exquisitely-crafted” from the wing bone of a red-crowned crane.
Music from the Book of Songs
In the Book of Songs, an ancient collection of Chinese poetry from the 6th century BC, the three-hole Yue is the most frequently mentioned wind instrument.
By the Tang Dynasty, the Yue had all but vanished. Source: China Daily
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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