新年快乐 (Happy New Year)

We stopped by Chinatown this week. Here's a picture of the Chinese thing there.
And the backs of Elder Lehnardt and Elder Leung's heads.

Dear all,

I got back to the Branch just in time for Chinese New Year. As far as I've been able to tell, or at least as far as anyone has told me, Chinese New Year is really, really big, but the only thing people do to celebrate it is eat lots and lots of food. It's like Thanksgiving, if Thanksgiving were a ton bigger and lasted for an entire week. We had a dinner appointment with ShenBo, the first councilor in the branch presidency, on Thursday. His wife made us a ton of really extravagant, very northern Chinese food (pictures included).

New Year's Dinner with ShenBo.
The brown stuff to the left of the fish is meat Gelatin.
It tasted all right, but was really gross-looking. 

I ran into Elder Amichia and Elder Reynolds today and got a great awkward picture with them.

He told us all about how they celebrate the new year up in the north of China, where he's from.

On Saturday, we had our branch New Year's party (pictures also included. You're welcome). There were people in the chapel making dumplings for about 4 hours before the party actually started, and then everyone who came brought a huge dish to share. There was a ton of food and a ton of people. A fair amount of non-members showed up, but I didn't get to talk to any of them because Alice was talking to me pretty much non-stop the whole time (she talks a ridiculous amount).  The missionaries got asked to sing a song for everyone, so we sang some traditional (?) New Year's song in Chinese, and then a hymn. It was a pretty bad performance, but no one expected it to be good. It was good fun all around.

Branch Party

Here's Alice and Elder Hsiung at the party.

We got  to visit Yang Yuan Lan this week, to help her prepare for her baptism, which is this Saturday. She's really, really ready to get baptized, so there wasn't a whole lot we could do for her. We ended up sharing the story of Moses with her and some other bible history just to help her understand the scriptures. It's surprising how much scriptural knowledge I have that I just take for granted, and how important that is to understand so many other things in the church. We had a good time explaining it to her and sharing scriptures.

The main investigator we focused on this week was Jia Ying. She was the first investigator I taught after I got here, but she's from Canton and prefers to be taught in Cantonese. Elder Leung has been teaching her. She speaks Mandarin fluently, but Cantonese is a lot easier for her. She's about 25 and has been investigating for around 6 months. She has a baptismal date in May, comes to sacrament meeting every week, and is progressing slowly, but surely. She's really funny, but a little immature at times. Lessons with her are a weird mix of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. Elder Lehnardt and I just try to keep up as much as we can. 

We taught her a couple times this week, mostly just answering questions she has from the scriptures, and giving her conference talks to read. More notably, we taught her the law of chastity. We all knew that she definitely doesn't have any problems with chastity, but we have to teach it to her anyway. It went pretty well until she didn't know what masturbation was, and poor Elder Leung had to awkwardly explain it to her in Cantonese. I didn't understand it, but I could tell it was super awkward. Elder Leung told me it was the worst Chastity lesson he's ever taught. She didn't have any problems committing to follow it.

Life in the Chinese trio is super fun. Elder Lehnardt and I are learning a bunch of Chinese together being the only white missionaries in the branch. It's a party every day.

That's all for me. Love you all,

Elder Hadden

Lastly, another cool picture of downtown Montreal in the snow.