Today, China Daily’s newspaper and website published my winter solstice article titled Discovering the meaning of winter solstice.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
The late afternoon sun of winter warmed us as we bowed before the front door of that little whitewashed house in the mountains of rural Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. There we prayed to the ancestors, whose table before us carried a delicious spread of home-cooked dishes from my mother-in-law’s kitchen. The tempting aromas of chili peppers, garlic and ginger mingled with the faint fragrance of papermade ancestor money burning on the ground. As I stood together with my husband and his relatives, I had this strange feeling of deja vu, as if I had been there before somehow, somewhere in my life.
And in a way, I had.
Before I married into a Chinese family from rural Hangzhou, I had never known anyone in the United States who celebrated the winter solstice as an actual holiday. But once I moved back to China with my husband in 2013, I finally had the opportunity to experience a traditional winter solstice celebration in all its splendor.
To read the full article, you can head on over to China Daily’s website.
Additionally, if you’d like to hear me read the article, there’s an audio version available. Just scan the QR code below:
Congratulations on your article
Thank you Svetlana!
Your name will soon be a household name. Well done!
Thank you, Traveller at heart!
love to read your articles, they are so elegantly written with those humble words conveyed so much warm feelings about life, I felt so close to the life you described in China, in the meantime, I felt so familiar to the words you used as I am living my daily life in the US
You’re a such next door girl bridges the culture between east and west