Behind the 可爱: JingJing's Dark Past

Olympic mascot 晶晶 (Jing Jing) is touted on the official site as a much-beloved, joyful creature, especially popular among children. Most of the descriptions of him could act as a sugar substitute, though a few people have noticed an odd discrepancy between his seemingly lovable face and the somewhat violent behavior in his publicity photos: see GraniteStudio. Sadly, Beijing officials have had a hard time putting a warm polish on Jing Jing's gruff personality.

Jing Jing's sometimes anti-social behavior isn't entirely his fault. First off, he's a panda--not a species known for their friendliness. Witness the man who, with a few solid drinks under his belt, decided to show his love for one of his country's national icons with disastrous results; nor are pandas above biting the hand that feeds them--or, well, mauling it a bit. They're panda bears, not teddy bears. Think maybe Gu Gu was just having a bad day? Guess again! Pandas just aren't huggable creatures, no matter how cute their headdresses.

Secondly, Jing Jing wasn't born into some posh zoo habitat with saunas and hot-tubs, but in the Wolong Reserve--sort of the 'hood of panda breeding grounds, located among some of the nastier bamboo groves of Sichuan province and a popular poaching locale. Jing Jing would have been just a cub, when poachers wiped out nearly 15% of the world's panda population, and poachers don't give up just because of a few arrests. The pressures of life on the reserve are so strong that most experts only expect pandas to make it into their teens or twenties if living in the wild. Jing Jing's childhood and adolescence must have consisted mostly of fighting tooth and nail just to keep his pelt intact, and such violence so early in a panda's life just doesn't make for an easy-going disposition.

Little wonder then that Jing Jing, long before the Olympics committee picked him up as one of their five Friendlies, fell in with a bad crowd. In the late 1990's Jing Jing started working hand-in-er-paw with a number of young idealists from the Animal Liberation Front. Though some of his actions may now seem regrettable, they helped him to survive, and he picked up proficiency in quite a number of sports, like shooting, archery, and various forms of weaponless combat (provided you don't count huge claws as weapons).

Note: 牙刷 (ya shua) or "toothbrush" is a common insult in Sichuanhua.

Strange Days 2

After spending Thursday and Friday learning knitting from Panda, I managed to make a small, pink square decently enough--something like the beginning of a scarf. In order to get even this much done, I had to learn a simpler way of knitting. Saturday, I met the tutor with whom I'll be studying during break, and afterwards I went to see Panda again.

Panda, a former doctor, is big on healthy eating and exercise, so since three days of rain had made exercising outdoors an impossibility, she had picked up two jianzi.

Jianzi are basically Chinese hacky-sacks: four large feathers and some smaller ones bound together at the bottoms with some metal washers and a little plastic nub, the original precursor to the shuttlecock used in badminton. Apparently they used to be used for some game, though I've never seen anyone playing according to what looks like sensible rules (though I have seen a group of kids playing in two teams, one team using their feet and the other team using ping-pong paddles in what looked a little like volleyball, with one team trying to paddle the jianzi toward the ground while the others defended). For people like me, ti (kicking) jianzi is usually just what it sounds like--kicking this little clutch of feathers in the air as many times in a row as you can.

Panda and I ti jianzi for an hour or so. Again, I had one of those moments of seeing myself from the outside and got a bit of laughter out of the moment. Then I worked on my scarf for a bit before we had dinner. After dinner, with Panda's help on quite a few rows, I managed to finish my first knitted scarf Saturday night. I gave it as a gift to the co-worker who had given me my "I am not a Capitalist Drover" T-shirt (now the image on the right side of my page).

Strange Days

Now that my laduzi has dried up for a bit, it seems Shenzhen's weather is seeking to make up for it. Yesterday and today have both been cold and drizzly--bleak miserable days. On the bright side, I have the days off, so I have all the time I want to enjoy the dripping dampness.

Nersey and Jia left to visit the States Tuesday afternoon and apparently arrived safely yesterday morning around ten or so, I think. I can't be entirely sure, because my informant in this is Panda, Jia's mother, who speaks only a few words of English. She called at ten yesterday morning (presumably after hearing from Nersey and Jia) told me, "Tamen dao Meiguo le" (They arrived in America), and then asked me a bunch of questions I didn't understand.

Ten minutes later, I got a call from Zhongguoren* (an American friend in Bao'an, whose Chinese is much better than mine). "I just got a call from Panda," he said, "She says Nersey and Jia made it to America okay, and--I'm not sure I'm hearing this right--I think she wants to give you a sweater, or maybe go shopping or something." I asked him to call Panda back and tell her I'd stop by the apartment around two in the afternoon, figuring it'd be easier to figure out what she wanted to do mian-dui-mian (face-to-face).

When I got there, she first wanted to go to a gongyuan (park) to zuo yundong (do some exercise), but because of the rain, we settled on going to shop for yarn instead. Apparently, the invitation had been for her to teach me zhi mao yi (knitting), something I'd said would be interesting to learn. The actual skill probably isn't that difficult--I'm doing what's probably a ridiculously simple style of knitting, I'm sure--but learning a craft in a second language isn't the easiest thing in the world; "Bu dui" and "Yi dian bu dui" are certainly good hints that I've messed something up, but they aren't exactly helpful for figuring out how to fix a mistake. I got to practice a lot of Chinese during the lesson, though, so even if my knitting never improves, at least my listening will.

During my lesson, I had a brief moment of seeing myself from the outside: sitting in an apartment with Chinese music and a looped pre-recorded prayer playing in the background, drinking tea, eating oranges and taking knitting lessons from a friend's Chinese mother-in-law. Had you asked me before I first came to China what my expectations were, this scene wouldn't have been the first I'd mention. I didn't really have many expectations about China at all, except that I'd probably be taller than most people (check) and that I wouldn't understand the language (check). If I'd imagined myself learning any special skills while here, it maybe would have been a Chinese style of painting or pottery--something that struck me as a specifically Chinese version of something I could already do. Maybe this is an advantage to not having any expectations for a place before you move there; whatever I wind up doing with my time, it rarely seems that strange.

I've picked up at least one bit of knitting Chinese, though I'm not yet sure about the exact Pinyin: "Da liang zhi" (Hit two somethings). Maybe this is equivalent to "purl two" in English, though I'm not really sure just what "purl two" means anyway. Maybe I'll do a blog entry of Chinese knitting instructions in the future, if I get the hang of it this afternoon (Yep, I'm using my other day off for another knitting lesson).

*When asked, "Ni shi naguoren?" (What's your nationality?) this friend usually replies, "Wo shi Zhonguoren" (I'm Chinese), hence the name.

Another story that didn't seem that strange at the time follows:

Flashback: Bu Hui Pa Shan, Part One
Originally posted: 07:05, 2007-11-20

So it would have been around this time last year that I finally managed to get to the top of a mountain near my old neighborhood, Tao Yuan Ju in Bao'an. Earlier, I'd tried climbing the same mountain and failed. To be more accurate, I'd failed to get to the mountain, though I'd certainly tried for a while.

On my first attempt to climb it, I'd set off walking with an umbrella and a phrasebook. Mountains in Shenzhen aren't particularly tall, so I knew the mountain I wanted to climb couldn't be that far away. (The main reason I wanted to climb that specific mountain was that it had a peculiar building on top--something with what seemed to be a spire; that and the fact that the mountain was right in the background as you walked to RenRenLe made it a very interesting mountain at the time.) The problem, it turned out, wasn't the distance between the mountain and I, but the terrain between the mountain and I. My first hour took me on a long detour along a road that rounded what should have been a small foothill in the way, and when the foothill was past, a highway took its place. (No matter how daring I might be in some circumstances, trying to cross a highway full of Chinese drivers just isn't something I can summon the courage for.) By the time an hour and a half had passed, I had gone from the relatively rural highwayside into another developed area (still part of Bao'an) and had figured out I was walking in the wrong direction, as the mountain in front of me no longer had an interesting building on top.

I walked back toward home, then cut through a small factory yard, just as shift was apparently changing, and walked alongside a few hundred quite surprised workers wearing blue jeans and the standard blue smocks of Bao'an factory workers until a little dirt path appeared on my left, apparently heading directly for the mountain I wanted. I followed the path, and it soon began to run between a wall and an enormous gutter. Above the wall, I could spot buildings reaching up, and I figured I was walking beneath the developed area I'd been trying to avoid. I crossed the gutter, using a few stairs and a decidedly shaky plank, and headed across a small field. Within a few minutes, I was walking alongside another highway, apparently in the direction of the correct mountain. Now and then, I passed what must have originally been the beginnings of an overpass project--huge concrete supports with rusted steel rebar sticking out of the tops, each covered in months or years' worth of clinging ivy, some showing even the first saplings of small, vertical forests at the tops. The highway wound about until I was no longer walking in the right direction, and I took the first right-hand path I came to.

This path wound sharply up a hill, passing two parallel rows of trees. Farmers, normally shirtless and shoeless, dressed only in faded khakis with the legs rolled up at the cuffs, slept between the trees. (My first attempt on the mountain had been in early October.) One of them slept quite soundly beside a moulted snake skin about one and a half feet long. Further along the path, I started to pass a few homes--cheap, thrown-together plywood affairs--and thought how odd it was to see this just an hour's walk (for those who knew the way) from the over-development of my neighborhood.

Soon I was passing through fields of what looked like bai cai (a type of cabbage) and, glancing back to see whether I could spot home, realized I was doing so with a following of about twenty Chinese farmers. When I stopped to look back, they also stopped and made an effort of appearing to be examining the ground or the sky or their hands or eachother's hands. I walked on again, stopped, looked back; again, none of them were moving, all carefully examining something other than me, though the distance between us stayed the same. They followed me for about half an hour (and fairly enough, I figured, since I had to be walking through their farm), as the path took me out of the fields and into a small shanty town where dogs slept at the ends of their chains and mostly naked children blinked back at me from inside their little plywood shacks. The path went around a corner, and I found myself looking at a flock of chickens--big chickens,moving chickens--that were walking the opposite way down the same path as I. I turned, went back around the corner and found myself looking at a much-swelled crowd of Chinese all desperately trying to look disinterested. I figured that between the Chinese and the chickens, the Chinese would be the most likely to move, so I stalked back the way I had come, using one of the few Chinese things I knew at the time over and over: "Ni hao. Ni hao. Ni hao."

All the Chinese parted, slowly, and I walked as quickly as possible back to the highway and, from there, back to the wall I'd seen earlier. I climbed a set of stairs in the wall, up into a row of mechanical shops and outdoor pool stores, wandered around a bit and finally sat down in a restaurant and had two cold sodas, one after the other. I wandered through streets for a while until I found what seemed a promising highway, then followed that. About an hour later, I reached a road that seemed to go toward the mountain I wanted to climb and was grateful to see that it climbed upwards, since another foothill had since popped up in the way. It turned out to be the driveway for some college or other, and I got stopped by guards at the gate. I pantomimed walking for them, pointed at the mountain I wanted to get to and pulled out one of the other phrases I knew: "Hao bu hao?" They looked at eachother, talked a bit, shrugged and waved me through.

I followed a little road up through the campus and past a construction site, where workers called, "Hay-loo," at me from six stories of bamboo scaffolding. Maybe ten minutes later, the road turned to a gravel path skirting the side of some sort of concrete reservoir full of algaed water. I walked around to where a little pagoda looked out over the school's campus. Steps led upward and I followed them. They led to a narrow path about one hundred feet above the reservoir; one one side, a steep cliff dropped toward the black and green water; on the other side; a steep cliff dropped down further than I wanted to see: the path was about two feet wide and covered by foot-high grass and weeds. I thought about the snake skin I'd seen earlier and decided, "Wo bu hui pa shan." ("I can't climb the mountain.") I walked back the way I'd come, decided I was just too tired to try another approach, and finally managed to get a ride to RenRenLe on the back of a motorscooter for "Twenty money," as the driver said.By the time I'd walked home from RenRenLe, I'd managed to sweat through not only my shirt, but my jeans as well. I felt thoroughly miserable, disappointed and smelly, so I took a shower and went to bed for a few hours. I gave up on the mountain for about a month.

Flashback: Bu Hui Pa Shan, Part Two
Originally posted: 12:33, 2007-11-29

My first attempt to climb the RenRenLe mountain involved being followed by a flock of Chinese, chased by a flock of chickens, and finally giving up when faced with the prospect of walking a narrow ledge just to try to reach the mountain. I'd made this first attempt in maybe mid-October, and I largely put the idea of climbing it out of my head for a good month.

Then in the middle of November (or thereabouts) my Senior Teacher from last year and I wound up eating with a group of Chinese. One of the Chinese took a shine to me when he heard that I liked climbing mountains. (It's not so much that I actually enjoy climbing mountains, actually, as that there just isn't much to do in Shenzhen, and that it's nice to get above the pollution now and then.) He told me I had to come to his hometown sometime, since there were beautiful mountains there, not scrawny, littered little mountains like the ones here. I told (with my Senior Teacher translating) the story about my first attempt on RenRenLeShan, and the Chinese all laughed. I got a decent translation of some traditional Chinese wisdom: "The mountain looks near, but it's actually far away." I pointed out that it wasn't the distance to the mountain itself that was the problem, but all the roads, buildings and general confusion filling the distance that made for a problem: the labyrinthine approach was what had defeated me.
By the end of the meal, the Senior Teacher was explaining to them that I had a personal grudge against this one mountain and would climb any mountain once I'd gotten up this particular mountain. (Apparently the translation was closer to "This little mountain has made him angry. He wants to shame it first, then he'll look at worthwhile mountains.") The Chinese at the table swore to help me find the shang shan (the way up the mountain)--the next morning, at 7:00 am.

I woke up bright and early the next day and loafed down to the Tao Yuan Ju gate, expecting to wait around for a while before realizing no one was coming. The night before, the Chinese had been drinking baijiu (a clear, horrible-smelling alcohol that even Chinese don't seem to enjoy), and making promises while drinking baijiu, only to break them later, is something of a national pastime here. To my surprise, not only had everyone from the dinner shown up, they'd brought a driver with them, and they'd made arrangements with an English-speaker to help me clarify just which mountain it was that had angered me so.

After a short conversation over the phone, the driver took me, alone, to the mountain's main road. (My new friends were happy to help me get to the mountain, but actually climbing it after a night of baijiu was apparently going too far.) It was about a ten-minute drive, and it turned out I would have able to walk it quite easily had I skirted the mountain to the left instead of to the right. As it was, I later learned while going to climb Pheonix Mountain that I'd almost circled the mountain entirely in my first attempt--had I walked another ten minutes the first time, I would have found the right road. Live and learn.

At the foot of the mountain, there was some confusion over just what I wanted. The driver had come fully prepared to drive me to the top of the mountain, and it took a lot of talking over the telephone to get it across that I actually wanted to climb it. Since the shang shan was a road instead of stairs, the idea seemed ridiculous both to the driver and to my translator. I finally got the point across, and the driver left me on a little gravel road running up from a college campus through an odd sort of little village.

Along the sides of the road, two rows of houses had been haphazardly thrown up--better constructed than those I'd seen on my first attempt, but ragged nonetheless. Here, what might qualify as peasants were tending to huge stacks of some unidentifiable product (little tubes of some dry white substance flecked with black, each about two feet long and four inches thick, stacked in crosswise layers.) The stacks looked like orderly piles of dried bird feces. I got the usual gawking as I wandered past, including the silent children gaping from doorways, but here the children were at least clothed, albeit in split-crotch pants.

The road wound up and up in a series of switchbacks, providing for a more pleasant walk than I'd anticipated. One moment, I'd be walking along with a pleasant view of where I'd walked from, and only ten minutes later, I'd be crossing the shoulder of the mountain, with a view of the areas I'd gotten lost in a month before spreading out before me. I saw only one other person on the way up: an older man digging a hole in the middle of the road for no reason I could figure out, his bicycle leaning against a tree that angled out from the road over a drop of a few hundred feet. The best view I saw along the way was of Tao Yuan Ju itself, from a sizable enough height that I could only pick it out by finding my school's campus and then the RenRenLe, guessing at where my apartment sat in between the two. In a little over an hour's climbing, I was near enough the top, that I could see clearly the little spire-like object that had raised my curiosity about the mountain in the first place was some sort of radio antenna.

Another half and hour later, I rounded a turn and ran smack dab into a gate about four feet high. Beyond it was a wide courtyard with at least two peaceful carved lions squatting in it. I decided it probably wouldn't be a good idea to go much further, but was still half-tempted to hop the gate just to see what I could see (especially since one side of the courtyard had been cleared of trees, making, I was sure, for a wonderful view of my neighborhood). The thing that discouraged me from doing so was the large lump of brown fur lying motionless in the middle of the courtyard.

When I first noticed it, I thought it was something dead--like an elk or an especially large deer. I sat and wondered for a while just what sort of animal China had that might look like this, then it occurred to me that a place where elk (or their equivalent) might drop dead in the courtyard maybe wasn't a place I wanted to be. I turned back down the gravel road, figuring I'd at least climbed as far as was sensible and that I could now count the mountain suitably conquered.

I got about twenty feet before I heard the bark. I looked back, and the thing I'd taken for a dead elk was on its feet, charging toward the gate--not an elk at all, but the biggest dog I've ever seen in my life. I turned back down the road and started walking a little faster, then slowed back down, thinking, "Well, there's a big gate behind me; good thing I didn't jump it, or he'd be on me." I turned back to gloat a little and saw the dog jumping over the gate as though it were only four inches tall. I started walking faster.

The dog kept up a steady barking: "Won ... won ... won ... won," in Chinese fashion, and I relaxed a little, since the sounds weren't getting much closer. Then the barking picked up--"Won, won, won, won, won, won," as more voices joined in. I chanced a glance back, only to see that it was now five dogs following me instead of just one, and the latecomers were clearly more ambitious than the first. They were actually running.

I walked as fast as I dared, figuring that breaking into a run would trigger some latent hunting instinct in them, and stuck the tip of my umbrella out behind me, hoping they'd attack that before me. They pulled up close behind me, alternating between barking and snarling, and I thought, "My epitaph is going to read, 'Mauled by dogs in China, because he wanted to see the top of a mountain.' Either that, or my heart will give out first." My heart was pounding in my chest at this point, and since I was quickly getting below the pollution line again, my breath was getting rougher and rougher.

It took me about an hour and a half to get up the mountain and less than half of that to get down. The dogs finally gave up chasing me about two-thirds of the way down, but I didn't slow down or relax much until I'd reached the little village I'd passed on the way up. I didn't stop until I'd gotten back to the college campus, where I sat down for a while and tried to get my breath back. At a bus stop outside the campus gates, I ran into some students who hello-ed me and kept asking, "Ni hao ma?"

Embarrassed about my panting and sweating, I scraped together all the Chinese then at my disposal and put together a rough story: "Wo qu shang shan. Shang shan, da men. Wo bu qu. Wo qu xia shan, ting ruff ruff ruff. Yi ge da gou! Ruff, Ruff, Ruff. A, yi, er, san, si, wu ... wu da gou! Wo qu xia shan. [Here I pantomimed running with my heart pounding.]" (I go up mountain. Up mountain, big gate. I don't go. I go down mountain, hear, "Ruff, ruff, ruff." One, two, three, four, five ... five big dogs. I go down mountain.) It wasn't the most sophisticated translation, but to judge by the laughter, it got the point across.

Only one student responded in English: "You can't this the mountain." Then he started laughing again. When we piled into a mini-bus together for RenRenLe, they refused to let me pay my own fare. I guess the story (or just meeting a foreigner who'd been chased by dogs earlier in the day) had been worth five kuai.

哎呀：Interjection of Suprise

I've been getting a lot of mileage out of this phrase the last few days. The reason is that--哎呀--la duzi (the dreaded travelers' diarrhea) I've managed to avoid thus far this year finally struck early Sunday morning, waking me from an otherwise peaceful sleep. Saturday morning, just seventeen hours before, I'd been worried that I wasn't using the bathroom enough (i.e., at all, for a thirty-six hour period), and as I suspected, constipation gave way to the normal situation in China: cant-stop-ation.

I made it through work on Sunday, with three bathroom breaks (breaking my rule about not using the work toilets) and a lot of water. Cramps set in a bit painfully, and Sunday night was restless because of them. Yesterday, my trips to the bathroom were becoming a bit less frequent, though the cramps persevered. Knowing that I had classes that night, I decided to go out and buy some medicine, hoping to find just a simple anti-diarrheal to hold me through classes.

Unfortunately, the medicine available in China for an upset stomach goes a long way toward explaining why all the big-media illnesses--SARS, avian flu, etc.--seem to originate in Asia. To treat my simple case of the runs, I had my choice (out of those boxes labeled in English) of Ciprofloxacin (a wide-spectrum antibiotic) Azithromycin (usually used for respiratory infections) and Oseltamivir phosphate (the active ingredient in Tamiflu--used to treat avian flu) and--哎呀--Nelfinavir Mesylate (used to treat HIV). I finally sent Nersey a message asking for the name of any simple charcoal tablets, and fortunately, he had enough at home to give me a little bag of tablets, presumably anti-biotic-free.

Three pills later, and I'm feeling a good bit better. I tried solid food again earlier today (Yesterday's diet consisted of Gerber carrots and peas and a bowl of boiled noodles), and since I only have to work for one hour tomorrow night, I'm going to try a calzone at Andes cafe. That seems about the best way to celebrate being off the baby food.

Ten Reasons to Come to Shenzhen, or Stay
Originally posted: 03:08, 2007-10-14

You want to experience another culture, meaning that you have a sadistic desire to be continuously confused by a language you don't understand and by daily routines you don't understand, while suffering diarrhea and living surrounded by dirt.

You never really fit in at home and figure it might be a nice change to try not fitting in in a new place, somewhere no one would expect (or let) you fit in.

You really, really like tiles (tile buildings, tile floors, tile sidewalks), the slipperier the better.

You want to learn another language and think the best way to do so might be through hour-long conversations with people who only want to say, "Hello," over and over again.

You think it's high time you cashed in on your only marketable skill: your undeniable ability to be not Chinese.

Though not a Hilton, you desperately crave the attention normally afforded celebrities, but you don't want to go through all the hassle of doing something noteworthy first.

You're tired of being called "crazy," "retarded," "a criminal," "a loser," or "an arrogant jerk" and would prefer being somewhere where you're just "foreign."

The only things you like more than tiles (see above) are handwritten triplicate forms, for everything.

You believe whole-heartedly that all Asian women are beautiful and want to test this article of faith through exposure to a thousand or so of them per week, mostly on buses, mostly in hot, humid weather.

You really dug the eighties but always felt that (despite the Flock of Seagulls haircuts, Boy George and Judas Priest) the decade just wasn't gay enough, and you'd like to live in a place where rat-tails and jean cut-offs still rock.

必胜客：No Pizza Here

I went to Pizza Hut (必胜客) Friday night, drawn by the idea of quick and easy non-Chinese food just downstairs from my apartment. I ordered an iced coffee and a 9-inch Supreme Pan Pizza, washed my hands and waited a few minutes before the waitress arrived to tell me "没有" (mei you--don't have). She then opened a menu to point out to me all the other pizzas I didn't want (many of which--like the crab stick, lobster, shrimp, sausage and corn--I can't eat) that were still available to me. I pointed to the page of the menu that shows the pan pizzas, said, "Wo zhi xihuan zhege bisa" (I only like this pizza).

"A, women you dade," she told me: "We have large pizza." Yes, they had large pan pizzas, just no small pan pizzas. This may seem confusing, and in fact it's one of the things that puzzled me my first year in China: if they have the crust and toppings to make one size of pizza, then surely they have the crust and toppings to make the same pizza, only smaller. At first, I supposed that all the pizzas were shipped to China pre-made, so that all the cooks had to do was pop them into the oven. Then I got a peek into a kitchen one time and saw the cooks making the pies themselves.

Now I've figured out why 必胜客 runs out of pan pizzas--and specifically pan pizzas--so often. Since they serve pan pizzas still in the pan, if they have a busy night, they often run out of pans and have to wait until one table finishes eating before they can make more. Friday I tried asking, "Ruguo wo deng yi xia, jiu nimen you meiyou xiaode?" (If I wait a bit, will you have small pizzas then?) The waitress hurried off, grabbed another waitress to bring her to my table.
I thought for a moment the first waitress might be a Guangdonren and not able to speak Putonghua, thus her reason for enlisting another worker. No, she brought the other waitress over just to tell me again, "没有."

That night, I left and went to the Papa John's that recently opened near my apartment, where (believe it or not) they had pizza. I'll probably be doing so more often. Perhaps a Pizza Hut executive back home might try and think of a solution to this problem (as can be seen below--keeping in mind that I only try Pizza Hut about once a month now), which is remarkably common in China, such as buying more pans for each restaurant.

Architecture
Originally posted: 08:20, 2007-09-14
I've finally taken the measurements of my apartment. Not including balcony space, my apartment is about 450 square feet. The sitting-cum-dining room is about 220; the bedroom floor is about 140; bathroom, 49; kitchen, 41. These numbers have a little give or take to them; not all of it is usable space (such as storage areas), but 450 square feet is probably about the interior footprint as it would show up on the as-builts. The main balcony is about 60 square feet and has a tall ceiling, so it's very likely I'll be getting a little Weber grill.
******
In other architecture news, I tried eating at Pizza Hut this week. Alas, "meiyou": yes, Pizza Hut was out of pizza. However, I managed to get some pictures of salad bar architecture (an artform born out of China Pizza Hut's "one trip, one small bowl" policy for salad bar visits).
******
I've been documenting the progress of a footbridge under construction near my apartment. It looks as though it will include four elevators and four escalators. I'm anxious to see how long it will take to complete. Between that and Pizza Hut, I should have plenty of pictures to post once I get my Internet access straightened out.

"Sit Down, Please/Sit-Down Fee"
Originally posted: 08:48, 2007-08-31

There's a tricky little thing about eating good food in China that I'll have to call a sit-down fee, for lack of a better word. Though it doesn't happen at every restaurant, it's a common thing for bills to arrive larger than expected. Sometimes this is because of an actual sitting fee charged for the privilege of being at a table in a restaurant; I don't know the Chinese word for it. Such charges usually occur at K-TVs, cafes or Japanese-style restaurants.

Tonight, I ran into the sneaky version of the sit-down fee. Since I couldn't find anything I really wanted to eat (even after trying Pizza Hut, where--"meiyou"--they didn't have any pizza), I finally bit the bullet and went to a Japanese restaurant for some chicken kebabs. Having been stung at Japanese restaurants before, I made sure to gesture at the table and ask, "Duo shao qian?" (How much?) The server responded, "Meiyou [something that sounded like gongfei, or public expense]." I sat down, drawing attention to the action, said, "Ling kuai?" (No money?) "Duiduiduidui." (Rightrightrightright.) The meal was good.

When the bill came, an extra five kuai had been added. The reason? They'd given me a bowl of shrimp and mayo noodles that I said I hadn't wanted, didn't eat, and which they'd refused to take away. Elsewhere, it's one, two, even thirty kuai packs of napkins. At this place, you don't have to pay to sit, but you do have to pay something you didn't order and don't want.Apparently, even the Chinese have trouble getting a straight answer about hidden gongfei. It's not the only thing Chinese do that the Chinese can't stand.

Hwrrraaawk, Ptui

Today, just one the way from the SPR kafeiting to my bus stop, no fewer than five Chinese (all men) felt the need to clear their throats and spit loudly on the street as they passed me. In each case, the noisy expectorator made a clear point of establishing eye contact either before or after their performance. This is one of the things I'd rather not know while living in China: that I'm usually the cause of these disgusting little displays.

A few months ago Dawei informed me that Chinese commonly use this gut-churning sound (gut-churning and entirely unnecessary sound, since this drawn-out hawking is made in the mouth more than the throat and doesn't, therefore, produce any more sputum to be expelled) as a sign of contempt. Initially, I was skeptical of this--the very idea that people were even possibly doing this as a commentary on me. Then I took the time to repeat Dawei's own experiment: every time I heard this sound, I repeated it. Just as in Dawei's experiences, every time I made the hawking sound after hearing it, the person I was mimicking would repeat the sound, again and again; as many times as I "cleared" my throat, he or she (but usually he) would repeat the sound again, as though being the last to hawk were the final word in expressing contempt. In the week or so that I played around with this little phenomenon, my personal record for the number of times I prompted one person to make the hawking sound was eight.

After about a week, I gave the whole experiment up as a stupid waste of time. After all, by responding to the noises in any way, I just reinforce the disgusting little habit and give the stupid little people who treasure this insult more reason to use it. (Granted, even if I don't give such people a reason to despise me, they probably will anyway, but I don't have to justify their pettiness.) Now I do my best to ignore the sound and not look up when I hear it, figuring that without the eye contact it loses much of its power. Today was just a weak point in avoiding looking. I also try to relish the almost laughable irony built into this particular means of communication: namely, that in order to express contempt for a foreigner, so many nationalistic morons find spitting on their own country to be most effective.

"Quick Notes: Heartbreak, Earaches, Floodgates"
Originally posted: 07:25, 2007-10-28

1) Bad news this evening: I was planning on going to Andes Cafe tonight for a good cup of coffee and maybe a slice of cheesecake to unwind after class. Unfortunately, the cafe was locked up. Inside the furniture is piled up in a way that suggests more than a nightly cleaning, and a sign on the door says something about "zai 12 yue" (in December). It looks as though it's closed down, at least for a month or two. Just when I was learning how to say fajitas in Chinese, it seems I have no reason to say it. I only hope my reading of the sign is terribly wrong. [Note: Andes is of course now open again, much to my joy. 08-01-17]

2) I've compiled my list of the Seven (auditory) Habits of Highly Annoying Chinese people. First, the honking; while some think, "To be is to do," and others think, "To do is to be," it's very clear from even a moment beside a road that the Chinese think, "To honk is to drive, and to honk is to drive." Second, the English; whether shouting, "Hay-lu," "Hello," or "Howahyu," Chinese couldn't be more annoying than when trying to communicate with a waiguoren in English, usually from a distance of at least ten feet, and the practice is made none the less irritating than their often choosing to walk past you on the sidewalk, only to shout at your retreating back. Third, the hawking; as though it weren't bad enough that they chose to spit constantly in the street, the Chinese who do so cannot do so quietly, but instead precede each spit with a painful sounding, drawn out and completely needless "Hwraaaaak," as though advertising their own contribution to poor hygeine. Fourth, the put-upon xiaojie voice; this high-pitched, whiny, and completely feigned voice, used only for complaining, sounds more like Beaker from the Muppets than anything else, only Beaker rarely talked for half an hour at a time. Fifth, the reverse snort; I've recently noticed a habit, primarily among men, to blow short bursts of breath out through their nostrils at irregular but frequent intervals, and as one of my students noted yesterday, it's not unusual for this habit to cause flakes of dried mucus to dislodge and spray wherever the guilty nose happens to be pointed. Sixth, the lip-smack; when stopping to think while speaking English, most Chinese do not mutter, "Ah, um," but open their mouths wetly, producing a moist "tick" that just grates on my nerves. Seventh, the eating; most Chinese eat with their mouths open and as loudly as possible (creating a steady rhythm of "tick"s much louder than the thinking pause), and matters are not helped by their slurping noodles with a sound like the one made by a dental vacuum.

3) On Friday night, my post-nasal drip developed into a full-blown cold, making me, I'm sure, just as annoying a source of sounds as any Chinese person could ever be--snort, sniff, sniff, cough, cough, sniff, snort. There are some advantages to living in a country in which you can spit anywhere you want, at least when you're sick. By the time I got home Saturday night, I had a pounding headache from the congestion and had to sit under a hot shower for a full thirty minutes to feel a bit clearer. After the shower, I sat on my couch a while, listening to music, and promptly fell asleep. I woke around midnight and had to immediately take a shower again and do some laundry: while I slept, my sinuses had spontaneously drained themselves, down the front of my shirt. Today, at least, I've been feeling much better and have only had to blow my nose a few times.

Special Chinglish

I've begun a new adults class in the past two weeks and am still at the stage of trying to convince them not everything they've been taught is true. One of the common problems with teaching Chinese English students is trying to deprogram them of a lot of peculiar, misunderstood phrases and sayings, of which "Bye-bye" is the king. I can't speak for England, of course, but "bye-bye" just doesn't get used that often in the States. We say "bye-bye" when we're speaking to little kids, but not with adults: doing so would just sound cutesy. But everyone in China says "bye-bye"--everyone--and not just when talking to foreigners; they "bye-bye" us; they "bye-bye" eachother; they even "bye-bye" their pets. The word gets used so often here, it may as well be introduced into Putonghua dictionaries. Other words, like "beautiful," "lovely" and "pretty" also get used much too often, especially since many of the Chinese English-speakers don't understand that "handsome" is the masculine counterpart of "beautiful."

Other expressions I hear commonly include "Was it very dear?," "A billion thank-yous," "Warmly welcome" and the one that came up in class yesterday: "I couldn't agree with you more." It's not that the last one is incorrect; it's just that it's overused in China, and that if I say simply, "You can say that," then all of my students will use the phrase every time they want to express agreement. The student really wanted to know whether "I couldn't agree more" was the most common way to express agreement, so I tried explaining that most Americans would usually say just "Right," "Sure" or "Okay" to indicate agreement, just as most Chinese simply say "Dui" or "Haode." I mentioned that many phrases like this aren't as common as most Chinese seem to think, and that many of them are (or in many cases, were) Britishisms. Since they're all very insistent that they learn American (or "Standard" in their words) English, I said they may want to avoid using them, or at least use them very sparingly.

"Why are they in all the textbooks, then?" one student asked. This is normal--the assumption that if a sentence appears in a textbook, it must be extremely common. I explained how the Chinese goverment had started by trying to get everyone to learn British English, then changed to American English, and that it generally takes so long for language-learning books to get published that some of the expressions will naturally be outdated.

Then one student (whom I'll call Apple--her actual name is a different kind of fruit) decided that she couldn't agree with me less. "My college teacher say everyone say this. He very good teacher."

Since this student is a recent graduate, having earned her 4-year degree as an English major, I was sorely tempted to reply, "I couldn't agree more, Apple. Oh, wait, I could agree more; it would be possible, yes. If you were able to construct a sentence that made use of more than one tense, were able to remember that 'very' doesn't act as a verb in an English sentence, if your name weren't a kind of fruit, and if you showed even the slightest sense of amusement or embarrassment over the fact that your partner pronounces his 'English name' as a racial slur for Asians, then I would probably be unable to agree with you more. As it is, though, I can't say I couldn't agree with you more." I managed, though, to bite my tongue.

This is one of the strangest parts of teaching in China. There's this huge demand for "real American teachers" to teach "real American English," yet when they actually have someone in front of them who can tell them what "real American English" is, they immediately disregard everything he or she says, because their previous teachers (usually Chinese) said something else. So it's a safe bet that Chinglish will be around for a good long time.

"Chinglish Sop for the Soul"
Originally posted: 06:29, 2007-09-23

In order of least to most amusing, I've gotten the following over the last week.
On a xiaojie's T-shirt: "MY SHOES!!" repeated fifteen times, in concentric circles.

On the The Collection (a kafeiting) menu under Soups: French Onion Sop . . . Mixed Vegetables Soup Talian Style . . . and Cream Soup (Chichen, Sweet COrn, Mushroom Crap).

On the The Collection menu under Western Ric: Fried Rice Western Style (Sangage. Harm. Mixed Pea. Mushroom).

On a public sign: Green green grass, cherish it under the foot.

Again, on the The Collection menu, under Curry: Seafood Curry Rice (Squiel Crapmeat Fish Ball Garoupa).

Again, on a xiaojie's T-shirt, in two rows, writ directly across the chest (and this xiaojie was very Chinese in the stereotypical sense regarding morphology): Small Size Big News.

Grumpy Update: Beware Guangzhou

It seems that along with Rudolph, Vixen, um, Nixon and the rest, Santa has a new travel partner. I've just heard the news that Grumpy finally came by the school on Boxing Day to pick up his passport, which the school had been holding behind the counter while waiting for his return. Apparently, this was very much a in-the-nick-of-time situation, since his visa expired the next day.

Apparently, he disappeared quickly, with nothing more than a few comments about how keeping the passport behind the front desk could have "compromised" something. (Granted, given the general disarray behind the front desk, I'd rather not have my own passport stored there, but then I wouldn't disappear for a couple of months either.) So Grumpy is really gone now, and headed on to a new post in Guangzhou. If you're an employer in Guangzhou, a few things to look for if you think you may have Grumpy on your staff: chain-smoking, remarkably vague sentences that invariably end with "you know what I mean" (even though you don't), and an unusually large number of ninjas (presumably employed by a Nigerian Santa Claus) hanging around outside your fron entrance. See below for the original Grumpy trilogy (including "Pen Phenomenology"--my second most viewed page from blogcharm, after the post about toilets).

"How Do You Spell Qianjing?"
Originally posted: 08:19, 2007-10-10

As I sat tongiht, eating a plate of fried tomato and egg with rice* and listening to a peculiar blend of music**, I felt a deep sense of relief. Grumpy has been let go.It turns out his condition had not improved early this week, whatever it is that's going on with him.

Monday he apparently called in to say he couldn't come to class (twenty minutes before the class was set to meet), stating only that there was an "emergency" and asking to take use of the emergency provision in his contract. (Of course, as Whitetooth mentioned to me, the emergency provision is meant for more tanglible things--natural disasters, war, maybe spontaneous combustion--than Grumpy's emergency.) He tried to arrange a certain time to call Whitetooth on the days of classes (the later, the better) so that he could provide Whitetooth with the most up-to-date information on the situation and say whether he could make it to class. Whitetooth naturally said that this wouldn't be possible, and when Grumpy asked what they could do then, said to call him back in twenty minutes. (Though Grumpy had a cellphone last weekend, apparently he no longer does; you wonder what happened to it.)

While waiting for the return call, Whitetooth spoke to the Chinese manager, explaining that this particular teacher wasn't goofy-crazy, but crazy-crazy, that he was freaking out other teachers and creating problems with the students, and asked whether he could fire him. He got permission to offer Grumpy a deal: Grumpy would be taken off full-time employ, given an unpaid vacation, and if he felt up to it later, could return as a part-time employee (at which time, classes would be curiously unavailable). Grumpy accepted this deal, stating that he needed a vacation (here, quite a bit of talking was apparently necessary to make it clear that this was an unpaid vacation).

Whitetooth double-checked whether the communication was actually clear on both sides: "So you understand you don't work here anymore?" Apparently the message was clear.Granted, it still remains to be seen whether an even weirder Grumpy will show up to work on Saturday, either to teach classes he imagines he has or to battle adversaries equally imaginary, but for now I'm assuming the best (grudgingly, since doing so often proves the wrong choice in China).

As Nersey points out, should the communication turn out not to be clear on all sides, at least waiguoren can't buy guns in China. So if Grumpy goes postal, at least it should be with a weapon everyone can potentially outrun.

*I was going to have a plate of chicken and cashew, but changed my mind once the chef brought a large chicken cage to my table in order to let me pick my favorite. Granted, I like fresh food, but I'd rather not meet it first.

**Included on tonight's play list were English versions of "Silent Night," "Eidelweiss," and a Chinese version of an English song I had a hard time putting my finger on. Then I made out part of a line--"Nin shi qu ____ ji shi ma?" ("Are you going ____ fair market?")--followed by a distinctive (even in translation) falsetto. Simon and Garfunkel would be proud.

"...And Curioser"
Originally posted: 08:05, 2007-10-08

Grumpy has taken a turn for the frightening over vacation. It is as though the bad run-in with the female student weeks past had pulled at a loose thread in some poorly made crewel. The little quirks and general unpleasantness which I had earlier passed off as a bad case of nanguo waiguoren (angry foreigner) now seem to be an indication of greater problems.

The weekend before our break, Grumpy had begun to pull another teacher away for secretive talks, saying, "I need to talk to you for a minute." A drawnout conversation would follow, usually ending with the other teacher's confessing he had no idea what had been discussed. Grumpy tends to speak thus: "I promised myself [long pause] said I was done philosophizing [long pause] Let's not talk about this just now [long pause] Okay. Okay, let'sjust say, maybe someone said something [long pause] Well, okay, so I'm not sure just how I'm going to feel tomorrow [long pause] This is just between us, okay?" The problem of course is that there is no between us; whatever the subject of discussion is, it is firmly locked away in the space between Grumpy's two ears. No communication, just sound and fury.

By the Sunday before break, his behavior had become erratic, and he held a secret conversation with me that day. I won't bother recreating all the annoying pauses and disconnected phrases. Suffice it to say that there was much talk of his adversaries, how "one adversary goes out and more take his place," how well-funded said adversaries must be, how badly they wanted to "get [his] skin," how he didn't know who was on his side anymore, and how to tell whether the "psychological damages of running away" might or might not outweigh the risk of "hospitalization, or worse. The whole conversation was creepy, and I was glad to get out of it by pleading a dinner date (which I actually did have--at Wave pizza in Bao'an).

That night, I mentioned to Nersey and Jia that I might be working with a paranoid schizophrenic.Saturday, after vacation, Grumpy was sullen and largely silent, saying only that something was bothering him; he wasn't sure just what. The next day, the rambling became even more unnerving. In the morning he said he'd slept in an "Internet store" because he couldn't go home. At lunch he very intesely detailed how Chinese guanxi was working against him, how someone (who knew who) would have prejudice built up against him and think he was some sort of monster before even meeting him. How, he wanted to know, did you work against this sort of prejudice, and how long did this guanxi stuff have to go on? Didn't it ever let go?In the afternoon, he began pulling teachers aside as they walked past his (in-session) class. For me, he only said, "This has been going on too long, three months. I need you to help me. You know to say something to someone. You know who."

I had no idea who he meant. Another teacher and I got to talk about this behavior, and it turned out that similar encounters had happened for other teachers. The other teacher expressed concerns that having Grumpy around children might pose a hazard to safety. We decided to discuss the matter with Whitetooth during break between classes.While I was waiting for Whitetooth's class to finish, I got cornered by Grumpy again. It was very important to him that I sit very still in a specific place; the two of us sat unspeaking, he mulling over whatever was going on in his head, I just thinking how much I wanted to go home. Whitetooth called me over from this uncomfortable situation to discuss "the visa," and Grumpy tried to casually follow us outside. In order to speak, Whitetooth, the other teacher and I finally had to hide in a back office which is currently under construction. Two of us told Whitetooth what had been happening; he thought a while.

"Yeah," he said, "I just found out about a part of this a month ago." It seems Grumpy had cornered him alone one night in the office and launched a threatening tirade in which he accused Whitetooth of having been "placed" at the school to sabotage him. He then demanded some "straight answers," though he'd asked no questions. The conflict ended with Grumpy's repeatedly asking, "Are you going to let me cool off, or are you going to do something?" Whitetooth admitted that he had run home that night once the coast was clear, not even stopping to unlock his bicycle. No matter how quickly tempers may have calmed or routines returned, I can't imagine working with that sort of open threat in the past (and won't, if it comes to it, I've decided).After the confrontation with the female student, Grumpy had again approached Whitetooth, this time to apologize. It wasn't Whitetooth who had been placed at the school to sabotage Grumpy; it was this woman.

"They've been trying to infiltrate the school, and now they have," he apparently said. "They're trying to infiltrate my neighborhood too, but they haven't succeeded yet."Whitetooth advised us to avoid Grumpy for the time being, which proved easier said than done, since Grumpy started a class late specifically to grab me as I was leaving the school. What followed was a rehash of the previous week's paranoia: unnamed, well-funded adversaries "out to get" Grumpy's "skin." The new element was that this time I was now "the only one" he could "trust, the only one who" was still on his "side." He needed me (in no clear manner) "to help take this to the next level." I said I was going home, and he told me I couldn't; if I left, "they" would get to me, and he'd end up hospitalized or worse.

I finally got out by promising not to talk to anyone in the next week.I left firmly hoping that something would happen to resolve the situation before I had to leave to the school. Since Grumpy had been late meeting a class, I thought perhaps he might mess up enough in the next couple days to get dismissed for neglect of duty. Chinese don't make it a habit of dismissing foreigners for "just plain crazy," which normally works to the waiguoren's advantage, since so many of the things we do--eating sandwiches without wearing plastic gloves, drinking coffee, preferring to have dogs as pets rather than entrees--might be the height of insanity to the average Chinese. Here, this hesitancy isn't working in the favor of anyone at work.

That's where the situation stood Sunday night.Monday morning Whitetooth called me to discuss some class changes (all to the good for me) and the visa interview with the PSB (currently scheduled for Friday). Once official business was out of the way, he asked me whether anything more had happened with Grumpy Sunday night. I told him about the conversation, and then he told me what had happened after I left. It seems Grumpy had moved his class to a new room in order to be across the hall from Whitetooth's class. During class time, he had continually left his own students in order to interrupt Whitetooth, each time with incomprehensible gibberish. During one of these absences, Grumpy's students apparently wrote, "Can you please teach us?" on the board.

As Grumpy later told Whitetooth, "This [could] only mean one thing; someone [had] gotten to the students." Grumpy confiscated the students' cell phones for the duration of the class to protect himself. After classes, Grumpy cornered Whitetooth for a similar conversation to the one he'd had with me. The only difference was that he made it clear what he thought was happening. Another teacher (henceforth "Ronald") is, Grumpy is sure, coordinating a Chinese group to kill him. The teacher in question is like a cross between Mahatma Ghandi and Bob Marley.

Whitetooth said we might have to wait the situation out until the administration decides to do something. Hopefully, a student complaint or two may get the ball rolling. In the meantime, he agrees that there's a serious problem. In his words, "If you need to be crazy on your own time, that's fine by me. But if he thinks this crap has infiltrated the school, that's dangerous."So for now, it seems we're supposed to be in a holding pattern. But if it comes down to it (i.e., if Grumpy and the lunacy are both present next weekend), I've decided I will put my foot down. If it comes to it, it seems an easy choice: Do you want to retain a qualified teacher who fulfills his responsibilities or a nut-job whose students have to ask him to teach them? Hopefully it will be an easy choice. Hopefully.

"Pen Phenomenology"
Originally posted: 08:12, 2007-09-24

My normal Monday class was cancelled today, so I went to the training center instead to hang around and try to be useful with placing students or a few other tasks. I didn't really have anything to do; it's rainy today, so people aren't exactly rushing out to start studying English. Most of my time was spent talking to one of the Chinese staff (we'll call him Happy) and some of the adult students who tend to hang around in the lobby hoping to encounter a bored waiguoren. To help fill the time, I asked about a few character combinations I'd jotted down at kalaOK and listened to an overly long "story" Happy wanted to tell me.

The gist of the story (in English and Chinese) was that, if you hold a bi (pen) up to a person and ask what it is, the person will say, "Bi." You check and, sure enough, the pen writes; it must be a pen. If you hold the same bi up to a dog, though, what will the dog think? "Gunzi." "Stick."

Happy explained that the "story" shows that meaning doesn't come from the bi itself, but from the person looking at it. The Chinese, it turns out, call this "emptiness"; the object is empty, and it's the viewer's mind that is full, that provides meaning. I mentioned the word "phenomenology," and all the Chinese nearby ran to the computer to look up this big, difficult sounding word. Chinese people studying English gravitate to words like this. Happy didn't understand the definition clearly, so I just mentioned a few examples from Walker Percy's "The Loss of the Creature" and talked just a bit about hermeutics and intentionality (without using the big, exciting words). He seemed to follow this a bit, and we took a little break from talking while he tried to remember all of another "story" he wanted to tell me.

I stepped outside for a cigarette, and while I was returning, a big fight broke out in the lobby. One of the teachers (we'll call him Grumpy) had had a run-in with one of our adult VIP students, and they were arguing back and forth before the front desk. The argument went on and on, and phrases like "playing games" and "not stupid" came up again and again. From the beginning, I realized that this was one of those arguments that go nowhere in China and that I didn't want anything to do with it. I went back outside and waited. Over the next twenty minutes, the argument continued, with the student complaining to one Chinese staff member after another and the teacher going back to his class, coming back to the lobby to shout some additional complaint, going back to class, returning, etc. The whole thing looked just like one of the Chinese melodramas I sometimes see on television.

When things cooled down a bit, I walked inside and sat down in the lobby. Happy called me over to talk to the student. She's the sort of person you immediately feel bad for, a frumpy xiaojie by Chinese standards (short, near-sighted, freckled skin, only achieving the illusion of an A-cup bosom with elaborate padding), and her English is decidedly weak, which probably explains why she's paying all the money for a VIP pass at the training center. "Do you let your students ask questions?" she asked me. I nodded. "Not this. Just, 'Repeat, repeat. Present perfect. No. No, you. I'm teacher. You the student. Stand. Get out.' I want my English better. Why will I come back?" It slowly became clear that the class style and the student's expectations were mismatched, and I thought the easiest solution was obvious: if this class wasn't going to work for her, then she could easily just take a different class.

Before I could point this out, Grumpy came back into the lobby and pulled one of the Chinese staff into a back room, where I could hear him hollering. The phrase "ugly American" popped into my head, and I tried to ignore him by explaining a "story" Happy had shown the woman: an Albert Schweitzer quote--"We should all be thankful to those people who rekindle the human spirit." Grumpy came back out, grumbled, "I never have problems with a student, but she just wants to play games," and went back to his class. (Grumpy uses the phrase "playing games" the way other people use "trying to get one over on me"; this woman wasn't calling out, "Play a game. Play a game," the way kids do in my one class.) The woman started talking in Chinese, laughing loudly (the fake sort of Chinese laugh that always has a darker side behind it), and finally she burst into tears.

One of the Chinese staff took her to the ladies' room, and Happy and I sat there in the lobby, in the awkward quiet that such moments normally create. Finally we ended up talking about how the "story" Happy had chosen wasn't really doing much to help the woman. I managed to explain what "rekindle" meant using my cigarette lighter, and Happy drew the conclusion that Grumpy hadn't rekindled anything; he'd more doused the woman's spirit than ignited it. Once we'd gotten this established between us, Grumpy came out once again, demanding to know where the women were. Happy told him, and Grumpy started knocking on the bathroom door, demanding to talk to the Chinese staff member. I thought, "Here's a nice little demonstration of personal experience at work. The teacher is convinced he's right; the student is convinced she's right. It doesn't matter whether he's a good or bad teacher or joyful or miserable, and it doesn't matter whether she's pathetic or admirable or a good or a bad student; right now, they're both right in the little picture of the universe they're creating for themselves, and it's an ugly thing when two such universes collide."

The drama stretched out for another hour or so; everything runs in cycles here. At one point, Happy held up the pen and said, "Pen," with a big smile on his face. I figured he had come to a similar connection between what was going on and the "story" about the pen. I said, "Yeah, this is a bad pen going on here." He stared at me blankly for a while and said, "No, the pen works fine." He demonstrated this fact by writing "pen" on a scrap of paper. I just said, "Oh, sorry. Yeah, it works fine." For him, the "story" was just a "story," and the awkward silence just seemed like a good time to mention the pen story again, since everybody had been happier back when the story was told. That's what I think at least.

Still the Season to be Scamming

I ran into an old face in my building earlier this week: my one-time rental agent. We took an elevator together, and he made a big show of hurt feelings that I hadn't recognized him immediately. I asked what he was doing with his time (not adding the "now that you've left or been fired from the rental agency"), and he said just the usual: collecting rent.

Near rent-day last year, I'd gotten an early "reminder" about rent from a number I didn't know, asking when I would have time. I had responded that I would pay rent on the usual day, in the usual way, and asked whether that was 可以 (keyi--acceptable). The response I got, at 11:00pm that same night was an emphatic "No okay. Where are you when?" I wrote back that I'd pay through my normal routine and said no more. (Nersey had pointed out that, near the end of the year, more thieves are out and people are trying more little scams to make fast money, so I said as little as possible.)

The next day, when I went to pay rent, I asked the office staff about the telephone number I'd been getting messages from. They claimed not to know it, and I suggested that they ought to notify the police that a former employee was likely using his old work numbers book to steal people's rent money. There's no way of knowing whether they acted on the advice, but seeing the man in my building makes me think they did nothing. Perhaps my one-time agent (whose name--for those potentially renting from the same company and getting odd phone messages around rent time--is the same as a famous city at the mouth of the Chang Jiang river) has gone into business for himself...a particularly illicit sort of business.

********
"Rent Troubles"
Originally posted: 03:41, 2007-09-20

Now that the issue is resolved, I can talk about the last week's panic over my apartment. Late last week, Nersey passed the news on to me that I shouldn't give any money whatsoever to my landlord's proxy. Apparently, I'm renting through a real estate company: not the real estate company that helped me find the apartment, but a real estate company advertising through the real estate company that helped me find the apartment. The proxy, who had given me a bank book for bills and rent, had been fired, and his company had called Jia to get word to me about this. No word was given on whom I was supposed to give my rent to.

With rent day approaching, I needed to figure out whom to pay. Thinking that someone from work might be able to call my building's property management to find out, I tried unsuccessfully to get my building name written down. This led to the qing ni xie fiasco I mentioned a few days ago. That day, Whitetooth agreed to drop by my building during the week to talk to the property management.

Monday afternoon, as I was heading out to work, the security guard stopped me at the door. He spoke at me for about two minutes, and I was able to pick up the phrase deng yi sha (wait a moment) and a lot of repetitions of shang and xia (up and down). I waited for five minutes, said I had to work. "Deng yi sha. Deng yi sha." With a bunch of hand gestures, the guard got across the point that someone had come to see me and had gone shang on the elevator while I was coming xia. (This was a source of much amusement for him; I don't know whether it's because his sense of humor is very simple or because this is about the most sophisticated joke he and I can both understand on opposite sides of the language gap.)

The person I was waiting for came back down, and rushed over to ask, "Do you remember me?" I apologized, said that I didn't. "I was here when you buy the apartment," he told me, handing me his business card: a fold-out Amway catalogue. I told him I remembered him. "We need for a copy of your passbook." I told him I didn't have my passport. "No, the one we gave you, the management passbook."

"You mean the bankbook?"

"Yes, bankbook. Bankbook. We need for a copy." I told him I didn't have the bankbook on me and that I was on the way to work. "This will only take a minute, only a minute." Besides, I explained, the bankbook was supposed to be for my bills, and I didn't usually give copies of bank documents to people I don't know. "We met. Remember me?" I explained that I'd met him, but didn't really know where he was. "This is my name right here." Finally, I explained that I had just been told not to give money to the person who had signed my rental contract, that I didn't know whom I was supposed to deal with regarding my finances, and that I was going to have to have a friend call the real estate office to set up an appointment with someone. "They don't speak English there, though."
"I know. That's why I will ask a Chinese friend to call."

"Oh, okay, and they will tell you that I am person to give money." I said that this may be the case and, if it was, that I would meet with him once an appointment was set up. We parted ways, and the next day Whitetooth called the offices on my account, then called back to tell me that a woman would be at my apartment between 10 and 11am on Wednesday. Whitetooth had some of the same apprehensions about the Amway guy as I did, including the question of why you'd give someone an Amway business card when you were coming to talk about real estate. He also pointed out that the Amway guy's Roman-lettered name was not pinyin but something else.

Wednesday morning the woman came to the apartment, and we went across the street to photocopy the bankbook. I asked where her office was, and she didn't understand me. She spoke a handful of sentences I couldn't understand at all. (I'm used to not understanding what people say to me, but this was different; I couldn't make out a single word in what she was saying, as though her dialect was so different from the Mandarin I'm used to not understanding that it may as well have been Thai. It could have been Thai for all I know.) I had to call Whitetooth to have him explain that I wanted to pay my rent, and that I wanted to do it in an office where I would be given a fapiao (receipt). He too had trouble understanding her, but gathered that I should follow her.

Slowly, she led me to the busstop. This is a good time to point out that this was probably the most timid woman in the world. When she walked, each step only carried her maybe three inches, and when we had to cross roads, she hesitated and hesitated, her face screwed up fearfully. As is common with many Chinese, she seemed terribly concerned that she would lose me in a crowd, and she managed this by "leading" me in Chinese fashion: gesturing with one hand in the general direction we're going, then walking slightly behind me. At restaurants, this can be uncomfortable, since it means you're always guessing at which table you're being led to; in the street, it means that you navigate with a series of tacks, zig-zagging across the sidewalk as you try to guess your destination.

We took a bus just around the corner. Normally, I'd prefer just to walk the distance, but the bus was welcome, given just how slowly the woman moved. From the busstop, she slowly led me across the street and up into an office building. She took me into a little back office, said, "Deng yi sha," and went back into the main office. In a few minutes, she returned with another woman (this one her polar opposite, very lively) and together they handed me a slip of paper. Since I hadn't paid the rent yet, I assumed this was the original receipt from when I signed for the apartment and tried to explain that I wanted to pay the second month's rent and get a receipt for that. This proves very hard to do when you don't know the words "pay" or "rent." The woman pointed again and again to the slip of paper, which I was trying to read, and talked so quickly that I couldn't understand anything she was saying and was becoming distracted from the task of trying to read. They quickly gave up on me and went back into the main office, where I could hear them talking on the phone to someone.

While they were gone, I got to take a good look at the slip of paper and realized that it was in fact a receipt for my rent payment, dated that day. Usually, people make sure to write out such a receipt only after they've gotten the money, and a great deal of showmanship goes into the writing and stamping of all documents. For whatever reason, they'd had the receipt all ready before I even came to the office; perhaps they didn't want to feel rushed when painstakingly copying my name into the appropriate blank. (Chinese often have a hard time reading English written in all capital letters.) It's actually a very efficient way of handling the whole receipt business, which will hopefully catch on. I called the one woman back in, said "Haode haode, kan de dong." ("Okay, okay, I read and understand.") I paid my money, tucked the receipt into a book in my bag, and thanked everyone. One of the women tried to ask or tell me something about a number on my contract, and I had to admit I kan bu dong (read but didn't understand). Apparently it wasn't important, since she didn't press the issue.

As I was leaving, my phone rang. Whitetooth was calling to explain the problem with the receipt; they'd called him. I said that everything was all right and he said, "They're really impatient there. One person said something I didn't understand and then immediately handed the phone over to someone else. I'm not stupid or anything, just don't understand that one thing they're saying. I don't care who it is; I'd rather talk to a janitor if he can say something simply." After I got off the phone, the timid little woman led me to the elevator and then asked the first thing I'd understood all day, asking if I knew how to get home. I thought, "It's around the corner, I think I can manage," but just said, "Dui dui dui." (Yes, yes, yes.)

So everything is resolved. I know where I can walk to to pay my bills, and since the office is right near a Croissants de France, I stopped and had a cup of coffee and a chicken curry pastry on the way home.

"Six Days in Nanshan: Day Six"
Originally posted: 10:58, 2007-09-02

Though I'd gone to bed early the night before, I slept until ten. (This probably sounds early to those who know me back home, but twelve hours away here I'm generally a morning person.) I took a cold shower because I didn't know how to get the water heater working, got dressed out of a suitcase and went for a walk. In part I was just looking to see what was in the neighborhood, but I was also looking for the tell-tale Kodak sign that usually means photocopies are available. After one false alarm (a hair salon with a yellow and red Kodak sign) and walking a few blocks, I found one, ran off a few copies of my passport and headed home.

On the way back, I ran into Little-little, a Chinese friend I'd known in Bao'an--quite odd to see him in Nanshan. I've since run into him again; it seems he has a business partner quite close to my apartment and is often in the area. We had a short talk, then he called Jia, apparently just to tell her he'd seen me. I walked back to the apartment building, where at 1:00, my landlord's proxy was waiting, and angry at my having kept him waiting for two hours. Though he'd told me he'd be there at two, he'd come at eleven instead; either he was reading 11 as a Roman numeral 2, or he'd changed his mind and expected me to have known.

Though I tried handing over my passport copy in the lobby, he insisted we should "do our the business" upstairs in the apartment. We headed up, and he quickly made himself at home, giving me instructions on the use of every item in the building and apartment. Most of the advice was unnecessary, such as his helpful advice for the elevator: "This is up button; you want go up, push this button; this is button down; you don't want to go up, puch this." Perhaps he thought I was confusing the up button with the Chinese character ge and wondering why the building had a large counting-word machine in the lobby. After twenty minutes of experimenting, he managed to get the water heater working, then gave me a stern warning to always keep the gas valve closed while it wasn't in use. I soon realized I'd gotten my first really bad houseguest in China.

My landlord's proxy is a nervous little man who chainsmokes (loudly, with a wet smacking of the lips to accompany each drag), interrupts his sentences regularly to clear his sinuses with a pinch of the nose and a snort (drawing attention to the half-inch of untrimmed nose hair growing past the rim of each nostril), and who thinks his English is quite good. Though I'd only expected to be giving him a passport copy, it turned out he'd come to have all the bills settled. His understanding of the English language doesn't include any distinctions between "give" and "gave" or "pay" and "paid," doesn't include the word "owe," and is a bit fuzzy on the pronouns "I" and "you." His explanations of the bill situation (oh, no "bill" or "receipt" in his lexicon) ran much along the lines of "I give you 94; you pay 328; I pay 42, and I pay the 178; you pay you 45." Since his confidence is quite strong, all of this was said at a rattling pace that most foreigners wouldn't use with other foreigners.

After two hours of talk (and exactly 18 cigarettes), he wrote a note in Chinese, told me to show it to my friend and left, telling me to "Ask he if you, I, are lying." I tried explaining that I didn't think anyone was lying, I just didn't understand what all the numbers were about. Inwardly, I was thinking, "He doesn't expect me to know how to use an elevator, but feels sure I can manage bills quite easily when there are no printed bills before me." I couldn't even ascertain from the conversation whether he was telling me I owed him additional money, whether he'd paid utilities, not even whether he was acknowledging that I'd paid the rent and the deposit for the apartment.

After throwing all my windows open to vent some of the smoke in the apartment, I went over to see Nersey for a bit and tell him about my strange visit. He was able to clear up a lot about how bill-paying goes in China, such as how landlords usually set up a bank account for a renter and pay all the renter's bills out of it. The electric bill and such apparently still come; it's just that you don't do much about them except for making sure there's some money in the bank account and checking the bank account activity regularly to make sure your bills are being paid and that no extra money is missing.

Later, I returned home and had a nap. Around dinner time, I went out looking for a place to eat and discovered a run-down little road where the prices are a bit cheaper than on the main roads. All the menus, though, are entirely in hanzi, and there are no pictures; my Chinese will perforce improve eating along this street. I was able to get a plate of fried egg and tomato with a huge bucket of white rice for eleven kuai. It was quite good, but the lapse back to eating the egg and tomato combination hardened my resolve to start learning menu hanzi as soon as possible. (The egg and tomato was actually quite good, but I'm not about to go back to eating egg and tomato three times a week.)

After dinner I went to buy a pillow at Ren Ren Le. The salesgirl tried to make herself helpful by pointing again and again to the most expensive pillow on display, even though I said I didn't like it. In the end, I bought the cheapest one possible (with the same receipt and form dance as it takes to buy a light bulb), went back to the apartment and slept on the couch again.
---------
In realtime I can now add that the issues of money with my landlord were resolved, not when we both exercised greater patience or worked to speak more clearly. Instead, when he showed up the next day without any real bills or receipts and tried to say the exact same thing, I lost my temper a bit, said things didn't need to be this hard and that I just wanted to be done with all the accounts for the month. The problem was resolved when we went to the buildings main offices and a very patient woman explained to me the bills and who owed what, in Chinese.

北北京京欢欢迎迎你你：The Games Are Coming

Last night, I picked up my first 2008 Olympics-themed geegaws—a set of pins depicting the Fuwa (nee Friendlies)* cavorting in front of the letters C-O-K-E and an old-fashioned 可口可乐 (Coca-Cola) bottle. (Note that the hanzi used in the title to spell out the “Beijing welcomes you”message don’t match up with those used in the mascots’ names; click here for an explanation of the discrepancy.) Since New Year’s, the wind-up to the Olympics (which had been strong when I arrived in 2006, but had since cooled down some) has again ratcheted up a notch.

On most of the buses I take, the same Olympics "good-will" advertisement has been repeating again and again. It shows a series of vignettes in which one Chinese person does a good deed for another, while a third Chinese person watches on with a beatific expression. Such good deeds include someone holding the elevator for another person, someone stopping (in accordance with the law) to let someone else use a cross-walk, and a gallant gentleman deciding to exert a bit of effort and pull a woman out of the way before she is crushed by some falling boxes. I guess this is intended to encourage Chinese toward what many here would consider going far out of their way for others, or toward what we would call basic civility back home.

A few ads are missing as far as I'm concerned, starting with the ad (to be played in buses) encouraging people not to pick their noses and wipe the resulting mess on the buses' handrails and leading up to the ad encouraging people not to let their babies urinate or defecate while on the bus. Yes, that last is a real problem: I recently saw one of my first diapers in China, on a baby, and was quite impressed. Quite impressed, that is, until the baby's grandmother removed his diaper--not in order to change the diaper, but in order to remove it before holding the baby over the bus trash can to use the toilet. Once the child was done relieving himself, she carefully refastened the diaper. Perhaps a proper-diaper-usage ad might be in order.

In order to really prepare for Olympics tourists, though, the biggest thing China should be doing is figuring out a way to advise visitors of some of the quirks of the language. Notably, a pamphlet on the phrase 哪个--usually used to indicate someone is thinking--should be handed out on incoming flights. Though "na ge" is a common pronunciation of this phrase, the pronunciation "nei ge," which sounds quite similar to an English racial slur, is just as common, and first time dark-skinned visitors to China often get steaming mad when they hear some benign local searching for a word: 哪个，哪个，哪个.

My own suggestion for making foreigners feel at home hasn't been acted on yet. (Originally posted: 07:39, 2007-10-09--I have actually devised a cost-effective method for the Chinese government to improve public image come Olympics time. All they need to do is require every registered car-owner to fix a sticker to their car bumper reading (in various languages), "Honk if you're happy to see our foreign friends!" Given the frequency (and usually unclear motivation) with which Chinese drivers honk their horns, tourists will be sure to return home talking about how friendly and open Chinese are.)

*For the basics on the Fuwa, see http://en.beijing2008.cn/80/05/article211990580.shtml.

For the Chinglish reasons behind the name-change from Friendlies to Fuwa, see
http://www.newsgd.com/news/china1/200610170031.htm.

For a more in-depth analysis of the names (and an explanation for why the hanzi used in my title don't match those on the mascots), see http://pinyin.info/news/2005/bei-bei-jing-jing-wel-wel-comes-comes-you-you/. The last is a great read.

Holidays Wrap-up

Well, the holidays are finally all over, and a normal pattern is establishing itself at work. Now there's just a stretch of a month or so before the next holiday (Spring Festival) throws the schedules into chaos again. Fortunately, that means it's also only a stretch of a month or so before I get a whole week off again, for the first time since October (which was a less than satisfying holiday). My week off, I'm hoping to hire a few tutors and take classes as many hours as possible to help tie down some of the vocabulary and sentence patterns I've been cramming for the last month.

I'll repost my Shengdanjie summary below, and I can add at least one additional note to it. A co-worker gave me a great custom-made, novelty T-shirt, a photo of which I'll have to post once I've figured out how to do so. The bottom of the shirt reads, "I am not a Capitalist Drover," due to a slight confusion over Communist terms (see story below).

"Shengdanjie, and Other Holidays"
Originally posted: 01:38, 2007-12-26

Well, Christmas (Shengdanjie) has come and gone, and normality is soon to be restored. The holiday went well and stirred up some interesting little notes:

1) In addition to the Watson's advertising campaign, nearly every store in my area felt the need to break out decorations or uniforms for the holiday season. Most simply wear Santa (Shengdanlaoren--Christmas old man) hats, but I did get to see a number of Shengdanlaoren in full costume, usually handing out candy (and in one case a business card for a prostitution service). For some reason, the men chosen to play the part are invariably young, short, and thin as toothpicks; all told, bizarre renditions, especially when hearing them call out, "Hou, hou, hou, Shendan huaile," which sounds to me just now like "Behind, behind, behind, Christmas happy."

2) Shops are of course putting up decoractions as well. My two favorite are the hair salon I pass on the way to work (whose windows read, "MErry hAPPy") and the kafeiting below work (whose windows read, "Merry Christmas 2008").

3) Our school, of course, held a Christmas party for the students last week, chock full of "genuine Western Christmas activities." The activities included making Christmas cards, meeting Santa (played by a Nigerian), Pin the Nose on Rudolph, Musical Newspapers, Balloon Fights and Fortune Balloons (the object of the last two simply being to pop balloons). The Christmas pinata we'd been planning didn't happen, but the student "gift exchange" (with a 20 kuai limit) went off just as planned--i.e., horribly; it turns out the idea of bringing a gift, then taking another, isn't that easy to grasp, so most of the students brought things they wanted and then cried or screamed when they saw others were taking their gifts. Even more in the holiday spirit, some students simply chose not to bring a gift, then steal one while everyone else was playing games. 'Tis the season to be greedy.

4) A friend from Bao'an noticed on our last trip to the nice jazz club in my area that they have a menorah on display alongside a random collection of objects. No, this isn't an attempt to acknowledge a non-Christmas winter holiday: it turns out the menorah is there because a) it holds candles, and b) candles are romantic. I hope everyone had a sexy Hanukka.

5) Friends and co-workers celebrated Christmas afternoon with a brunch at my apartment, which turned out quite well. My guests showed up bearing gifts--fruit, vegetables, pizza, and KFC--that went well with the breakfast food (deviled eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes, egg-and-sausage casserole) I'd cooked or bought, and I wound up with some useful leftovers (mostly cheese, butter, and bread from Bread Talk).

6) After the brunch, Nersey apparently headed home to have his normal Christmas celebration (eating Chinese food and watching a movie), and the rest of us headed out for Christmas hot-pot.

7) Unfortunately, no one seems to want to come for a "Clean my Apartment" party, so I'll be working to clean up for the next day or two.

"Tale of Two Restaurants"
Originally posted: 08:10, 2007-10-18
I've been getting a mixed sort of welcome from China this year. Two restaurant visits in one week sum up this welcome nicely.

At Qongqing Lao Huzi (a restaurant I like especially for it's name), I had difficulty on Tuesday ordering suan cai (garlic vegetables, I think). No matter how many times I tried to say the dish's name with different tones, the normally patient laoban (big boss) just couldn't understand what I meant. She finally took me back into the restaurant's kitchen, shrugged and pointed around. I found garlic, held it up and said, "Suan?" She nodded; I asked about cai, and she took me over to a cooler, from which she held up different types of vegetables. I picked a nice little leafy vegetable that tastes a bit like spinach and indicated I wanted it fried with garlic. She personally instructed the chef how to prepare the dish, walked me back to my table and tried to chat with me a bit in Chinese. The dish turned out wonderfully, and in the end only cost eight kuai. I'm not even sure whether the dish is on the menu, and she could have charged as much as she liked (after all, I can't find the dish on the menu to check the price), but didn't. So far this is one of my favorite restaurant experiences in China.

Then last night I tried a new restaurant that is a much further walk away from my apartment and had my least favorite restaurant experience ever. I'd gone there with a new Chinese friend, Al, and was in a great frame of mind, having gotten to play chess earlier that night with another expat, Dawei. Al and I ordered drinks, and when they arrived, I was asked to pay for mine in advance. I paid, thinking it odd that I was the only one at the table who had to do so. I asked for some hua sheng (peanuts), and when they came, I was asked to pay for those up front as well. While Al was going through the menu, I watched the other tables in the restaurant and saw no evidence of pay-as-you-go dining. I had Al ask the next table over whether the restaraunt's policy was for people to pay item by item; they laughed loudly and said it wasn't. When our food started to come out, the same thing happened; dish by dish, I was expected to pay up front.

I asked Al if he'd ever seen this before, and he said he hadn't. "Maybe it's you're a foreigner, so they think you'll run away without paying." Stupid people, I thought; I've never known a foreigner to dash and dine in China; then I thought I maybe wasn't being fair, maybe they'd had a bad experience with a foreigner before. Still, the idea of my (and only my) having to pay in advance rankled a bit, and I made a few jokes about the laowai fei (the foreigner fee); Al and I talked a bit, and the food wasn't bad.
A nearby table heard me mangling the Chinese language and invited Al and I over to their table. We joined them and I fielded the normal questions, then stopped to listen as Al spoke to the others. He made some joke about the unusual payment arrangement I had with the restaurant, and conversation went on relatively happily for a few minutes.

At this point, the laoban, an angry-looking little woman with short hair, came over and started talking sharply to Al. "She says we have to go," he told me. "Oh, are they closing?" I asked. "No, she says actually just you are to go." "Why me?" I asked. The two talked for a while. "She says you're making people uncomfortable." "What people?" I asked. Again they talked. "She says everyone."

Meanwhile the woman was talking to the people at the table, all of whom now did really seem to be uncomfortable. "Why don't you ask them what they think?" I suggested. "After all, they invited us to join them." Al tried, but whenever he spoke to someone at the table, they just put their heads down in a gesture common among Chinese in embarrassing situations. I suggested to Al that maybe we should move back to our own table and finish eating.

"I think maybe we should just go," he said. "I paid for food, and I'm going to eat it," I said. "If these people are really uncomfortable, fine, I'll sit at a different table, but I shoudln't have to leave." The whole thing was really puzzling.

Al and I moved over to our table, and he fidgeted nervously while we kept eating. Meanwhile, the laoban kept talking to the other table, more loudly than before. The waiters and the cooks had all come out and gathered around her. Finally Al said, "We really should go," with a peculiar urgency. I asked why we had to leave so quickly. "She's using old words, very bad words." I asked him what he meant, and he said, "She says you are . . . " He had to consult a pocket translator for a minute. He held it out to me so that I could read the word "capitalist roader" on the screen.
"Are you sure?" I asked. It didn't make any sense to me; how could I be a capitalist roader? More importantly, how could a Chinese capitalist (i.e., business-owner) use even the word "capitalist" as an insult? He said he was sure this was the word she was using. I noticed that by now the whole table was starting to glare at me, and there was a twingy nervousness to everyone at the restaurant. Al and I left, started to walk home.

"What was that about?" I asked.

Al said, "She I think is scared of foreigners. She says you are capitalist roader, you will make the country bad." I asked whether people talked like this normally. (Actually, I asked what the hell year it was that people were still talking this way.) "This is old words," he said. "Old, bad words. No one says this now. She is . . . backwards . . . We should be faster." He started to walk more quickly, so I looked back. One of the waiters and a cook from the restaurant were following us. Al and I walked faster and faster, and still the two men followed us. They didn't leave off until we were close to my apartment, where the security guards walked over to talk to the two restaurant workers. The whole thing was quite unnerving.

Last night the thing that amazed me was that this old word, capitalist roader, could be used now by someone who is quite clearly a capitalist about someone who really barely qualifies as one. The use of the word just seemed empty, hollow, as though it were meaningless--just something mean and ugly to say about someone. I thought all these political words and phrases had always been that way, just negativity and insults thrown at people without taking the target into account.

Today I realized that the most amazing thing about the experience was that the word still works. I had watched the mood of the whole restaurant change, just because one nasty, little woman used this meaningless word from the past. People who had been excited to talk to me only moments before had become detached and maybe a bit hostile just because of these words. It seems there's an incredible amount of mob mentality still tied to what should be obsolete language. Truly bizarre.

新年好呀, Part II: Oh, My Darling

Along with other New Year's notes, I can now add that the mystery of why so many Chinese have "Oh My Darling Clementine" as a ring-tone has been solved. In China, it's better known as the "Happy New Year Song," to wit:

新年好呀. 新年好呀. 祝贺大家新年好. 我门唱歌. 我门跳舞. 祝贺大家新年好.
Xin nian hao ya. Xin nian hao ya. Zhu he da jia xin nian hao. Wo men chang ge, wo men tiao wu. Zhu he da jia xin nian hao.
Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you all (or "everyone"). We are singing; we are dancing. Happy New Year to you all.

"Opening and Reform: Guns n Roses"
Originally posted: 07:36, 2007-09-27

In the area I live, they have three-screened television displays with sound set up every hundred feet or so in the sidewalks, usually playing either the same cartoon that I see on the 369 bus or reruns of "America's Funniest Home Videos," both of which involve a lot of people falling down or getting hit in the head or the crotch. (The crotch-shot is very near the pinnacle of hilarity in China.) Two nights ago, though, something new was playing, an old video of a Western magician.

It took me about five screens to realize that I'd seen this magic act before. In the big finale, the magician gets locked into this peculiar box, where you can see his legs, arms and head but not his torso; his assistant then crawls through the box, and apparently through all the magician's vital organs. I'd crouched down on a shop's steps to watch the show, and was busy thinking how funny it was to see this on a street in China, when a Chinese kid singing along to the music made me realize what the soundtrack for the show was: Guns n Roses' "Don't Cry" (1991).

There are a number of such Western songs that I hear in an average week. Andes Cafe routinely plays Londonbeat's "I've Been Thinking About You" (1991) and Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" (1992). Bon Jovi's "It's My Life" (2000) is covered constantly in nightclubs, and Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" (1981) and The Cranberries' "Zombie" (1994?) are both popular with female singers. I constantly hear ringtones playing "What Child Is This?" and "Oh My Darlin' Clementine"; the latter has a few Chinese versions whose meanings are beyond my understanding. It's also very common for me to hear Chinese songs with familiar music that I can't quite put my finger on; Chinese lyrical rewrites are common. (The song "Bu Pa Bu Pa," it turns out, is the Chinese version of "Dragostea Din Tei," and it took me months to realize I was hearing "Oh My Darling Clementine" everywhere, even though I knew the song was familiar.)

Maybe this cross-cultural sharing is a good thing, though, at least for me. Most of the traditional music here (even the boy-band music that's a bit more modern) isn't that enjoyable to a waiguoren, but the heavily Western-influenced music can be quite good. Last year I felt a huge sense of relief whenever I got to hear "One Night in Beijing" instead of traditional Chinese or covered Western music, and this year I particularly like a song called "Zhu Xiaole" ("The Pig or Pigs Smiled"). I don't really understand it yet, but it's at least one song that's worth listening to while trying to figure out the meaning, unlike another song with "Wo ai ni, wode jia" ("I love you, my home") as a refrain; that one I can nearly understand all of, but it makes my skin crawl to hear it. Meanwhile, I've gotten far enough with "Zhu Xiaole" to get that each refrain starts with a variation of "Beijingren shuo" ("Beijing people say"), changing the locales each time to include at least Shanghai and Guangdong (my province).