The last time I woke up to a landscape suddenly white was 16 years ago, in February, I think. I was in 2nd grade. I remember my grandmother, who grew up in Minnesota, looking out the window in disgust. “We moved to California to get away from snow,” she said.

This time, I find myself less eager than back then to rush out into the sudden winter. Maybe the past month of cold has made me less welcoming. Maybe I’m 25 and not 9.

I wanted to see it, though. On my way out I passed a Russian in his underwear. I trudged down the concrete stairs, zipped up my jacket with gloved hands, tucked my scarf under my sweatshirt and pulled my beanie down over my ears. I stopped at the window. The snow is still fascinating when it’s outside.

“Where are you going?” the Russian asked in the usual, unfriendly way. I ignored him.

“Where are you going?” he asked again, more forcefully.

“Out,” I said, like I always do, and walked down the remaining stairs.

Except this time there is snow on the ground and my footsteps would show exactly where I was going. I found myself thinking about an LA Times story I read my students this week about Somali refugees preparing to seek asylum in America:

Staring at pictures of snow-covered roofs and hearing stories about waking up to find a frontyard covered in white, the Somalis (who’d rarely felt temperatures below 60 degrees) peppered the instructor with questions.

“How do I save my family from this … snow?” asked Hassan Mohammed Abrone, 41, a father of two who was already trying to embrace the American lifestyle by wearing a Statue of Liberty baseball cap and a pair of secondhand Nike Airs.

After hearing a description of coats, scarves, gloves and long underwear, another student, Lelya Yussuf, 23, asked: “How can we walk while wearing all that? Isn’t it too heavy?” In an effort to explain snow to people who have never seen it, the instructor asked students to imagine how it would feel to live inside a refrigerator. But the analogy fell flat for some, because they’d never heard of such an appliance.

“How do I save my family from this…snow?” I’ve been asking myself that question all day. Except that most of my family is back in California, where it’s about 62. They need no saving from the snow.

I trekked over to Dalian University of Technology, where I’d heard someone sells or gives away donated American textbooks from a San Francisco non-profit. I didn’t find it. But I did find Chairman Mao, standing resolutely in the cold, showing unwavering revolutionary zeal as the snow piled up on him. Must be good to be made of stone.

There is something gratifying, though, about finally getting real snow, not just the occasional flakes that don’t stick to the ground but always find a way between my scarf and hat to sting my face. This is the stuff you make snowmen out of, that crunches under my hiking boots, that doesn’t feel quite as cold as the wind I’m sure will come back. It feels like the genuine winter I expected when I signed up for a year in Northern China.

*More photos are posted on my Flickr page.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 16th, 2006 at 12:24 am and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.