The Man in the Red Suit

"What? They don't celebrate Christmas in China?"

"It's not a country with a Christian tradition, Robert," said my wife patiently.

I knew this, of course, in the back of my mind, but it still came as a shock. I had grown up in Los Angeles in the 1950's, not particularly a Christian country either, but one in which we believed fervently in Santa Claus: A jolly old guy who would bring us everything we wanted -- cars, houses, a perfect sun tan, the entire American Dream. It was hard to accept that St. Nick was not a universal figure.

As Christmas approached, I did my best to remain blasů. It was nice to avoid all that shopping madness, I told myself. The stress, the crowded malls, the indigestion of eating too much turkey. Yet Christmas had an irrational hold on me, and as the holiday season approached in Beijing, I found myself feeling unaccountably moody. Sometimes I looked up at the sky and shook my fist. If only it would snow! But Beijing had been bone dry for three months, there was no weather at all to speak of, and none of the wintry coziness I associated with home.

Then about a week before Christmas, just as I was getting pretty glum, I saw the man in the red suit -- Santa Claus himself, complete with a long white beard. He was standing outside the Duncan Donuts on Wangfujing Ave., ringing a bell and waving at everyone in sight. Sure, he was threadbare when you looked closely, and his costume was about two sizes too large -- but that's the way Santa is supposed to be. Within the next few days, I noticed that Christmas had arrived in all the hotels as well, huge decorated trees in such places as the Great Wall Sheraton and the Kunlun, and even a few reindeer and elves and mangers.

It's subtle, Christmas in China -- but it's there. In Beijing, at least, the new generation of young people give Christmas cards and there are parties galore. My boss made my wife and I a present of two nights in a downtown hotel, where we took long baths with actual hot water and watched CNN on TV -- in English, by God! On Christmas Eve we wandered, quite by accident, upon an old Catholic church, St. Joseph's, which had been built by the Jesuits in the late 17th century, and destroyed and rebuilt several times. Usually when I've passed by here, the church has been locked shut and dark as a stone crypt. But tonight, miraculously, the heavy iron gate was open and the sounds of an angelic chorus singing Christmas carols drifted out into the street. We wandered inside and saw crowds of worshippers listening to a service in Chinese. It wasn't a very pretty church, and the music turned out to be coming from a cassette ape from the gift shop next door, but still it felt like Christmas Eve. As we left, we ran into an American woman who had been passing in a taxi and had stopped just as we had -- drawn here by an accidental glimpse of the deeply familiar.

On Christmas day, the big hotels make expensive turkey dinners for foreigners, but there seemed to us something sad about holiday meals in large hotels. So we ate sushi instead at a little Japanese restaurant, and then had too much to drink afterwards at Schiller's, a Western-style bar across from the Kempinski Hotel that was full of foreigners like ourselves eager to make some warmth and cheer in this foreign land.

There's no doubt about it -- Christmas is not one of the high points of the ex-pat life in Asia. It's a time when you feel how truly far away you are, on the opposite side of the globe from family and old friends. Yet to be a traveler on Christmas day is perhaps to get to the heart of the matter; to experience acutely the meaning of this holiday . . . and to be at one with all wanderers who follow distant stars.

Next Week: Shop Until You Drop

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