I recently wrote about last Christmas, but this is about the Christmas before that which sadly, couldn’t have been more different.
I’ll go into gorier detail in a minute, but for now I’ve give you a preview in the form of a rhyme:
Shellfish, and liquor, and vomit! Oh my!
That was the extent of my Christmas in Shanghai
Christmas Observance in China
Although the Chinese are eager to put up decorations, go shopping crazy, learn about Christmas customs and traditions, Christmas is not officially observed in China. Most companies that employ Westerners, including English schools in China, close to let their employees have Christmas day off.
EF was white enough to close early on Christmas Eve, too, so I left the office at about 5 p.m. instead of my usual 9. I’d been invited to a Christmas Eve dinner with Brandon, Dave, Debbie, Laura and Mark, the five people who’d started at EF with me six weeks earlier, so my first priority after leaving work was purchasing my Secret Santa gift for dinner.
We’d decided on “Down Home Kitchen,” a nice-ish Shanghainese restaurant located in the “New Factories” retail and restaurant complex in the Jing’an district. Par for the course in China, we ordered about a half-dozen main dishes to share, which included Chinese favorites like gong bao ji ding (Kung Pao Chicken) and sautéed xi lan hua or broccoli, as well as more out of the ordinary selections, my favorite being the spicy stir-fried cuttlefish.
We followed up dinner with an evening of drinking at Debbie’s place, but ended the festivities early so that we’d all be able to wake up the next morning and head over to Laura’s for a delicious catered Western meal with all the fixin’s. I could positively taste it as I laid me down to sleep.
Shanghai on Christmas Day
I woke up Christmas morning to Dave knocking on my door. Wake the F up! he texted. We’re going to be late to Laura’s. Somehow, I’d managed to sleep until almost 10, which is extremely late for me. I invited Dave inside and began to get ready, but had difficulty moving fast.
“Man,” I said, “I didn’t think we drank that much last night — I can hardly get dressed.”
“You just need to eat something,” he said. “And drink some water.”
I threw on my yellow neon pants from the night before, a button-up shirt and a jacket, then grabbed a water bottle from my fridge. “OK, let’s head out.”
Judging solely by the Shanghai streets that morning, you’d never have known it was Christmas, minus the superficial decorations the Chinese put up for their own entertainment. We took the Line 1 Metro up to People’s Square and were walking to Line 2, where we needed to transfer to get to Laura’s apartment in Shanghai’s Zhabei district, when I realized something was seriously wrong.
“Dave.” I placed my hand on his shoulder as we neared the bottom of the escalator. At almost the exact moment I stepped off, I bent over and opened my mouth wide. A clear liquid approximately the color of the aforementioned neon yellow pants poured out, to the horror of most of the local people around me. I stood there, hunched over for a minute, until a Shanghai Metro staff member with a sanitation bucket urged me to move out of the way.
I looked at Dave once we were inside the moving metro car. “I don’t think this is a hangover.”
“You’re fine,” he urged. “We’ll just get you some bread to eat at the next Lawson we see. You need to have some carbs.”
Western Christmas Food in China
Unfortunately for me, the bread I got from Lawson would meet the same fate as everything I’d consumed the night before, albeit in Laura’s toilet instead of on the shiny floors of the Shanghai underground. As it would turn out, I couldn’t hold anything down, not even water.
Laura danged a piece of white turkey meat in front of my face. “Are you sure you can’t have just one bite?” She dug into the mashed potatoes and creamed corn on her plate as I studied the clean-looking piece of meat. This is bland, I thought. But filling. Maybe the reason I couldn’t hold down water is that there’s no bulk to it?
Wrong! Within minutes of swallowing the luscious breast, tasty as it was, I was on the floor hugging the toilet again. How ironic, I thought, that my decision to eat Chinese food — at a nice restaurant, no less! — the night before Christmas resulted in my not being able to enjoy the Western Christmas meal I’ve been dreaming of the whole time I’ve been here.
I spent most of the afternoon wallowing in pain and misery on the couch as the rest of the gang chowed down on the meal I wanted desperately to eat. After a few hours and the disappearance of my hunger entirely, I was sure that what I had was food poisoning and that it had nothing to do with having drunk alcohol the night before.
Worse still, the feeling of server sickness persisted through to the end of the day’s festivities, to such an extent that Laura literally had to walk me down to street level to get a cab — I couldn’t bear to go back in the metro. The chilly late December air felt even colder thanks to my fever, although I was still feeling far too nauseous to be bothered with shakes and shivers.
Sick on Christmas in Shanghai
About 20 minutes after getting into the taxi, the driver arrived in front of my building, apparently oblivious to me. Eventually he got out of the car and opened my door for me, at which point I fell out onto the pavement and starved vomiting, having held it in for the duration of the journey.
I told him, in my best broken Chinese, to take the cab fare from my pocket, plus a small tip. I usually didn’t tip cab drivers in China, but I become much more generous the more in need of someone’s services I am. He sped off and luckily, no other car drove over me in the minute or so I spent writhing around in my own vomit.
I spent most of the rest of the night curled up in a ball under the hot water of a running shower, my apartment far too cold and drafty for me — most buildings in Shanghai aren’t equipped with central heat, in case you didn’t know. Whenever the hot water ran out I would run to my bed and curl up in my Tibetan wool blanket, occasionally calling my mother over Skype to update her on my progress.
I was supposed to have gone to a party with my immediate co-workers after Laura’s party, but obviously wouldn’t make it. Several of them, plus a couple students, called intermittently to check up on me and ask if I needed medicine. I politely declined each time, knowing full well that food poisoning is just something that has to run its course.
Indeed, although I was initially upset by the fact that my first (and thus far only) Christmas in China was spent sick, hungry and mostly alone, it was a humbling and even cleansing experience. Looking back, I was almost say it was my body’s way of telling me “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
Wherever you spend Christmas this year, I wish you an extremely happy (and not sick!) one.
Robert Schrader is a travel writer and photographer who’s been roaming the world independently since 2005, writing for publications such as “CNNGo” and “Shanghaiist” along the way. His blog, Leave Your Daily Hell, provides a mix of travel advice, destination guides and personal essays covering the more esoteric aspects of life as a traveler.
