First of all, check out my brother’s project. The ZBoard: The Weight-Sensing Electric Skateboard. On Kickstarter! It’s so amazing to see how many people have already backed the project. Keep up the good work, Ben!

Today is International Women’s Day.

"If you are a woman, enjoy the delicious and exquisite cookies that Co-Work gives to you to celebrate your day."

International Women’s Day is not a holiday that I grew up celebrating. I first celebrated it in China. I remember that my Cameroonian colleague in China said it was a big event in her homeland.

In Chinese, people often refer to holidays by the date — month then day. Since International Women’s Day is March 8, and March is month #3, the holiday is 三八 (san ba) or 3-8.

San ba is also a common insult for a gossipy woman. A forum on learning Chinese gave the following definition:

the sentence :

ni hen san ba.

means you are a person always like to talking about others’ business,privacy,etc. or wanna intervene others’ business.

san ba means 妇女 in chinese, eapecially refers to moms and middle aged women. from international women’s day,so it exists only in modern chinese language. but it refers to old chinese women. in old days, chinese women were not well educated and couldn’t go out for work. they had lots of time , some of them then always had time and concerns with others’ business.

Curious about how this double meaning affected Chinese women’s perceptions of the holiday, Anna Sophie Loewenberg, perhaps better known as Ms. Sexy Beijing, interviewed women all over the city.

Click the title of this post if you can’t see the video. Enjoy! 

I loved this video and it made me feel less alone in my complicated, multilingual impression of this holiday. Our personal histories shape the way we interpret the simplest things: holidays, words, phrases, events.

Enough overthinking! I’m off to grab another cookie. Chocolate.

Update: Isabel, the woman who put out the cookies pictured above, sent me this fascinating article about the hidden history of this holiday (in Spanish.)

There is a myth is that women were sewing in a factory on March 8, and while they were petitioning for better working conditions, the boss burned down the factory. The cloth they were sewing was violet, and therefore, violet is the holiday’s official color.

But this is not true. The day that this revolt supposedly happened was Sunday and the factory was closed.

The article goes on to explain the work of various feminists and revolutionaries, and then concludes: [This holiday is] “an offense for all who died to bring us out of ignorance, slavery, and submission. Because we don’t want gifts, we just insist on our rights.”

What comes to mind when you think of International Women’s Day? Cookies? Labor conditions? Rights? Men running races in high heels?