Foreigners feasting on festive delights(4)

　　It's more for adults than children

I participated in China Central Television's 1999 Spring Festival gala in a crosstalk (a form of humorous dialogue) show with Mark Henry Rowswell - who's known in China as Dashan ("Big Mountain") - and other expats, including some from the former Yugoslavia and some from Africa. At the time, we were all students of Ding Baoquan, a crosstalk master.

It was the first and busiest New Year I have spent in China. I performed on the stage and my wife and our 2-year-old daughter sat in front of the TV watching the show.

Every act had to rehearse and perform run-throughs. Every time we did a run-through we changed the script by adding something. We rehearsed for weeks and weeks; the process took two months in total.

It was like learning a new story every time. During the final two weeks, we had to stay all day, just rehearsing. The original script was 15 minutes long, but in the end it was cut down to just four minutes. It was tiring. Everyone was paid the same: 1,000 yuan ($165), no matter how famous you were.

When we finished the show and walked out on the street, it was interesting to realize that the program had been seen by 800 million people all over China. I received many phone calls, including a strange one from a good friend of mine. "You were the least funny in the show," he said, jokingly. However, I thought he was very frank about it.

Most of the time I spend Spring Festival with my wife and her family in Huaishui, Hebei province. We used to take a long-distance bus to her hometown, but now family members pick us for the two-hour car ride. During the holidays we are always overloaded with food and sometimes there is just too much. We have a lot of relatives in Hebei, but there's no shower and the heating system is poor. It's cold and I guess I just liven up with the energy provided by the food.

When I first arrived in China in the 1980s, there were few raw or fresh vegetables during the northern Chinese winter; all the vegetables were cooked. Then, as living standards improved, people began to eat a greater variety of food, even though everything was oily. However, in the past five to 10 years, I've noticed that things have started to change and people eat far more healthily now.

Chinese Lunar New Year is more about adults than children. My daughter used to prefer Christmas because it's much more child-oriented, with lots of candies and gifts - it's more fun and enjoyable. In China, people give each other hongbao (red envelopes containing money) as gifts and that doesn't mean as much to kids.