The firewood in the living
room makes cracking sound. I look at the fire: it’s yellow and slightly red. I further
look into the fire near the burning wood area: it’s blue, slightly purple. I also
prepare the fire in the sauna room. It’s getting so hot inside that I come to stand
in the backyard. The air is cold and clear. I can hear the sound from far away.
I close my eyes and I feel so content. What a beautiful and tranquil winter in
my life!
I think of my parent’s
house in another village on this planet. Fire there is only used to cook. We
burn the dry hay not the firewood. Later on, we started to use gas (stove) and briquettes
(stove). Winter there is wet and cold, which is a different kind of cold compared
with Finland. We have to wear more inside than outside, thanks to the warmth of
the sun. It’s really a pity that we have never thought of build sauna. Nevertheless,
we don’t even have heating system inside the house. We had to prepare hot water
in the glass bottle and put it under the quilt so as to warm the bed. The glass
bottles were usually cleaned transfusion bottles, hence they were leakproof. Nowadays,
there are hot-water bags on the market. The first time when I was visiting
Finnish school in Oulu, I was filled with jealousness. Students take off their
jacket and shoes and leave them in the corridor. They don’t need to warm their
hands with their breath or rub their hands together to generate warmth. I
thought of my classmates who were suffered from chilblain. They probably will
feel more jealous if they visit Finland.
Lately I get more opportunities
to look at students here in different circumstances other than classrooms: the Independence
Day celebration, the Christmas celebration, the regular performance of music
academy etc. More than once, I cried over their talent. It’s not simply jealous
but an eye-opening astonishment that human development can be on such different
levels. Kalajoki is just a town. If I take a stroll from the town hall to
Havula, I feel like going back to my hometown. But I know they are enormously different.
The local community here provides all kinds of activities and services for
people of different ages. People have the freedom to choose what to do. This
benefit is especially evident to youngsters.
Whereas, in my hometown,
little is provided for its residents. Yle[1] lately
reported one article about China, in which it mentioned that China’s villages
have little to do with children. According to researchers, this is one of the
reasons why many people are hooked to the phone. Though I would say that: China’s
villages have little to do with residents’ life but survival. The article continues:
a middle class child in Beijing can have more hobbies than those who live in the
villages. The cities of China are full of shopping malls which have activities
for children: play schools, places to do handcrafts, toy heavens, pink colored
wonderlands, that the Finnish kids cannot even dream of. Villages have barely
nothing but fields and silent roads. In the villages, there are a few kiosks,
police station and wrinkled grandmas. No wonder kids there are so excited about
looking at screens. –Things has changed dramatically in the past few years, the
fact that there is a huge gap between Chinese village and city has never been
changed but intensified. It explains why I don’t really have hobbies.
Looking back, it has
been 4 months since I took my first walk from where I live to Havula. I decided
to take another walk before I travel back to China. Not many people on the road
but many cars parked outside of K-supermarket, I guess S-market, HalpaHalli as
well. People are preparing for Christmas, like what we do for Chinese New Year.
Kalajoki, the river, has frozen with a layer of snow on top of it. A man is
fishing on the ice. I stop and look at him from far away. I can even hear him making
the sound because everything is quiet and still. I take off my gloves to take a
picture. Soon my fingers are numb from the cold so I continue my walk. Not much
changed from summer to winter in Kalajoki except the weather.
I noticed a letter box
with a familiar last name by the roadside. Not many things happened in the past
4 moths, except I have gotten to know more people, mainly my students. Fortunately,
I have also gotten to know them more outside of the classroom. Sometimes I
wonder, why they are so different inside and outside classrooms? I couldn’t
figure it out. But one thing is getting clear to me: they have much more diversified
and versatile life after school. Not like vast majority Chinese students[2],
who are confined to grades and school life, Finnish students are free to
develop as they would like.
[2] A few Chinese students from privileged family background
can choose not to participate the national exams and apply to schools abroad,
for instance US, UK etc.
