Caterpillars turn into...

I was walking down the street yesterday with a Chinese friend after dinner and noticed a strange sign. There are signs lit up all over the place advertising a restaurant or some new product and I often take advantage of my company to learn what things around me say and mean (photographing signs is also not beyond me). Usually they're not very interesting, but I often get a new vocabulary word or two. This one looked particularly strange -- it said something about a worm, so I was very curious why a huge yellow sign, posted vertically sprawling five floors, had something to tell me about worms. There were four important characters on the sign -- 'winter worm summer grass.' I still didn't get it once these were identified, so my friend started to explain that there was this caterpillar that, instead of turning into a butterfly, turned into a plant, from which you got this expression, in the winter it was a 'worm' and in the summer a 'grass'. I still didn't quite get it, so my friend, being a good scientist in fact, went into more detail, explaining that this wasn't quite the whole story. The caterpillar doesn't actually turn into a plant, and actually the summer phase isn't a plant at all. In the winter when it should be metamorphosing into a butterfly, it often gets infected by a fungus, and in the summer a mushroom sprouts from it. This mushroom is extremely valuable in Chinese medicine, especiallly as a nutritional supplement for strength. Anyway, I later looked it up on wikipedia and indeed it's a pretty cool organism interaction that sort of does look like it results in a half worm/half mushroom type of thing (.

My friend was initially astonished that I was so puzzled by this situation - why hadn't I heard of this very well-known thing before? It's easy to forget that the things so well known to you can be unheard of to others. I forget this often too, and it's nice to be jolted to remember that there are a million things you don't know, and a million things that don't necessarily have to be the way you know them to be. An example, perhaps with the table turned, was in a conversation earlier in the week with this same friend. We somehow came upon the topic of time zones. China is roughly the same size as the US, but is all on the same time, whereas the US spans four different zones. I have thought this ridiculous for China and tried to explain why -- it means that the time of sunrise in the east must be 3-4 hours different from the time of sunrise in the very west. For example, some people may have sunrise at 5am, and others at 8 or 9am, and I would guess it means that someone is having sunrise and/or sunset at a rather awkward time. (I guess we're all on Beijing time, which to my calculation should mean I get more sunlight in the evening than I should, so I'm not too upset by it. Still, I find that acknowledging that the earth spins is more reasonable.) My friend though, thought it was equally ridiculous that a single country could split itself into time zones, making unnecessary complications for domestic affairs. What about live telecasts? What about national exams? What about phoning someone across the country? What about traveling on business to the opposite coast? I still argued that regulating daylight hours was more important, but admitted that sometimes making phone calls, or waiting for election results, or probably arranging important national live speeches, was inconvenient. I realized someone living with this alternate situation might quite reasonably hold this opinion I had previously not considered. I think we both came out with a bit better understanding of the two sides. We're used to the inconveniences that come with having time zones, but we also have states with power that allows some domestic affairs to be taken care of on this level, and state boundaries to serve as time zone dividers. While people do often talk about different provinces and who's from where here, I think that China places a lot of importance on being a single, unified entity. I guess we do too, but maybe we're more comfortable and stable in this identity. China is large, populous, and has a large income gap between rich and poor, but it maintains a unified front to the world, and wants it citizens to feel that they belong.