Running With Fire

Chinese Guy Bitten by Panda, Again

2008-11-25T04:44:00.000-08:00

Yet again, someone decided to jump a fence and enter a panda's enclosure here in the PRC, and yet again, said fool has been mauled. This time it wasn't a drunk, and it wasn't a dopey teenager. This time it wan't GuGu, twice-headlining panda in Beijing news stories.

This time, panda YangYang took a bite out of the crime of stupidity, and an uncounted number of bites out of a college student surnamed Liu. (Though a few articles have tried to categorize the twenty-year-old Liu as a "teen," such whitewashing isn't saving anyone any face.) Whatever Liu's major might be, it surely isn't logic, or press relations: asked for explanation (as to just what sort of person thinks jumping into a pen with a bear is a good idea), Liu said, "YangYang was so cute, and I just wanted to cuddle him."

Asked for comment, YangYang informed reporters that the attack should be considered as "a sort of commentary on the failings of a college system whose requirements are simply too lenient." He went on to lament the "apparent inability of some of the nation's top graduates to generalize experiences."

Liu's blunder comes at a particularly embarrassing time for wildlife officials, whose recent ad campaigns--aimed at giving pandas a harder edge--have apparently failed.

Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice (Like Salt and Margarine)

2008-09-15T21:58:00.000-07:00

I've been getting exposure to quite a few strange tastes in the past few weeks, some of them pleasant surprises, some of them familiar shocks that I'd almost been able to forget from last year.

Returning from his summer trip to Malaysia and other parts, Nersey brought me back a tin of Malaysian-style coffee, with the warning that the first cup might take some getting used to. The tin lists the ingredients as "Coffee (70%) Salt, sugar, and margarine (30%)," and I'll leave it up to coffee experts to explain just what they do with the last three ingredients. (Wiki has this to say about it.) Strange as margarine and salt coffee sounds, the result of brewing (I used my regular perculator instead of a sock) is ... well, the first few cups take some getting used to. The coffee turns out thick and black, and there is a strange aftertaste, which (maybe suggested by the ingredient list on the tin) I'd describe as buttery. By my third pot, I'd cut back on the amount of grounds I used for each pot, and really, the coffee is pretty good. I don't think I'll ever convert from, say, Sumatra Mandheling to this Malaysian variation, but I won't turn down the offer of another cup. (In fact, I'm considering a trip to Malacca during my upcoming vacation time.)

中秋天节 (Zhong qiutian jie, Mid-Autumn festival) was Sunday. This is a traditional Chinese holiday, among the country's most important, during which people take a day of work to spend time with family, eat and gaze at the moon. (Nowadays, moon-gazing has been largely replaced by staring at the television set, as with 春节--Chun jie, Spring Festival.) The moon plays a big part in the 中秋天节 festivities in the form of 月饼 (yue bing, moon cakes). These saccharine, moist and sticky little cakes come with a number of surprise fillings (traditionally, lotus paste, bean paste, jujube paste, yam--of the purple potato-tasting variety--and hard-boiled egg yolk). Most of the fillings have chalky textures, apparently chosen to offset the jelly-like texture of the surrounding, and tastes chosen to offset the sickeningly sweet exteriors. So what you wind up getting inside the mooncake wrapper is the long-lasting and low-tech equivalent of an ipecac-filled chocolate.

What you also get for 中秋天节, if you're unfortunate enough to be a teacher, is a whole lot of moon cakes, usually from children with very fragile egos. This year I got two big, big boxes of moon cakes, one from the grandfather of a serious trouble student (It is my assumption that this gift box was a poorly thought-out apology) and another from the parents of a teenaged student who has been a VIP on and off for the past year. The boxes are flashy, gold and red affairs, ornately decorated and weighing in at about ten to fifteen pounds apiece, while only holding a few moon cakes each. (They're also expensive as all get out, adding a large helping of guilt to the honor of the gift.) I also got single moon cakes from quite a few students who, not content with my most heart-felt thanks, insisted I have a try, so I downed four of the gross little things on Saturday, trying my best to smile. In another week, the experts tell me, I may have finished digesting them. Anyone who thinks my assessment of this traditional food may be a bit harsh should check out an oldie from the blog scene: Noboby Likes Moon Cakes.

In other news, I have discovered Hunan and 客家 Kejia food, both of which now join Sichuan, Xian and Xinjiang food, on my list of 好吃. From Hunan, 红烧肉 (hong shao rou), thick hunks of pork and some small vegetables in a rich red sauce and 农家炒肉 (nongjia chao rou, Farmer's home fried meat), little strips of pork cooked in a heaping helping of edible spicy peppers have become part of my regular routine. I've had a certain kind of tofu a number of times while in China--a yellow, eggy tofu rectangle with a small piece of sausage in the center; it turns out this is 客家豆腐, Kejia or Hakka tofu. The dish tastes a bit like the egg and sausage casserole my family makes for 圣诞节 (Shendanjie, Christmas), and has made for a nice brunch-time treat on my days off. If the self-styled Guangdong/Hakka women I met on Sunday is right, and Hakka should be counted as Guangdong people, then I guess there is such a thing as good Guangdong food.

Trust Us. We Know What We're Doing.

2008-08-26T02:36:00.000-07:00

Checking out of my old apartment turned out to be more of a pain in the neck than finding a new one. Because my former landlord was apparently a busy man, he'd long ago turned all the actual rent issues over to a real estate company, with whom I'd had at least one prior problem.

This meant that my deposit--a whopping two months' rent--was in the hands of the real estate company, rather than those of my landlord. Before you get your deposit money back, any outstanding bills have to be resolved, and an inventory of the apartment has to be done (in my case, to be sure that a cagey 外国人 doesn't make off with some poor sap's TV). After two hours of looking over the place, the real estate agents conceded that I hadn't stolen or damaged anything, and the landlord had not only agreed but also pointed out that I'd actually fixed a few things up, putting the place into better order than it had been when I moved in.

I asked whether we should go to the real estate office then to take care of my deposit. "在这里我们没有钱。我们的福田办公室有钱。你请给我们你的合同和你的发票，还有我们的福田(什么）五天后(什么) 你钱." (Zai zheli women meiyou qian. Womende Futian bangongshi you qian. Ni qing gei women nide hetong he nide fa piao, haiyou womende Futian (shenme) wu tian hou (shenme) ni qian.--We don't have money here. Our office in Futian has money. Please give us your contract and your receipts, and in five days our Futian (something) will (something) you money.

I responded, “你们先给我钱，就我给你我的发票." (Nimen xian gei wo qian, jiu wo gei ni wode fapiao.--Give me then money first, then I'll give you my receipt.) Then the agent did the one thing that always tells me I'm about to be screwed over by someone; he said, in English, "Trust us. We know what we're doing. This is process, always process." I told him I didn't much care about the process, pointing out that once I handed over all my receipts and my contract I had nothing left to indicate his company owed me money. Even my landlord said I shouldn't hand over my contract or receipts until after I'd been paid. "This is not a confident matter. We just want to help." I told him he could help me by writing down the address of their Futian office and letting them know that I'd be coming to collect my money at my earliest convenience, so they'd better get ready.

The next day, I got a message from the company, asking for my fax number. I sent them the school's number, and they faxed me an invoice detailing what they thought I was owed as a return of my deposit. Unfortunately, they'd listed one month's rent as unpaid (which was bunk), bringing my refund down significantly to about nothing. One of my coworkers called and cussed them out over the phone, and then they sent another fax, this one indicating that I was owed more money. They then began calling the school, asking me to sign and date the invoice and fax it back to them so that they could prepare my money.

I asked a coworker whether the invoice clearly stated I was owed money or whether my signing might indicate I'd been paid money. The invoice stated neither. Again, my coworker called and cussed the company out.

The next week, at my earliest convenience, I made a trip to Futian and visited the company's main office. When they asked what I wanted I showed them the invoice, and they immediately said, "你需要去那个南山办公室." (Ni xuyao qu nage Nanshan bangongshi.--You have to go to that Nanshan office.) I told them that, since the Nanshan office had told me to come to the Futian office, I was there, and I planned on getting my money.

“如果我需要再去南山，就我先要去给公安说话." (Ruguo wo xuyao zai qu Nanshan, jiu wo xian yao qu gei gongan shuo hua.--If I have to go to Nanshan again, then I'll go to the police to talk first.)

Then the woman quickly went back to get my money.

Back Online in a New Place

2008-08-22T23:22:00.000-07:00

It's been a good while since I put up a post, mostly because I've been busy. (It's a funny thing how when interesting things are happening, it's harder to find time to write them down, while when nothing's happening, I've all the spare time I could use.)

In recent weeks, I've changed apartments, which has eaten up most of my free time. Just looking for an apartment in Shenzhen is one of the worst experiences anyone can live through, and it's getting more expensive. (Oddly, while the real estate market is consistently going down in Guangdong, the asking prices for rent are rising. The explanation I've been given is that if fewer people are buying homes, then it must be because they're waiting for prices to go down even lower, and if they're not buying, they must be renting; therefore, raise the rent.)

On the bright side, the real estate agents in town seem to be getting a little better about showing people to apartments. The first agent I contacted actually showed me more than ten places on our first day of hunting, and she called back the next day, eager to show me more places. Perhaps the closing of many real estate offices has led to an increase in customer service and competitiveness: See last year's apartment shopping stories below. At the end of the first day, though, she did tell me, "我们今天看了那么多房子。如果你不买一家，就我会哭!" (Women jintian kanle name duo fangzi. Ruguo ni bu mai yi jia, jiu wo hui ku! "We've seen so many apartments today. If you don't buy one, I'll cry!")

Overall, the apartment shopping was almost fun at first. I got to practice my Chinese a lot, and I got some good exercise. After a few hours, though, the whole process started to wear thin. Bathrooms in most places were too small, or had squatters. We saw at least a dozen huge apartments with no furniture. Many of the apartment owners didn't even bother to clean the places before trying to find new tenants (in two cases, families totalling more than ten people were still in residence), so bonuses like air conditioners or refrigerators were unseen behind piles of of clothes, knick-knacks or packing boxes.

In the end, I finally found a decent place where the landlord seems to understand investing a little bit of money into an apartment raises the value. The place I have now has a smaller living room, bathroom and kitchen than my previous apartment did, but these are all large enough to be comfortable. (And, really, I never got much use out of the massive sofa I had in my former apartment.) The bedroom is larger, so I'll probably end up putting in a desk for my computer--I may even get an Internet connection...maybe. My rent is about 200 元 per month cheaper, and I can walk to school, which doesn't save that much money but does cut down on the number of smelly, dirty, loud, or otherwise offensive people I have to sit next to in a day.

Probably the biggest improvement is my balcony: large enough for a patio table (metal and glass, with an umbrella) and four chairs. Since my living room is smaller now, I may not be able to host as many people at one time, but with the patio set-up, I'll probably be able to do a lot more barbequing a lot more comfortably than I used to. The balcony's cooler at my new place, too, and more private (meaning I'm looking out over rooftops instead of at a wall of other apartments), so I've been spending a lot more time there.

It took me about three days to move all my things, and about four trips in cabs. Then I got to go through the process of closing out my contract for the old apartment, a pain I'd been warned about before, which ended up being worse than I expected. (No matter how much the service may improve when it comes to getting you into an apartment, there's been no decrease in the size of the hassles you face when you leave.) Next post I'll be sure to write something about the little scam artists in my old real estate agency.

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Six Days in Nanshan: Day Two
Originally posted: 07:33, 2007-08-27

After a slow breakfast and some reading, I left the Hai Tao and got a cab to the Hai Wan hotel, where it turned out no rooms were available. I wound up at another hotel whose name I couldn't discern, unless it was actually "The Vienna Group," which is under the same management as the Hai Wan.

Where the Hai Tao had been well above my price range for the long term, this second hotel closer to the cost for renting. Besides, this hotel room provided me with much better motivation to get out and find an apartment. A bit darker and older, this room was a nice enough place to sleep and shower, but not the kind of place you'd want to kill time in.

I met with Nersey and his mother-in-law to go apartment hunting and ran smack dab into the Shenzhen business model for real estate. Set up an appointment to see places with a company, and you find out they only begin looking through listings (mostly above your price range) after you've arrived. Ask to see one of the places in your price range taped to the agency's window, and you're told it's too far away or that a much pricier one is more "beautiful." Beauty >Space+Cost is apparently the basic formula in determining desirability in housing here. After hours with the first agency, we got to see two apartments: in one the bathroom was simply too small; in the other the bathroom would have been large enough had it not also been the laundry (with a washing machine plunked right in its center). I learned the phrase "Ce suo tai xiao le" quite quickly and had a good deal of fun sitting on the washing machine, pantomiming scrubbing my feet and back.

We parted ways with the real estate folk and had lunch at Hasio, then rested a while. Later Nersey and I went out walking, collecting mingpien, and trying to get to see apartments. We managed to get a look at a little loft-style place that was really quite nice (or would have been, were it not for the garden gnome-sized bathroom), and later met with an English-speaking agent called "Apple," who almost took us to see the same loft we'd already seen. After a visit back to her office, she was able to show us an unfurnished apartment in one of the Time buildings; the owner raised the rent by 300 kuai per month as soon as we entered, and it just wasn't worth it without the furnishings.

I had dinner with Nersey and his family, and his wife made a few phone calls to agents that night, asking them not to bother calling unless they had a few apartments to show instead of just one. I wasn't waiting with bated breath while I returned to the hotel.

****On a side note, in real time I have had my first corporate class tonight. For now, I'm teaching English training at a big computer company on Monday and Tuesday nights. The class went quite well from my point of view. The students are talkative, have good senses of humor when it comes to success or mistakes in English, and seem to be very much invested in improving their English. Even better, their English is already quite good, so it's largely a matter of lowering their inhibitions about speaking. In true Chinese fashion, I'll probably have to wait a week or so to see if the class went well for them, but tomorrow I have the chance to talk less (since I don't have to do the whole spiel about my credentials) and lean on the curriculum now that I know how far they've gotten in it. Hopefully, things will continue going well, and I won't wind up with the same fate as their last teacher, who apparently forgot to let them speak now and then.

Six Days in Nanshan: Day Three
Originally posted: 08:22, 2007-08-29

For the second day in a row, I had a breakfast pass, though this meal turned out more disappointing than the previous day's: no good meat, no fruit, just a thoroughly Chinese breakfast--various steamed bread objects and congee. The only things I recognized as baozi were stuffed with zhu (pig) something, and that something wasn't rou (meat), whatever part of the pig it was. In the end I got a tray of jidan (egg) buns that were light and moist to look at, but dry and chewy to eat. Coffee, it turned out, wasn't part of the breakfast pass, so the disappointment cost me 50 RMB; live and learn, no such thing as another free meal.

Nersey and I started apartment hunting again, this time with an agent who, while not seeming to get the point of looking at many apartments, was at least willing to try. Such people help you appreciate China's sense of service, even after others have robbed you of hope. After seeing two lackluster places in the immediate area, we took a longer walk out toward the local Walmart to the NewEra building. There I got to see the first apartment in my price range that I could imagine living in. Though small, it used space very economically, allowing a good amount of space in the kitchen and bathroom. Alongside the mainroom was a sheltered balcony-cum-laundry, and the main room itself was built on a sort of open concept design; a half-wall of silhouette shelves divided the main space mentally into a sitting room and bedroom, with a curtain hung on the bed side to create actual privacy. It was a cozy little place, well furnished and decorated in a style John Waters would have loved--nice '60s and '70s colors and a sofa whose camp value alone justified a good part of the rent.

For some reason the owner felt it very important that a Chinese lantern be hung from the curtain rod while we were there looking. Since I couldn't follow the Chinese being spoken, I'm not sure whether she was just taking advantage of having people taller than herself in the apartment or whether she thought the lantern really filled out the whole overall style of the place. I put the apartment in the category of "very strong maybe" and said I'd contact the agent if I was still interested after seeing a few more places.

Nersey and I went back to his place to have lunch and a rest. Since his knee was giving him a lot of pain, his mother-in-law gave him a Chinese medical treatment; this is a massage that looks quite painful--consisting largely of loud beating and vigorous stretching of the leg--but I'm told it's actually very relaxing.

Later we saw a few more places, all disappointing. The worst was over the Eastern Athens Hotel, a cramped little space with a bathroom so Lilliputian that, were I able to sit on the training-sized toilet, my knees would jut out into the entryway and showers would have to be taken in just such a posture. The NewEra apartment was looking better and better. I got back to the hotel figuring I had at least one good option if the next day turned out to be a bust.

Six Days in Nanshan: Day Four
Originally posted: 07:53, 2007-08-30

I skipped breakfast at the hotel, opting instead for a walk around the area and some vegetable baozi with a canned coffee; all told, this ran me just five kuai. Nersey begged out of the apartment hunting, as his knee was still acting up, so I set out with two agents and a little English to one of the Time buildings and saw two apartments.

The first was a spacious room with a large kitchen, large bathroom and good-sized bedroom set off of it. It had lots of storage space, one large balcony and a second balcony for the washing machine and complete furnishings, all new or in good shape. (This is actually the apartment I wound up renting.) Next I saw a place in the same building, offered by the same owners, for the same price; this second place was smaller, on a lower floor (which Chinese apparently like less) had no washing machine or refrigerator and only one air conditioner set in the place of the least possible usefulness. "Yi yang, danshi meiyou, meiyou, meiyou . . . wo bu dong," I said to the real estate agent: "The same (price, I hoped, was understood), but doesn't have, doesn't have, doesn't have . . . I don't understand." He shrugged, nodded, smiled; I think maybe he got the joke.

I managed to get across that I really liked the first place, but that I'd need to wait for my Zhongguo pengyou (Chinese friend) before I could settle anything. While I was waiting for Nersey's wife to get home, I went out with another agent from another agency. She was able to show me a once-nice apartment whose current resident looked like he was preparing for the lead role in a cinematic version of Kafka's The Hunger Artist and who had done a good job of starting the apartment's decline into utter squalor; all that was missing was a boarded over window and maybe a graffitoed RIP for someone named Tiny or Boo. Then she showed me an absolutely beautiful room in the same building (with enough furnishings and details--such as a forty-two inch plasma TV--to make up about a year's salary for me) that just exceeded my price range by, oh, half of my monthly salary or so.

After Nersey's wife came home, we had dinner, and then a storm broke out, during which Nersey's mother-in-law taught me shandian (lightning), leisheng (thunder), and that you shouldn't touch a shu (tree) during a thunderstorm, though I think tree is actually shumu. We decided against going to look at more apartments, and I settled myself on the apartment I'd seen that morning.

We walked down to the agency, but it was closed for a business function; she phoned the agent, and he and his partner came rushing back to the office just to explain to us that the landlord was currently out of town, so the apartment couldn't be rented yet. After a bunch of talk (among the Chinese) and some confusion (on my part), we managed to set up a meeting for the next morning, but only after I'd paid a deposit--not the apartment deposit, but an agency deposit; I'm not sure why. (Perhaps arranging to sign for an apartment and then not showing up is the Chinese equivalent of knocking on someone's door and running away.)

好吃:Hao Chi

2008-07-18T00:06:00.000-07:00

Since I've been asked recently about what foods from home I miss the most here in China, I figured I'd mention a bit about the dining and snacking situation in China.

I eat out for nearly every meal here: restaurants are so cheap that it costs about the same for me to cook at home as it does to eat out, and the Chinese food I can buy in a restaurant is much better than Chinese food I could cook myself. Though I'm actually pretty good at cooking Western dishes, it's impossible, unusual, or ridiculously expensive to get many of the ingredients I need. The things that are 找不到 (zhao bu dao, not to be found) in Shenzhen are herbs, spices, and some fruits and vegetables--there's no fresh basil or thyme here, though there's coriander aplenty, and things like cloves or allspice are only available in the foreign import shops, sometimes; artichokes and raspberries are as common as unicorns. A lot of the other common ingredients I'd use at home--things like canned tomato paste or corn, soup mixes, wheat pasta, BBQ sauce, 等等--sell at steep prices here (One can of tomato paste goes for about 8 元; that doesn't sound like much until you consider I can buy a large bowl of egg-and-tomato fried noodles for about the same price). So I end up eating out every night, unless Nersey and his family invite me to dinner or I cook to celebrate some holiday.

The good news about this is that the Chinese food I can get at restaurants is also much better than that I could get back home in the States. Sichuan, Xinjiang and Xian dishes are all spicy--really spicy; back home I'd tried dishes like Kung Pao chicken (here, gong bao ji ding) and been disappointed, but most of the Sichuan places that cook it here manage to make it both spicy and tasty, a skill that eludes most of the stateside cooks. Sichuan cuisine also has a lot of ma la dishes, made with little peppers so spicy your mouth goes numb while you're eating, that are high on my list. The Xinjiang restaurants make a lot of lamb dishes, a lot of noodle dishes, and some of the best barbeque I've ever had: at least once a week, I just eat food on a stick (lamb on a stick, chicken wing on a stick, sliced potato on a stick, mushrooms on a stick, 等等) all grilled with hot pepper and cumin. At the local Xian restaurant I've discovered a dish called 回锅冬瓜 (hui guo dong gua) that's some kind of spicy battered and fried squash; even though it's no longer on the menu, the cooks will still make it for me when the supermarket next door has 冬瓜 on sale.

I do miss some food from time to time, like meatball parmigiana subs, good steaks or gravy, but I rarely get long-term cravings for specific things. Probably the thing that's easiest to miss from home isn't the kind of food as much as convenience: for some extra money and a lot of time, I can eat, say, pasta salad here, but one thing I can't do is go to the supermarket and buy a pint container of pre-made pasta salad. I can buy a decent sandwich at Andes cafe or hunt around for thinly sliced meat at restaurants, shop for bread that isn't sickeningly sweet, take out a loan for some cheese and put together a decent sandwich on my own, but I can't just order an Italian cold cut sub for take-out. In fact, I can't get cold cuts: they just don't have them here. And cheese here is so expensive that I rarely even eat it with crackers, let alone cut it up and put it on a sandwich where I'll hardly taste it.

One thing I don't miss that much anymore is pizza, especially not now. Granted, living above a Pizza Hut makes it hard to miss pizza much, but a few months ago I was getting cravings for good pizza. (The stuff at Pizza Hut just isn't that good--not since the Arabian Nights pizza left the menu--and I'd been getting tired of it.) Ah, but 意想不到, a wonderful thing has happened here in Nanshan! Just as Pizza Hut rolled out its new Olympics themed menu (including the "World Conqueror Pizza")--Jia gave me a brochure for a new pizza place: Champion Pizza, whose incredibly perplexing website apparently hypnotizes people to make them want more pizza. Since trying it, I've developed an out-and-out addiction for it--an addiction largely fueled by the VIP cardholders' deal they offer: two ten-inch pizzas for 57 元. Compared to 78元 for a nine-incher at Pizza Hut, that's almost like getting free food.

So at the moment, the food situation here is pretty good. If anything I think more about the food from here I'll miss when I go back to the States. For example, there are a lot of good eggplant and tofu dishes here (yes, good eggplant, good tofu) that I know I can't get at home.

放假: Taking a Vacation

2008-07-07T01:52:00.000-07:00

在夏天, 老师们几乎都放假,大概放两个月. (Zai xia tian, lao shi men ji hu dou fang jia, da gai fang liang ge yue.) In the summer, almost all teachers get to take a vacation for about two months. I'm not that lucky; since I work at a training center, my school winds up being just as busy as usual (if not busier) during the summer.

Nonetheless, I've scored something like a vacation, because I have a fixed class on Saturday afternoons, one that can't be cancelled, which means that I can't work a set Monday through Friday schedule. I've enjoyed that fixed class since it started, and it's been my favorite class for a while. Now, I think I'll never like another class as much again.

Why? Because, since I have to work Saturday, it means my schedule is the least suited to the new summer camp classes that began today--the summer kids' classes. This means that I won't have to teach anyone under the age of eighteen or so until (probably) early in September. So my schedule for the foreseeable future includes just two fixed classes (one a corporate gig) and a bunch of flexible adults' classes. Sometimes a change really is as good as a break.

Independence Day may have officially been last Friday (which a few foreign teachers--three of us actually American--and I celebrated at my place with burgers, chips, pasta and potato salad), but today I feel a much greater sense of freedom than I did three days ago.

...And a Sight of Beijing, Hold the Mao

2008-06-15T02:14:00.000-07:00

A former 同事 (tong shi, co-worker) returned to Shenzhen for a week after having spent about a month or so traipsing around China. The traveling opportunity would almost be enough to make me jealous--after all, it's a chance to really see something of China, instead of just Shenzhen--but seems to involve a lot more walking, sweating, and running into other strange back-packers than I really have the desire for. (Among the strangest on-the-road tales was the one about a 40-something guy who's apparently traveling with a stuffed koala bear--a stuffed koala bear with definite opinions about weather, tourist sites, 等等, that only he can hear.)

The most interesting bit of information, though, came from Beijing. It seems Mao's tomb is closed, and Beijing's Underground City is also unavailable for viewing. In fact, it sounded like nearly all Beijing's tourist sites were "closed for renovations" while she and her beau were there--renovations apparently expected to last until after the Olympics. If the PRC really has shut down all the tourist sites in Beijing (except for the Wall and the ugly buildings constructed for the Olympics), it must mean someone didn't get the memo about basic marketing.

Add this to the recent visa restrictions over security concerns and all the areas where travel is currently restricted due to one disaster or another, and you wonder whether 2008 won't actually become a benchmark low for China's tourist industry.

Quick Notes: Da Bao, Di Li, Deluge

2008-06-12T03:59:00.000-07:00

So the PRC has made a bold and positive move to protect the environment, and I'm already seeing the effects close to home. In a city where I rarely see blue skies and only see green or black water, I'm at least starting to see fewer plastic bags, thanks to a new policy requiring stores to use heavier strength bags and charge customers for them. Of course, a Google search on "china plastic bags" shows at least one US environmentalist criticism of the move, but the change is a great one as far as I'm concerned. Now when I go to buy juice or water at the 7-11 that's right next to my building's entrance, I no longer have to watch the shop attendants wrap a tiny plastic bottle in two or three plastics while fruitlessly arguing, "不需要包。真的，我家离这儿不远." (Bu xu yao bao. Zhen de, wo jia li zhe'r bu yuan. I don't need a bag. Really, my house isn't far from here.) The only downside of the ban is that I've always used the endless supply of bags the stores give me to line my garbage can at home, but I guess the brighter side even of that is that I can now buy a heavy-duty garbage bag for just 2 毛 (2/10ths of an RMB)--one that won't break the minute I dump out my coffee grounds.

Now the government just needs to find a way to get rid of the old flimsy bags at restaurants, where I'm still getting the same treatment every time I 打包 (da bao, carry-out) food.

Every month, the school calls a handful of each teacher's students to find out whether they're happy with classes. Every month, there are either students who are unhappy (usually because the teacher is 无聊--wu liao, boring) or students who are happy for very peculiar reasons: "The teacher is responsible" is one of the most common comments. This month, I got one of my strangest comments yet: "老师教学很好，地理知识也很好." (Lao shi jiao xue hen hao, di li zhi shi ye hen hao. The teacher teaches well, and his geographical knowledge is also very good.) For someone from a country where most students can't find Iraq on a map, this came as a big surprise at first, until I remembered that I live in a country where most of my students can only name five countries (in their native language, at that) and constantly confuse Australia for Japan when looking at a map.

Nersey and I have been discussing plans for construction of an ark. The rainy season (which was in May last year) has hit Shenzhen. In the past week or so, we've had three days of straight rain, three days of sunny weather accompanied by nighttime downpours, and a few days of mixed drizzly, cloudy and all around depressing weather. The rain has been heavy enough that I've had to stop using my living room air conditioner most day, since the drainage system is no longer working properly. Fortunately, all of the weather has thus far been accompanied by relatively steady winds, so I've been able to open the balcony doors and find relief.

Creepy Enough Yet?

2008-05-25T02:45:00.000-07:00

在生命中的每一年，在一年的每个日子，在一天的每个小时，在一小时的每一分钟，在一分钟的每秒钟，我都在想你，念你，恋你，等你。
Zai sheng ming zhong de mei yi nian, zai yi nian de mei ge ri zi, zai yi tian de mei ge xiao shi, zai yi xiao shi de mei yi fen zhong, zai yi fen zhong de mei miao zhong, wo dou zai xiang ni, nian ni, lian ni, deng ni.

More and more I'm getting messages like the one above, now at the rate of one per day, mostly from one woman I met about four or five weeks ago. I'd played a game of Chinese chess with some of her co-workers at a restaurant, and we'd talked for a brief bit in a mix of Chinese and English.

The next week, I got a message on my phone: "Tonight look for you. You no come same place?"

Not taking much time to think my response through, I sent back "I was there earlier. I must have just missed you."

Minutes later, the reply came back: "Miss you too!" (Look up "miss" in a Chinese dictionary and you get 想--xiang--and it doesn't really have the meaning of "fail to meet due to timing.")

So now I'm getting regular messages like the one at top, the sort of sappy fodder that bounces around on instant messengers back home and on cell phones here in China--canned romantic sayings: "In a lifetime, every year; in every year, every day; every day, every hour; every hour, every minute; every minute, every second, I miss you, [love]*, [love]* you, wait for you." And this from a woman I talked to for about ten minutes. 很可怕的！(Hen ke pa de, really frightening!)

On the bright side, such messages make for great Chinese practice, as they're generally written for the nearly illiterate--a category I fit into pretty safely here.

*Both 念 and 恋 give me a bit of trouble for translating; both can mean "love," but the dictionary shows a whole slew of other meanings, ranging from "understand" to "feel drawn to."

On Shaky Ground

2008-05-22T00:07:00.000-07:00

Following on the heels of the Sichuan earthquake* that struck last week come the aftershocks of suspicion, superstition, and blind nationalism. For the most part, my students have been in somber moods, having gone into mourning in their own personal ways, and of course the whole nation officially went into mourning earlier this week, with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday being national days of mourning including work halts and observed moments of silence. (Interestingly, the Chinese way of observing three minutes of silence while en route apparently requires drivers to blare their horns, making for the loudest minutes of silence I've ever heard--deafening silence made real.)

For these people--and this is the vast majority--the Sichuan earthquake is to them what 9-11 was to most Americans. I've had students cry in class and talk about how helpless they feel; the whole nation seems glued to television sets, watching the news coverage of the crisis, so that the streets near my apartment are more than usually crowded with pedestrians clustered around the little television kiosks.

For some, though, this is a chance to show their true colors as conspiracy theorists, isolationists, racial supremacists, or worse. The rumors that have cropped up around the event range from the superstitious--clouds foretelling the earthquake or unlucky numbers or unlucky 福娃 (fuwa) like JingJing and YingYing causing disasters in China this year--to the usual beleaguered Han laments: the earthquake was caused by Xinjiang separatists, by the Dalai Lama, by Taiwan; [insert your country's name here] isn't doing enough to help because they hate Chinese; 2,000 years ago, Han Chinese invented an earthquake-prediction machine** which would have saved everyone in Sichuan had cultural imperialists not imposed Western seismographs on their country.

A few people, both Chinese and 外国的, have told me the earthquake was surely caused by the Three Gorges Dam. Who knows what category of confusion about geology to put that in?

Probably the nastiest little bone of contention I've heard debated endlessly by a few people in the last week is the size of Yao Ming's donation. In classes, a few students--usually rich, usually unwilling to talk about how much they donated--have gone out of their way to heap scorn on Ming, calling him a 香蕉 (xiangjiao, banana) and race traitor. Such loudmouths have gone out of their way to pester me about how much I've donated and, when I've refused to answer, verbally abused me for being an American capitalist who came to China to steal their money and women. Granted, I'm 一个人 (yi ge ren, single) and will make less money in five years than one of these men recently lost playing the stock market, but to such small-minded bigots, I'm American and, therefore, rich--rich and greedy.

So it's been a mixed week, showing me once again some of the best parts of living in China, and some of the worst parts of living in China. Now when people ask me how I feel in the aftermath of the earthquakes, I can usually only reply that my feelings are muddled.

*And, yes, suddenly I can access Wikipedia without using a proxy--and read "Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident"; maybe the earthquake took out the PRC's central censorship bureau. Oops, nope, the blocks are still in place for the 1989 riots.

**In reality, a Chinese inventor, Chang Heng, did invent the above 候风地动仪 (houfeng didong yi), which just showed what direction tremors came from after an earthquake had already happened.

The Olympic Torch Delay Hits Shenzhen

2008-05-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

The Olympic flame came to Shenzhen today, more or less as had been planned. The intended route seemed a relatively convenient one for me, though not convenient enough for me to view it from my balcony.

The running route for the torch was set to go to the 海王 (hai wang, or Sea King) building which is just a few minutes walk from my place, and it was supposed to do so relatively early in the morning. Just before I went to look at the crowd and see whether I might be able to squeeze in close enough to see, I ran across the announcement that the relay would be starting a bit late, so I waited until around one o'clock to head there.

By the time I arrived there, the crowds were massive: probably fifteeen to twenty thousand people packed into a single block and swarming onto the streets. For some reason, rather than adding to the permanent fences built alongside the road to stop pedestrians, the powers that be had decided to use little movable barriers to control the crowds. Little to no police presence attended the event and people were pretty much left to do whatever they wanted: mostly clambering onto the roofs of bus stations, scaling light posts or trees in order to get a better view; a number of banners had been ripped down by these climbing attempts, and branches were ripped off trees in a few places. Most of the rest of the crowd's energy was devoted to trying to push through to find a better place, pounding drums, and chanting: "加油，中国，高兴" and what sounded like "一三" ("jia you, zhongguo, gaoxing" "yi san"--"Add gas (Go!), China, Happy" "One, three"); it seemed anytime someone decided to yell out a two-syllable phrase, the crowd just picked it up and screamed it for a few minutes.

Early on, I got caught up in one group's decision to push through the crowd, and I wound up opposite Children's World--a store about halfway between the 海王 building and the Haiya Baihuo overpass. I managed to get near the permanent fencing on the side of the road and, thus, stay out of the pushing contests.

Around three-thirty, there was a bit of a louder roar well off in the distance: people got excited for a few minutes, but then the cheering and chattering faded back away. Twenty minutes or so later the torch finally arrived ... sort of. Since the crowds had pushed the movable barriers on both sides of the streets to nearly touching, the officials apparently deemed it unsafe for the runner to continue. So instead of watching the torch run past, I got to watch a bus and a van pass, preceded by a handful of men in uniforms marching. Ahead of the bus ran a bunch of people shouting at the onlookers and shoving back the barriers. I did get to see, presumably, the runner, sitting and looking tired and discouraged in the van as it drove past, and then the whole thing was over, the crowds pushing and shoving to get home.

May Day: Save Our Sense

2008-04-23T01:07:00.000-07:00

I may have to make a trip out to 家乐福 (Carrefour) and pick up a fan just so all the shit flying around will have something to hit. I'll have to go within the next week, though, or else risk being labeled an "anti-China" reactionary protestor. The anti-protest protests have begun, targeting KFC, Carrefour, and the Body Shop--and probably a lot of others I haven't heard about yet.

I first heard about the Carrefour boycott about a week and a half ago, and at that time the stated reason for the boycott was a simple one: France allowed the Olympic Torch protests to happen, so boycotting a prominent French company would send a strong message. Unfortunately, there must not have been enough people joining in the boycotts, so late last week SMS messages started circulating: Carrefour gave money to the Dalai Lama (who, of course, is the leader of a "terrorist" organization).

Now May 1st is set for the beginning of an extended boycott against Carrefour. And the mob mentality may have set in. Shanghaiist.com just ran an article about a 22-year-old American who was atacked by a mob of protestors after coming out of a Carrefour in Hunan province (or "Fulan" as the locals would call it). I have some misgivings about the article, such as the atrocious English written by "an Ivy League university volunteer programme" who would presumably be here teaching English. More in keeping with the sort of attitudes I've been encountering every day as of late are some of the sentiments expressed in the comments section, such as "he should have known that he was taking risk to do the whole thing at this time and place."

The comment that probably drives me the craziest is "When news or rumors pop out like this, the first knee-jerk reaction of you guys is blasting evil China and Chinese." Fair enough, some of the 老外 commenting on the story are knuckle-heads, but so are some of the 中国人. But lately, in every class, I've had to listen to the woe-is-us diatribe of how the PRC is a developing country that everyone steps on and takes advantage of and doesn't respect, while at the same time having to listen to lecture after lecture on how the Han are superior to other people, due in part to their 5,000 year old history. The whole country seems to be suffering from a sort of collective Napoleon syndrome, and it just gets sadder and sadder with each new update. Hopefully, the whole thing will start to disappear after the May 1st holiday, when everyone has to work the weekend to make up for the luxury of two days off.
And, now, KFC has made the list of places to boycott: "Worth mentioning that a few days ago and compared to boycott French goods, the famous American restaurant chains KFC has also been included in the boycott list, the 'charges' is 'the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution to boycott Chinese Olympic.'" (That last link's a bit diffuicult to read, but at least attempting to be fair.) As an American, though, I'm looking forward to the boycotts for two very important reasons: 1) I can make a 不吃肯塔基 sign and parade the streets--"Don't eat Kentucky," which looks a lot like "Don't eat KFC"; and 2) I can finally start selling some 我是巴哈马人 T-shirts to other foreigners (What have folks from the Bahamas ever done to China, after all?).

Just Nod Your Head and Smile

2008-04-10T03:05:00.000-07:00

I tried to discuss the Olympic torch relay in class last night. My goal was to try to get students to focus on the meaning of the Olympic flame itself and some of the motivations 外国人 (waiguoren) might have for taking part in such protests. I pointed out that it had been a foreigner responsible for one instance of the torch's being extinguished.

"No, there were no foreigners--Tibetan's children," they insisted. I said that many of the protestors (such as those who hung the handcuff Olympic rings, those who chained themselves to the Eiffel Tower, and some of those who caused the torch to be extinguished) were foreigners, not Tibetans. "Children of the outside countries, not Tibet's children," I clarified.

My students then showed me the one picture published in the newspaper, saying, "See, Chinese woman want save flame, Tibetan terrorize flame, Chinese, Tibetan, China, Tibet," pointing back and forth between the two figures. "What about other pictures?" I asked. "You're saying this picture isn't real?" they accused me. "No, just that there are other pictures," explained; this one incident isn't everything. They didn't believe me. So, for the record (on a blog that can't be accessed in China without a proxy), the guy below is whiter than I am.

And this guy's pretty pale too.
And I don't think I need to point out that there aren't many Chinese as dark-skinned as the guy in the middle of this picture.

Again, though, my students can't easily get ahold of such pictures. I had to go to the New York Times and BBC to get them, and Chinese searches just don't route that way. And of course my students wouldn't think to do an English search on the issue; after all, the Western media always lies. (As an interesting side-note, yes, Chinese police do dress as indicated the one page in the youtube clip, but the 保安--bao'an, or security/paramilitary guards that monitor my neighborhood certainly do dress in camouflage and boots; who knows which are actually being shown in that clip.)

So, I'm done raising such issues in class. It's too much to hope for that people will be able to put aside the People's Daily and Xinhua official lines long enough to even complete a sentence.

Virtual Black-Out

2008-04-08T23:55:00.000-07:00

So the riots in Lhasa have set off a string of other riots, and speculation about all of them is running rampant. One thing is absolutely clear as far as any of my Han students are concerned: this is all the fault of the Tenzin Gyatso--whom my students tend to view in the same light as most Americans view Osama bin Laden. According to them, the Tibetans are well-armed and well-funded terrorists, who take their orders directly from the Dalai Lama ... yep, Nobel Peace Prize winner (1989) and terrorist king-pin. Seems he's got quite the resume.

The purpose of this terrorism sweeping through the Middle Kingdom, as my students deduce, is to ensure that China doesn't host the Olympics (and never mind that once a host country has been selected, the games don't move). The simple solution to all of this, a few say, is "to get someone to him quiet and kill him." Nothing would ensure peace during the Games like wiping out a man honored throughout the world for his efforts to create peace.

Of course, my adult students are all highly educated individuals, show a good bit of reasoning skills, and are really among the top products of their nation's education system. It would almost be worth asking how they could be so (and so alone in being) out of touch with the rest of the world's perspective, except that the answer is written (or not written) on the front of every newspaper. We've entered an essential media blackout here in Shenzhen--one which runs from the papers to the Internet more than I've yet seen. The only real sources available in print or online are government organs like the People's Daily--only of help in finding out what the government wants us to know.

It's a strange thing: whenever people back home had asked about the government censorship they're sure I run into in China, I've always worked to defend China. Really, until a short while back, censorship has played a very small role in my day-to-day life; I've always been able to get loads of information on international politics, even when the North Korean nuclear snafu was going on, and if anything has been blocked, it's just been a few blogging sites, Wikipedia, and occassionally Youtube. Now, nearly anything of value is inaccessible without a proxy, and even with a proxy a large number of sites still won't load. Apparently, the minute news starts to affect China policy directly, this is when the Orwellian tactics kick in.

And it's sort of a sad thing as well. The steps the government is taking in response to the riots seem about the surest route to ruining the Olympic Games for China. Already we've begun to hear the chatter about boycotts by prominent leaders, and the disruptions to the torch relay are at least common knowledge here (though my students can't seem to differentiate between Western pro-Tibet protestors and the "Dalai clique" terrorists closer to home). Maybe the events will smooth over a bit before Opening Ceremonies, but the Games have picked up a few stains because of this that won't rub away. Nor does it seem likely China can look forward to kind receptions among media once the games begin: after breaking their guarantee of greater press freedoms in 2008, then lambasting most Western news outlets, it seems they'll be lucky to get honest treatment by the presses and far more likely now to get resentful treatment. Since nearly every Chinese person I know is emotionally invested in the Games' success and the "good face" it could bring China (the product of eight years of hype), I can't imagine anything less than a perfect Olympics leaving anyone happy.

I'm predicting a somber September in Shenzhen and parts further afield.

Missing Books, Left and Right

2008-03-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

Last week, my textbook 老外在中国 (Laowai zai Zhongguo--Foreigner in China) disappeared. I'd had it with me when I went into a restaurant to play Chinese chess--my new distraction--with some local cabbies. The games were interesting enough that I forgot to take my book with me when I headed home.

Last year, this wouldn't have been a problem, since forgotten personal possessions were generally treated with more than their due respect out in the untamed boondocks of Bao'an. I once left a copy of "Zorba the Greek" at a restaurant, only to return the next day and find it set upon its own little table, perfectly centered on the table cloth. Here in civilized Nanshan, though, it's a different story. I returned to the restaurant the next day and inquired after the book. Though the waiter seemed unable to understand my question, one of the cooks spoke up quickly, "老外在中国!" I affirmed this, and the waiter went off to find the manager while the cook babbled the title over and over again.

The manager showed up just to tell me, "没有; 没见 (meiyou, meijian--don't have, didn't see)," with a shifty sort of look in his eyes. I suspect he just decided to take it home, since he has been making some half-hearted attempt to learn English. Now that Jia has managed to order the same book online and the loss doesn't irritate quite as much, I can finally find hilarity in the situation; that someone out there is probably using my Chinese textbook to learn English--and learn miserably bad English at that, since the book's author is no whiz in the language, forming conversations like the following (set in a doctor's office):
D: What's wrong with you?
P: I feel uncomfortable.
D: Where do you feel not good?
P: My body has the ache.
D: It should be caused by the cold.

Elsewhere, more books have disappeared. Having met "a nice girl, I thought" at a party, Baolou later invited her over to his apartment, from which she promptly lifted his teaching materials. At least this second person (however not nice she may be) is pretty sharp and will be studying well-constructed English in the future.

Just a Little Favor

2008-03-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

One of our adult students recently wrangled me into an uncomfortable corner. After complimenting me on the way I ran classes ("Best in the school!") and telling me he'd be honored if he could take me out to dinner sometime (I accepted, but pointed out that I rarely to never speak English outside of school), he asked me whether I could do him "just a little favor"--review his resume. He said he'd send both the English and Chinese writing so that I could check whether the grammar in his translations were right. Though I'm not too fond of the endless exchanges of favors that run most of life here in China, I figured looking over a resume couldn't be that much work.

Yesterday, he sent me his full resume: all four pages of it, including descriptions of companies and long lists of poorly proofread gobbledygook. He hadn't even bothered running spell-check on the document. I worked through a bit of it, just identifying which portions were suitable for a resume and which parts would need to be condensed. I printed off a sample resume for him and a list with a few resume-writing pointers, then said I'd be happy to look at his resume again once he'd taken some time to condense his four pages of information into a standard format of one page. I figured this was a fair enough effort.

"But how about you correct it first, and then I'll make it smaller, okay?" he asked once I'd given my advice. I pointed out that what he'd given me was a lot of information to go through at one time. "But I just need you to show me my mistakes." I pointed out that in many places I wasn't sure what he was trying to say. "I give you the Chinese." I pointed out that the Chinese I was studying was on a bit simpler level than that (leaving out that almost none of my hanzi have much to do with the corporate world)--things like asking for and giving directions, talking to service staff, 等等. "Then it can be good practice for you."

"Well," I finally said, tired of the needling, "I reckon this will take me about a month, maybe a month and a half to proofread as it is now. I'll have to look up a lot of phrases and words, and I'm going to have to enlist a lot of people for help. On the other hand, if you can make it smaller, just a page or so, then I can go through it in maybe a day and just ask you questions for things I don't understand." I didn't point out that I have absolutely no intention of learning a bunch of corporate terminology, at least not until I'm well done reading a children's comic book.

He finally said he saw what I meant, or at least he didn't try to hand the print-off back to me again. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. As for the sort of high-brow material I actually am studying, I'll give some of the little mantras I've been working on below:

大头，大头，下雨不愁。人家有伞。我有大头。
Da tou, da tou, xia yu bu chou. Ren jia you san. Wo you da tou.
Big head, big head, when it rains, I don't worry. Other people have umbrellas. I've got my big head.

谁高？我高。满地都是草包。
Shei gao? Wo gao. Man di dou shi cao bao.
Very loosely, this translates, "Who's tall? I'm tall. Everyone else around is useless." More literally, the last sentence is something like, "The full ground, all are grass bags."

电灯泡。砸核桃。谁放屁？我知道。不是他，就是他。
Dian deng pao. Za he tao. Shei fang pi? Wo zhi dao. Bu shi ta, jiu shi ta.
"Light bulb bubbles. Smash walnuts. Who farted? I know. If not him, it must be him." [This is sort of an eeny-meeny-miny-moe chant, one whose English translation I've begun using in classes to pick students.]

These are little nursery rhymes Jia has taught me (and which I'm sure she'll correct if I've messed up any of the hanzi). For some reason these seem to stick better in my head than more useful expressions, and since they have really simple sentences, I usually only have to hunt for one or two hanzi to finish them.

Li Yang Reconsidered

2008-03-25T02:06:00.000-07:00

I'm no big fan of Li Yang's "Crazy English," and I don't go out of my way to keep this dislike a secret. Generally, the only effect I see from Yang's teaching in my class is loud shouting during class activities and a heightened tendency to repeat (usually poorly) one or two nearly meaningless phrases.

Recently, I've run into a few adult enthusiasts of Li's in classes, and have adjusted my original opinion of his message slightly. (My overall opinion of him, that he's just a motivational speaker who's making money with a ridiculous gimmick, hasn't changed at all.) Li's central message, which sadly gets drowned out by all the shouting, is that in order to learn English, you have to be "crazy"--have to pursue something with all your heart. I realized recently, talking with Whitetooth about some of his experiences, that we've both gone through periods of studying so intently that others might think we were losing our minds: both of us have caught ourselves tracing hanzi on the bathroom wall while taking showers just to keep awake, and my morning routine of making forty sentences from the flashcards taped all over my apartment before letting myself use the bathroom in the morning might look at least masochistic if not perfectly insane.

A few of my adult students seem to have gotten this part of the message: that learning means work, and that you have to be inwardly motivated to keep up that work. Unfortunately, the distractions in Li's message make the central idea muddy for them. One student says he spends all his time outside of work and class studying: "Li Yang said he had to listen to the 'I Have a Dream' speech a hundred times before he understood. Last night, I listened to it fifty times, and I still don't understand. Tonight I'll have to listen to it another 50 times." (This student has since missed a week of classes at the school.) Another student has expressed unhappiness with the classes, because she's expected to think of her own sentences to speak during class sessions, which should be the instructors' jobs; she thought she'd be fluent by now, because she quit her job in order to attend classes all day, every day at the school.

So they've got the act like a crazy person part of the equation down; they just can't seem to make the connection that the craziness ought to be born out of the fatigue and frustration that studying according to a normal and sensible schedule creates. And they still can't tell the difference between realistic goals and "crazy" promises. Maybe after they see the absolute failure of "Crazy Chinese," which promises to teach children 1,000 more hanzi in half an hour's studying per day than they currently learn in six years of schooling--maybe after that they'll be able to see that a silver tongue is often attached to a big bag of grass. (大草包 or big grass bag is a common slang term for someone worthless.)

Shenzhen Goes Crazy
Originally Posted--06:14, 2007-11-05

And in the upcoming weeks it's likely to try and drive me that way as well. The reason? "Crazy English" has hit Shenzhen. "Crazy English" is already popular with a few of my more annoying students, who insist on listening and REPEATING everything I say as loudly as possible, and even my Chinese manager has apparently told Whitetooth that "it's good because you speak English loudly." Despite Li Yang's claims that there's more to "Crazy English" than just screaming English at the top of your lungs, none of his adherents seem to have gained anymore from him than shouting every English phrase they know.

I like Li's attempt to explain the "crazy" element of his program by saying that it's not to be questionably lunatic but "to dive into the thing one sets out to do." He's translating the Chinese term gongzuokuang, which we would translate as workaholic, and neglecting to note that the "crazy" part of the phrase just means crazy (as in kuangre--fanatic; kuangwang--deluded).

The cleaned up Answers.com article has this to say, and whoever wrote it made a good decision by not going to far into Li's biography (such as, for instance, mentioning that he almost flunked college). Of course, no one seems to notice (or admit) that Li is just a pep-talk performer, not a teacher. In the States, most would probably immediately think of Christopher Farley's motivational speaker from SNL. ("You're gonna end up living in a van down by the river!")

Though there are a few character-assasination sites on the web, Li doesn't really deserve them; he's not a cult leader, just a motivational speaker, which is exactly why he chooses to perform in front of crowds of 30,000 people. He hasn't done anything innovative, just capitalized on the Chinese ability to mimic sounds like automatons. (It's not getting students to repeat anything I say that's a problem; it's getting them to know what they're saying or to actually say it correctly--not say "shpeak," for example--or to use English in sentences on their own that's the rub.) He isn't shaking Chinese tradition in the least, just capitalized on the Chinese desire to do things as groups; every morning, Chinese work to do calisthenics in synchronicity, most of their performances devote at least half the time to choreographed dance, classes (English and otherwise) are conducted through endless repetition or rote phrases, and really the only new thing Li has brought to the table is yelling. (If you think yelling goes against Chinese tradition, sit at the next table over when a waitress delivers the wrong dish to a group of Chinese, when shouting is necessary to indicate displeasure.) And, of course, when folks shout in any language, pronunciation suffers.*

No, there's really nothing wrong with what Li is doing, unless you happen to be a waiguoren living in China. The enthusiasm at Shenzhen University (which has a bus stop on my way home) must already be spreading like wildfire, for I've already had my first college student step up to me and scream, "HELLO," inches away from my ear. My first response was to say nothing, after which the student shouted again, louder and closer. I slowly and loudly replied, "Wo ting bu dong," ("I hear but don't understand.") and honestly I can't understand--can't understand why he'd think I'd take the time to talk to him after such a rude greeting.

*I wonder if any native speaker can understand what he's saying at the end of the clip, say, about 3:34 on. The one part almost sounds like "Elvis Presley" to me; it's worth noting that his English is apparently quite good when he's just talking.

祝我生日快乐: Happy Birthday to Me (Sort of)

2008-03-20T03:43:00.000-07:00

Well, my birthday is right around the corner, which turns out to be sort of a weird thing. I hadn't expected it to seem that important a day, really, so I was a bit surprised this afternoon to find myself suddenly meditative about the whole aging process. I guess in part this is because I effectively skipped turning thirty last year: since many Chinese add at least one year to their age*, it was easy to get into the idea that, though I was by stateside standards hitting the big three-oh, I'd already passed it on the mainland, so nothing was really changing--a peculiar little bit of reasoning that kept me from experiencing any major crisis.

This year is only a little different: Since I'm now already thirty-two by Chinese standards, turning thirty-one tomorrow doesn't seem like such a huge deal, but the encroaching birthday, no matter how far away (in geographic if not temporal terms) it may feel right now, provides an explanation for the way I've been feeling the last week. Over the past two or three weeks, my ability to pick up new hanzi has been slowing down a lot, to the point where I'm only able to remember one or two new hanzi per day, and in the last week I've been obsessing over the idea that I'm not getting anywhere with my studying. Part of me knows, of course, that plateaus are a natural part of learning anything, and another part of me knows that I was due for one--you can only make big improvements for so long before the slow-down sets in for a while. But in the last week or so, this little plateau has seemed a bigger deal than it should.

Today it hit me suddenly that this temporary slow-down in my progress seems like a bigger deal than it actually is just because of when it's happening; another year is passing on my internal calender, and since I got a pass last year on the "round number" milestone, this year seems a little bigger than it should. Realizing this, I drew the conclusion that I've been a silly ass for the past week and that it's about time I moved on from there. So today, I spent a good chunk of time cleaning, then I reviewed my hanzi lists from a few chapters in my textbook (reminding myself that I've learned over 600 new hanzi since December--not too shabby a number), then I made a single resolution for the new year (after all, it's really Spring now, and I'm living in a country where the first day of Spring marks the beginning of a new year): "Try not to be too much of a silly ass." It's probably the best resolution I've made in my life.

As for birthday plans, tomorrow I'll likely be having dinner with Nersey and Jia, since Nersey has an oven and has started making pizzas with nan from the Xinjiang restaurant. Then I'll probably go to bed early, since I have to work early the next morning. Since my birthday gives me occasion to mention it, below is the ridiculously simple Chinese "Happy Birthday" song (sung to the tune of "Happy Birthday" to you, though often as not sung for many reasons besides a birthday**).

祝你生日快乐。祝你生日快乐。祝你生日，祝你生日，祝你生日快乐。
Zhu ni shengri kuaile. Zhu ni shengri kuaile. Zhu ni shengri, zhu ni shengri, zhu ni shengri kua le.
(Literal English translation: Wish you birthday happy. Wish you birthday happy. Wish you birthday, wish you birthday, wish you birthday happy.)

*The reasons for these extra years have been explained to me in two ways: Either a child is considered one-year-old at birth, thus adding a year to the overall age, or age is tracked according to the lunar rather than solar calendar, leading to the extremely inflated ages you hear about for seniors in China. If you want to feel older, visit this calculator site and find out your Chinese age.

**Last year at Lao Chongqing (my favorite Sichuanese restaurant in the neighborhood), I sat outside during a particularly riotous celebration. About eighty women from one of the nearby factories had the night off and, crammed into the relatively small restaurant, went through a good amount of food, beer and baijiu. When they weren't busy dancing without music or running in and out of the front door, they spent most of their time singing 祝你生日快乐. The next day, I mentioned the party to a friend, and he asked the head waiter whose birthday party it had been. The head waiter's response (as it was translated for me) was "It was no one's birthday. They were just happy with drinking, so they sang some. People like to sing that song when they're drinking, because everyone knows the words."

Walls, Walls, Walls

2008-03-12T03:08:00.000-07:00

China still thinks in walls. You'd think maybe a country that went ahead and built the world's largest wall to (unsuccessfully) keep out intruders would have sort of gotten tired of the whole idea of walls, but the idea of the wall is alive and well in China.

This realization first came to me last year on my second day, after I got locked in--yes, locked in--my own neighborhood. From my apartment last year, I had to pass through one (usually) locked gate to get into the space between my buildings and the other buildings in my area of the neighborhood; all the buildings on the perimeter of this area are linked by fences, turning them essentially into part of one great wall. The gated community is the basic community of China, neighborhood after neighborhood surrounded by walls, and the walls seem more important than anything else; streets often meander aimlessly, dodging around one community after another. To walk to school along the main road--in a straight line along restaurants and shops--takes me about half an hour. To walk home along a separate road, this one winding between neighborhoods, takes me well over an hour.

But divisions seem too to run deeper here than simple stonework. India may have its caste system, but China has something just as clearly divisive--the idea of outsiders. Many of the adult students at our school, having seen a few of the foreign teachers talking to each other in Chinese or about Chinese, have decided they need to find people to study with. In one of my classes, all six students talked about this desire to find a study partner. I pointed out that all six of them were studying English, that they all knew each other, and that it should be easy enough for them to make plans to meet and study. No, that wouldn't work: two of the men live in different districts, one in the Nantou area of Nanshan and the other in Bao'an, near the Nantou checkpoint (ten minutes apart by bus); the woman who lives in the Nantou area--this is no good because this would be "blended company" (a man and a woman); two students live across the street from one another, but in different neighborhoods, so this is also no good. Ideally, they all want to find someone who works at their company to study with. "Are there any people in your company also studying English?" I asked them. No, no there aren't. "Then maybe trying to find someone from outside your company would be a good idea?" No, not really; eventually someone in the company will maybe study English.

The word "danwei" (government office work units) doesn't get used much around here, and any time I use it just to mean a clique of co-workers, I'm almost immediately corrected. ("Danwei" seems to be a relic of earlier days--a word from before Opening and Reform.) But the feelings behind the danwei is alive and well. If I look at my Chinese friends, I realize I'm nearly their only friend who isn't a co-worker, and they're generally reluctant to talk to other groups of Chinese. I rarely hear my Chinese co-workers talk about meeting their friends, but they do go out together quite a lot (this despite a rapid turnover rate). It seems a desperately lonely way to live; I wonder, since they're always out with co-workers when they're out at all, whether they ever get a chance to blow off steam about work. (In the US, loose lips sink ships, but here they more likely get you fired.)

So our school now has a "social committee"--another co-worker and I--who are responsible for arranging social events for our adult students. We're looking into bowling and maybe some salsa dancing lessons nearby, trying to find something we can take people out to do at least once a month. It's a curious job to find myself now responsible for helping adults have a night out.

Kibitzing

2008-03-06T01:15:00.000-08:00

I had perhaps my most interesting class yet last night. At school they've begun a new sort of course offering--adults classes that meet at least twice every day and for which students can more or less show up whenever they want to. Different teachers handle the classes on different days or at different times, which means that continuity breaks down a bit, and most of the time (to judge by the class notes most teachers leave) teachers do whatever they want, sticking only loosely to the course curriculum. It means that I'm freed up to do just about anything I think is interesting (and that students are prepared for this), which makes it a bit more interesting to teach.

After Monday and Tuesday's class both got hijacked by questions like "Is it true that most people in the US don't marry or have children?," "As an American, do you think you're better than black people, or is that an inappropriate question?," "How do you say, ' [insert food name for which there is no Western equivalent],' in English?" I decided I couldn't take another class without extra materials. Since students are always asking me about food in America (which they assume is all hamburgers and hot dogs), I started hunting for some American menus and soon ran into the menu from Chicago's Eleven City Diner. I figured this would be a good way to show what food in America is like and maybe break down the idea of a McDonald's and KFC nation.

I knew the menu would be a hard read; Nersey had mentioned that Jia struggled to read menus while stateside, and her English is better by several degrees than most of the students in the level I'm teaching. I also knew it would be worthwhile if the students would only put the effort into it. I put together a glossary of about forty or so words I knew wouldn't show up in the Chinese-English dictionaries--things like "shmear" and "mayo" and "side car." I also geared myself up for the class to be an absolute flop. Despite my concerns, the class went over extremely well.

In total, I had four students show up, and all of them seemed to think that this was an incredibly valuable lesson, even if it was miserably difficult. We only managed to get through the first page of the menu and into a few of the words from the glossary. It didn't occur to me while looking at it, but Rubin's short dedication uses a good number of abstract expressions; it took a long while to explain how a restaurant can be a "cornerstone" when a cornerstone is part of a building or how you could "rekindle" feelings without understanding the idea of feeling being like a fire inside a person's chest. With the exception of "diner" and "delicatessen,"* my students knew nearly all the words they were reading; they just didn't understand what it said or why there'd be such a thing in a menu. It took about an hour and a half to get through Rubin's writing, but once we'd worked our way through it, two students concluded that it was "beautiful," like "poetry." My students may be light-years away from remarking, "Oy, this mentsh is a real dikhter," but somehow they manage to get a lot more emotion out of two short paragraphs than most people back home probably would. I imagine getting a chance to peek into part of another culture (and especially into part of it that is maybe just behind the surface and not often seen) and understand it makes such a little thing a larger experience than it could ever be for a native.

* These two new words led to a good bit of pilpl. One student's dictionary defined "diner" as "a restaurant that serves exotic, foreign foods" and "delicatessen" as "meat from foreign countries." It wasn't easy to convince them that diners mostly serve familiar homestyle food and that most delicatessens are neighborhood shops that serve a lot of local foods. I think it's a fair bet those definitions were written by Chinese rather than waiguoren; after all, what's more exotic a foreign food to the average Chinese than a double-decker pastrami sandwich?

Odd Man In

2008-03-04T01:16:00.000-08:00

Nersey and Jia recently found a good Xinjiang restaurant within walking distance of our apartments, and we've been a couple of times just for the random lamb kebab or tudou pian (grilled potato slices). Late Monday night, hungry from having had nothing more than a bowl of oatmeal all day, I went in for an entire dinner, adding nan (flatbread), grilled sausages, qiezi (eggplant), some vegetable skewers, and a plate of fried noodles to my normal order. The food was great; I filled up to bursting for under twenty kuai, and this morning I didn't have any of the digestive problems that normally accompanies eating too much at a Chinese restaurant.

Xinjiang food has become my favorite in China, since it's the closest to Western food you can find while still eating Chinese (and cheap). Nan is more or less the same as pita bread; Xinjiang-style kebabs are similar to Greek- or Turkish-style foods--loaded with cumin and pepper; tudou pian are like potato chips, only better; even their fried noodles have a distinctly Mediterranean flavor to them (quite odd, since most of Xinjiang is basically desert). Perhaps more importantly, the Xinjiang restaurants are usually Muslim, therefore safer, and the food seems healthier, cooked with less oil and cooked more thoroughly as well.

The greater attraction of Xinjiang restaurants, though, is that 意想不到, I often feel an odd sense of identity with the workers. Because many Xinjiangren are both ethnic minorities and Muslim, they don't seem to fit in as well with Han Chinese. The ethnic majority (i.e., Han) customers tend to talk down to them and be even ruder than they usually are. (Keep in mind that shouting, "服务员"--“Waitress"--at the top of your voice, snapping your fingers, arguing loudly, etc., are all normal manners in most restaurants.)

Monday, I got to listen to a table of four young Chinese men--all equipped with bad haircuts, "Western" clothes, and big leather money bags--alternatively mock one of the waiters and me. Their comments on him mostly consisted of lines like, "You are stupid; we didn't order this" and "Little wonder--he's a Xinjiang person," such quips followed by loud laughter. The item they chose to mock me about was that I was practicing my hanzi while eating; they all were of the opinion that I must 看不懂 (kan bu dong--not understand) what I was writing. I didn't bother responding, because I've learned it just isn't worth the effort. There are stupid people, and there are stupid people.

During the night, I got sympathetic smiles and nods from the staff throughout the night, and the waiter receiving the most abuse from the Chinese talked to me for a bit, mostly to compliment my writing. Together we got to enjoy the spectacle of watching the brain trust at the next table attempt to decipher the "English" sign on the wall: most of their attention was focused on the top of the poster (which advertising an electronic Quran/camera/MP4 player), where the writing is in Arabic. They proudly concluded that the capitals USB meant 美国 (meiguo--America). Little wonder, then, I don't feel bad about feeling like an outcast sometimes in China, or about identifying more with the minority than with the majority.

We've Got Your Cultural Sensitivity Right Here

2008-02-29T01:28:00.001-08:00

I dropped into 比胜客 (Pizza Hut) last night and tried one of their special promotion pizzas. Apparently following the New Year's World Celebration theme that ran from mid-January to early February, The 比胜客 executives decided to capitalize on the romantic vibes of our Valentine's Day with a new promotional roll-out: Arabian Nights. (Stay to watch the video; it's worth it.) Included on the specialty menu for the month are roasted lamb chops, "Magic Apple Tea," a plate of chopped lamb and hummus with something like pita bread, a curiously named dessert--the "Harem Sweeties"--that look like cookies, and the "Arabian Nights Pizza."

Last night I tried the lamb and hummus, and it was good enough (and close enough to Middle Eastern cuisine) that I decided to give the specialty pizza a go. I normally pass on any of the specialty pizzas, because shrimp (which sends me into anaphylactic shock) is a key ingredient in most of them, and Chinese cooks tend not to be great withholding one ingredient while making a dish. I carefully interrogated the waitress (her mouth coyly covered by a gauzy orange veil a la "I Dream of Jeannie") about what exactly was on the pizza, and once I'd determined that the pizza did not, would not, and wasn't supposed to ever contain any shellfish of any kind, I ordered a small. It turned out to be the best pizza I've ever had a 比胜客, in China or at home. Unfortunately, the recipe for the pizza isn't bound to help international relations that much.

The "Arabian Nights Pizza" is made with a special, savory sauce (which is what makes it so good), corn, garbanzo beans, red and green peppers, beef sausage and--here's the kicker--pork sausage: not exactly halal. I don't expect too many Middle-Easterners to be popping in to the restaurant to admire the waitresses' 可爱 little face-coverings and chow down on some pig intestines, though hopefully the little faux pas will be smoothed over somewhat by the very "Open" idea of honoring another culture's pre-hamburger history.

Bu Dui and Context-Blindness
Originally posted: 06:23, 2007-10-06

I've heard a lot of speculation about how China will one day take over the global market, crushing America's economic system, and I have to say I'm not particularly concerned. Yes, manufacturing and much unskilled labor are easily exported to China, and even some skilled labor (as in computer work) is coming here as well. I don't see China becoming an innovator anytime soon, though, and as long as America can keep up on the innovation curve, I'm sure it's future is safer than we expect.

The reason I don't see China becoming an innovator anytime soon is that there just isn't much creativity in China. Innovation requires a certain ability to see the larger pictures, and contextualization just doesn't seem to be a Chinese trait. For example, I go to a restaurant and am asked, "Ni yao he shenme?" ("What do you want to drink?") I respond, "Wo yao he xuebi." ("I want to drink Sprite") The immediate response is "Meiyou," despite there being cans of Sprite visible in the refrigerator. The problem is that my pronunciation of xue is slightly off, so it sounds as though I'm ordering "shuibi," which doesn't mean anything in a restaurant. Once I get up and point to a can of Sprite (this after trying to correct my pronunciation a few times to no success), the waitress will nod and say, "A xuebi." The waitress doesn't take the time to think, "Let's see this foreigner speaks bad Chinese. I asked him what he wanted to drink, and he said he wanted to drink something I didn't quite understand. What do we have to drink that sounds like 'shuibi?' Tea? No. Beer? No. Oh, xuebi! He must want that."

Granted, when it's all written out, it sounds like thinking through such things is a lot of work, but most Westerners make such adjustments all the time. If an Aussie visits an American bar and orders a be-ah, he can more or less rely on not being told, "Sorry, we don't serve bears."
The inflexibility goes a bit further than this though, even into the writing of clearly intelligible hanzi. I recently tried writing out the phrase "Qing man man shuo" ("Please speak slowly") while trying to hold a bilingual conversation with a man. Unfortunately, I switched the writing order of strokes five and six in the character qing. The result was that the entire phrase became meaningless. I rewrote the phrase, creating an identical version of it, only this time writing those two strokes in the correct order, and suddenly my chicken-scratch meant, "Please speak slowly."

Another illustration of this is the phrase 青井工牛, which I took a picture of in a public bathroom. This translates into something like "green well work cow" and is meaningless. I showed the picture to a number of Chinese people, and each time they laughed and said it meant nothing. I would ask why someone would write this in a bathroom, and nearly every time they would say something like "No one would write this. It doesn't mean anything." One person told me that it was probably an example of someone using characters that sounded like the proper characters in order to be cute, and that there was a huge movement to stamp out this sort of abuse of the language. "It's probably just someone's idea of a clever name," she said. Why would someone put this in a bathroom of all places? "Oh, sometimes people might think it's clever to put a clever name in a bathroom." Jia was the only person (after twenty) who took the context into account. It turns out the phrase just had a few missing pieces: 请讲卫生 , roughly, "Please be clean." It seems exactly the sort of thing you'd put in a bathroom, but only Jia took the time to consider the context.

This inflexibility extends to written English as well. Once the guy I was talking to proved incapable of reading Chinese written out of order, I tried writing from right to left "t-u-o-b-a," which shows on the page as "about." This, though, was also meaningless, simply because it was written in the wrong order. And while trying to get students to stop saying, "Oran-gee," I wrote "oran-zh" on the board, figuring the pinyin "zh" sound might help get the final across. "No, teacher," they cried, "Gee-ee, not zed aitch-a. Gee-ee." Everything is either dui or bu dui, right or wrong. Either everything is perfect and in keeping with normal practices, or it's just plain wrong.

But it doesn't stop there. If I want to eat sweet and sour chicken, I might try asking whether the cook can make tong su li ji with chicken instead of the usual pork. No, this is "impossible." If I ask whether the cook can cook chicken in the same sauce he uses for the tong su li ji, this is also "impossible"; there's no item like that on the menu. How could you possibly cook that?
It goes as far as a denial of basic reality in some cases. Recently, all the teachers from the school went out to eat. Unfortunately for me, the fried rice at the restaurant was cooked with shrimp, to which I'm allergic. One of the Chinese teachers was kind enough to order another fried rice without shrimp for me, and when the dish came out, of course, it had shrimp. (After all, that dish is made with shrimp. How could it not be made with shrimp?) Still, we had to work to convince the Chinese teacher that the dish had shrimp in it. "It's impossible. I said we wanted no shrimp." What were these shrimp-like things in the rice then? "That's ham." Why does this ham have a curly tail and pink and white stripes like a shrimp? "Oh, those are shrimp!"

So rest easy, America. Be sure that if anyone does actually manage to build a better mousetrap in Beijing, he will be sure to toss it out after repeatedly hearing, "That's not a mousetrap. Everyone knows what mousetraps look like, and this doesn't look like a mousetrap. Bu dui."

Quick Notes: Sacked, Sacked, and Smiling

2008-02-26T23:34:00.000-08:00

Well, the problem of my disastrous corporate class has been solved; they've requested a new teacher. The students' account of my first class session was that I told them Chinese English teachers spoke bad English and taught incorrectly. One student said that "as a patriot" she "could not continue to take classes with that teacher [me]," since I clearly didn't like China. Apparently she deemed the class to have "a learning atmosphere unconducive to improvement." (Both of those quotes are, of course, from Whitetooth's translation; none of the students would be capable of such speech at this point.) I told Whitetooth he should have responded, "I'm sure the teacher couldn't agree more."

Fortunately, Baolou (the teacher formerly responsible just for the Business English course at the same company will be taking over the General English course, and I'll be able to pick up some evening courses to replace it, so the only major change for me is that I can now sleep in once again on Tuesdays. There don't seem to be any other repercussions looming, so 没问题 (mei wenti--"No problems").

In keeping with the yin/yang nature of life in China, the same day I got this news (Sunday) was also the day I had my two worst children's classes yet. Sunday morning, four students showed up to sit in on my first class of the day and "have a try." Since the class is already nearly full and meets in a small classroom, this meant that two of the fourteen students total sat on the windowsill, there weren't enough books to go around, and the whole class turned into painful chaos. Since the salesgirl who had brought the students into class promptly disappeared to do something else, the chaos didn't even have any apparent benefits. But it was after lunch that things went downhill.

In one of my little-little friends classes (In Chinese, 小朋友 xiao pengyou means "child" or "children," and I often say xiaode xiao pengyou to indicate very young children) two boys have been coming to class for a while despite my protestations. The two boys have been placed in a higher level than this class and (at twelve or thirteen years old) are much older than the rest of the class (which ranges from six to ten years of age). Earlier, I'd asked them to be moved to a more appropriate class, since they tended to be disruptive and oftentimes violent. Yet Sunday they returned and, during class, refused to do anything other than hit one another in the crotch; Chinese boys think this is incredibly funny and often continue to play this "joke" well into adulthood.

So having picked up on the idea that this was an amusing pastime, one of my seven year old girls, with a big grin and a cheery "Bye-bye teacher," threw a punch at me on her way out of the class. Fortunately she's extremely short, so the punch, though well aimed, fell just a millimeter or two short of serious damage. She was promptly disciplined, her mother called, and I had to have a sit-down with the girl's mother. I explained that this was not appropriate in class, and the girl's mother agreed that this was "impolite." I said that I thought her daughter's action stemmed from her watching the bad behavior of other students in the class, and I assured her that I was doing my part to get the "bad influences" removed from the class and placed somewhere more appropriate. Hopefully the mother took the time to say something to the staff before leaving.

Aside from all that, though, things are actually going quite well as of now. As the weather slowly improves, my mood has been getting better and better, and I've been going out during the day more often just to walk or to hunt for interesting shops. I spent yesterday morning knitting on my balcony and went walking in a nearby park with a co-worker this afternoon. I've had a few impromptu conversations in Chinese in the past week--one with a person I met at Andes, another with the student's mother mentioned above--and managed not to struggle very seriously with them. 意想不到, then, things are looking up.

Struggle Sessions (i.e., Corporate Class)

2008-02-20T00:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday went poorly. Just before break I began another corporate class, again at a high-tech firm, and the classes hadn't been going all that well in the first few weeks.

After a three week break, I returned bright and early to the company for another class. (Class meets at eight in the morning, meaning that I have to get up before the sun to make it on time.) But I felt sure that, since everyone had gotten almost a month's break and since so many things had happened during that break (snowstorms, bad traffic, Spring Festival), that the students would be a bit more lively. In all of my other adults classes, any preparation I'd done was largely wasted, since everyone just wanted to talk about their vacations.

Just ten minutes before class, I got my first bad omen, a text-message from Whitetooth: "Before [the class] I should tell you some of the [company] students seem to think you don't like China, so maybe try to avoid any Mao jokes." Fifteen minutes after the start of class, when the second through ninth students finally showed up for the class, I got my second bad omen. Since the first student to arrive and I had been discussing our vacations, I opened the same topic up to the rest of the class: "Did anyone do anything interesting over the holidays? ... How about you, Apple? ... How about you, Girl-with-boy's-name? ... How about you, Racial-slur?"

Since this series of questions yielded nothing but downcast eyes and a lot of chatter in Chinese, I turned to the textbook, attempting to get them to read parts in a conversation aloud. This went a little better, but I was met with strong resistance whenever I attempted to correct pronunciation. Since the unit in the book was about illness and advice, I tried to set them up in pairs to complain about an illness and offer advice, but this went over poorly. We slowly, oh so slowly, worked our way through the tedious grammar section of the unit, then I had them work again in pairs, this time on a cloze exercise, in which one student was meant to play a doctor while the other played a patient.

After two minutes of simply reciting the exercise instructions aloud, they lapsed into speaking Chinese again. I tried near the end of class to open up a general discussion again, and met with failure on five different conversation topics. Thankfully, time had run out, so I took the time to pull Racial-slur aside and explain the problem with his name to him. He seemed grateful, but who knows. After I'd finished speaking with him, another student approached to tell me, "We think you should give us more chances to talk and reading." I said I'd do my best to do so during the next class, leaving it unsaid that I'd given all of them numerous chances to speak and to read, chances they'd chosen not to take.

This is an all too common phenomenon in adults classes here: the solid block of awkward silence, followed by a request to "let" students talk more. Somehow, they expect the teacher to make them talk, and there's nothing they really seem to want to say. I managed to hold back from any criticism, but was sorely tempted to say at the end of class, "China I like. It's classes like this I don't like--classes where people don't even have the common decency to show up on time, then don't make any effort to do any work in class." So between now and next week, I'm going to try and figure out something to do during class--something exciting and entertaining (and probably useless for learning)--just so that I don't start bleeding from biting my tongue too hard.

Translating Chinese Report Cards

2008-02-18T00:11:00.000-08:00

At school, we have to type up monthly reports for students, in which we evaluate their behavior and skill level, make comments and assign a grade. As may sound familiar to some back in the US, Chinese grading tends not to reflect a student's actual performance or ability; rather it reflects social expectations about grading, and (as in the US), letter grades like A, B, C, D and F have lost much of their meaning. Since my school caters primarily to the rich (and takes a lot of their money), it's in teachers' best interest to be circumspect when grading--especially since the better part of our bonus relies on student satisfaction (or the satisfaction of students' parents).

Thus, the grades I've been assigning have assumed a sort of code, as follows:

A is for "awesome" or "absolutely the best student it's ever been my privilege to work with. And it's also for "average," as all the parents waiting in the lobby or at home are fully expecting to see one on their little darlings' reports. It should of course be assigned to those above the 90th percentile, but here it's wiser to assign it to the top 90% of the class.

B is for "beating." This is what most Chinese students would expect to receive after taking this mark home. Fortunately, it's also for "blame the teacher"; since most of the Chinese kids I teach are infallible in their parents' eyes just by virtue of being born, any failure to learn must be due to a failure on the part of the teacher. Because of this, B is also for "Bye-bye fifty kuai"--what I can expect to find myself saying if the school calls these students' parents in their survey.

C is for "cao," as in "Wo cao,"* what any student (i.e., any student in the bottom five percent) will say when receiving this grade. C is also for "complain bitterly about the teacher" and "change your child's class"--the parents' natural reaction to such a grade.

D is for "Don't," as in "Don't even bother giving out such a grade"; the guaranteed resulting 麻烦 (mafan, trouble) is more than it's worth.

F is for "Forget about it." If I even think of handing out such a grade (and think through the resulting screaming match in the school lobby, I'm reminded of another F-word: "Fired."

The comments section of my reports have taken on a sort of special double-talk for the worst students: "[Insert name] shows a clear potential to learn English, and he/she does well at in-class tasks when he/she tries. He/she is often distracted in class, however, and this is interfering with her/his overall progress. If [Insert name] makes a strong effort to participate in class, I am sure/feel confident that his/her English will show further progress." Had I to write this out honestly for one student, it would read as follows:

"Your son spends most of his class-time either trying to pick fights in class or barking like a dog. Since he has good vision and his imitation of a dog is uncannily accurate, he does have the potential to learn some English sounds, such as 'a' or 'I' and learn to recite them upon seeing the written letters. Even dogs, after all, can make such sounds and even be trained to make such sounds when presented with visual cues. Your son probably will not improve, because he probably won't make any effort whatsoever. Were he to make even the slightest effort, it is nearly guaranteed that his English would improve, since his English level is as of now the lowest it could possibly be."

*"Wo cao" may be translated a bit too strongly in most places. It isn't uncommon for one of my six-year-old female students (a cute little girl with two front teeth missing and her hair tied up in five or six little pigtails) to loudly exclaim, "Wo cao," after getting the wrong answer to a question. Such usage suggests to me that either the transations I normally see are wrong or that Chinese kids have fouler mouths than the kids on South Park.

Normality Returns, More or Less

2008-02-16T23:31:00.001-08:00

Slowly but surely, the holidays are fading away. Last week at school, we had special winter courses--six hours a day with five kids, aged ten to fourteen,* 不好玩儿 (not good fun)--but starting tomorrow, normal work schedules resume at school, and I anticipate my regular tutor will be returning to Shenzhen before too long. Nersey and Jia are still in the US but are apparently due to return on Friday, so my dinners and trips to the park to ti jianzi with Panda will likely become less frequent. (Since my Chinese isn't good enough yet to have truly interesting conversations, this last will be a bit of a break.)

More importantly, the weather is slowly returning to normal. Though we had a bit of drizzle on Friday and Saturday, the temperature has been warmer for a few days now. I've been going to bed without a jacket and two pairs of socks, and I haven't seen my breath in the shower for three straight mornings. Yesterday afternoon was downright pleasant--sunny and warm enough for me to actually sweat a bit going to the 银行 (yin hang--bank) and 咖啡厅 (kafeiting--coffee shop). Dawei and I played chess for an hour or so yesterday afternoon (I lost miserably), and as we were parting ways, a bit of spotty rain started, without turning the weather into a miserable chill. So there may be a few weeks ahead of fine weather before the usual sauna-style humidity and heat kick in.

As seems to be my luck this year, I've caught yet another cold. I managed to stave off any sickness through all the truly cold and miserable days, only to wake up with a stuffy nose and watery eyes on Friday. Fortunately, it's a bit better today, so if this warm spell continues a while, perhaps I'll recover quickly.

*The class consisted of a ten-year-old girl, a boy and girl (both twelve years old) and two fourteen-year old boys. As is usual in China, the ten-year-old girl had the strongest English and did most of the communicating in the class, while the older girl was shy and quiet and the three boys spent most of their time hitting each other, telling stupid jokes in Chinese and asking the ten-year-old girl, "他说什么? 什么意思 ?" The boys, who together managed to show the intelligence of a box of rocks, seemed to feel no shame over being outshined by a little girl half their height and a third their weight. In another thirty years, I predict China will be run by women.

再感冒: Yet Another Cold
Originally posted--03:42, 2007-12-07

Well, it seems I'm doomed to catch colds this year. Last year, it was laduzi (literally, "pouring stomach") that I had problems with, so there isn't too much room to complain about it: a runny nose beats running to the toilet every ten or twenty minutes, even if the cost on toilet paper is about the same. A bit tired of the sniffling, though, I decided to do something about the cold this time and broke out one of my Zicam sprayers. Whoever came up with Zicam deserves some sort of reward; one day of squirting what feels like more mucus into my nose, and I've more or less recovered. (Granted, drinking four bottles of grapefruit juice and sleeping seven hours in the middle of the day yesterday may have helped.)

Being under the weather also gave me a full day to do nothing but practice my hanzi. Right now I'm picking words up at a pace of about ten per day and occasionally getting in anywhere from twenty to thirty on my days off. So far they're not doing a great deal of good, except that I can read more words in signs I can't make any sense of, but some things are starting to click into place. The first book of conversations Jia got me is more or less casual reading, and today while filling out student reports for classes, I realized I could read most of the Chinese--mostly limited to phrases like xia ge yue women hui xue _____ ("Next month we will study _____.") And I took a glance at the textbook I was using last year, only to realize that with a few exceptions like sushe, tushuguan and yundongchang (dormitory, library, and playing field), I know how to write most of the characters for the first fifteen chapters. I can also follow most of the readings, though I don't think I could actually figure out the sentence patterns enough to actually say anything like what I'm reading. I guess I'll have to be in the market for a sentence pattern book and CD before all the words I'm learning leak away from disuse.

Chinese Wisdom on Ganmao
Originally posted--08:35, 2007-10-29
If you have the misfortune to ganmao (catch a cold), rest assured that you will not want for lack of reasons why. Over the past few days, I've heard my cold attributed to everything from the weather to what, stateside, we might call a failure of moral character. Not one of the Chinese explanations has involved viri or bacteria, and nearly all have pointed to a personal failure on my part in some way.

Like in the US, the most common explanation for my cold has been a change in the weather; the temperature is dropping in Shenzhen, and I've failed to dress appropriately. Granted, the weather has indeed been getting cooler: we've had Chinese-brisk temperatures in the low 80s during the day, and at night, the temperature has even dropped to a Chinese-freezing 78 F. I dress year-round in slacks or jeans and a button-down shirt (with an undershirt) and have had a hard time explaining to any Chinese that--as my sweating clearly indicates--the only way I could be dressed inappropriately for 83 degree weather would be to go outside clad in nothing but a few strategically placed ice packs and maybe a dry-ice hat. I've also had that evil of all evils--the air-conditioner--blamed for my condition, and explanations that air conditioning at worst creates dry air (in dry climates, not in 65% humidity), which causes dry sinuses and often cold-like symptoms, fall on deaf ears. Granted, this explanation is just as common in the States, but at least in English the confusion is highly lexical: "He caught a cold." In Chinese, "ganmao" (feel rashly) doesn't seem to make the confusion with mild hypothermia as natural, though it may explain why the explanations for illness seem so accusatory. "Sick" in Chinese is "binghuan," the first part of which does sound like "cold" (though it simply means ill and its components mean "spread" and "fire"), so perhaps some confusion originates here.

Here, most illnesses are easily blamed on drinking cold water, and a cold is no exception. This explanation makes sense given the quality of water in China. Tap water here must be boiled before drinking (a process that brings out all the less pleasant tastes in what should be an almost tasteless liquid), and drinking cold water from the tap would certainly explain laduzi and related illnesses if nothing else. Based on the smell of the tap water, I wouldn't be surprised if it also caused dysentery, cancer, and spontaneous death. Naturally enough, I drink bottled water, as anyone here with the financial wherewithal to do so chooses to.

I've also had it explained that my cold may not be a "cold" cold, but a "hot" cold, a result of to much inner heat. This could be due to my diet, my temper, or my inherently (foreign and therefore) lustful nature. I have no idea how to respond to such explanations, other than to state that my diet is relatively well-balanced (if short on fajitas following the closing of Andes), that if brief bursts of sullen anger caused colds I'd long since have died of respiratory problems in China, and that I've had the libido of a pile of dirty laundry most of the time I've been in China.

Whatever the explanations, they've invariably been followed by the suggestion that I should take medicine (i.e., antibiotics) or try some Chinese medicine (i.e., weird concoctions of vegetables and dried parts of, usually, endangered animals or intimidating physical treatments). Trying to explain that anti-biotics are actually useless against a virus is wasted energy in a country where people often take eight or nine different medications to treat a case of the heebie-jeebies. Those suggesting Chinese medicine are often pacified when I tell them that I'm eating garlic (as long as I don't mention that this is a common practice in Western culture as well). Some of the more adamant insist that I still must take some official medicine, usually pointing out that I'm obviously uncomfortable. I try insisting that most symptoms of a cold are natural and healthy: coughing helps loosen and rid the body of sputum; sneezing helps loosen and rid the body of excess mucus; having to blow your nose is a good thing, since it's flushing the system of germs and dead white-blood cells. Little use. They still insist that I shouldn't be bushufu (uncomfortable), a word which is synonymous with sick in Chinese. (You'd think that a culture that says, "uncomfortable," to mean sick would accept the idea of discomfort being acceptable for someone ill, but apparently not.)

I've also had recommendations for acupuncture, massages, and a few other practices I don't entirely understand. Perhaps the most kindly offer came from Jia (whose mother is a Chinese doctor); she assured me that her mother would be more than happy to give me a hot-glass treatment to cure my cold, since her mother considers me good people. The sentiment is touching, but since the treatment involves using glass globes and heat to create a series of self-contained vacuums all over the back (a process which leaves people covered in circular bruises), the cure seems worse than the cold just now.

The universal bit of advice I've gotten has been to dress warmly and get plenty of rest. The latter seems sound advice, so I'm now off to bed.

Two Days of Fireworks

2008-02-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

The official Chinese New Year's Eve (大年三十, da nian san shi, or "big year thirty") was February 6th, and I celebrated by studying for a few hours, then having dinner with Panda. Before and after dinner, we watched TV, which is more or less the Chinese custom for celebrating any holiday. The big show from eight o'clock to midnight on New Year's Eve is the CCTV Spring Festival Gala--essentially a variety show--broadcast in Chinese with subtitles. As the pre-gala coverage was sure to mention, again and again, the CCTV Gala is over twenty years old, and watching it is a tradition for many Chinese.

It's also among the most boring things I've ever sat through in my life. Think of big feathered dresses and huge choreographical showpieces of the kind that were popular in early Hollywood; put that together with comedy routines that don't actually get translated, bubble gum pop songs that get translated poorly, loads of image-enhancing propoganda and a schmaltzy tribute to the "snow disaster," and it's just a bit more interesting than watching paint dry. Granted, had my Chinese been much better, I might have enjoyed it a bit, but having to rely on the usually meaningless subtitles makes for dull viewing. Perhaps lovely songs were rendered ridiculous by translations like "Hark! The children are reading their books." and "All the flowers and the drunken people." And rather than providing a translation of the words in cross-talks (a kind of comedy routine), the producers instead ran descriptive passages along the bottom of the screen: "This sketch is about China's real estate market. Real estate prices have risen drastically in recent years, and this has led to . . . etc. " The whole thing seemed like nothing more than a good-will message to the world.

By ten o'clock or so, I managed to convince Panda that this was 不好玩儿 (not good fun) and to get her to agree to go out to Bao'an with me to watch the fireworks. In my neighborhood last year, every tree, gate and window had been covered in decorations, colored lights, Chinese lanterns, and the fireworks had run all night, all leading up to midnight, when so many fireworks went off it looked like noon. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the bus stop, the buses were no longer running, so I got stuck in NanShan.

However much more money there might be in NanShan than in Bao'an, there certainly isn't much more celebratory spirit. Panda and I walked around a good while, but over a perios of a few hours not much was happening--a few fireworks right at midnight, but nothing like what I'd seen last year. One or two people climbed up to the roofs of their buildings and set off Roman candle after Roman candle, but the lights were mostly from isolated spots. The absolute chaos from last year (with fireworks shooting from every roof, most balconies and from the road, all while children ran around with sparklers, and the whole thing looked like the sun would surely rise on a corpse-littered street)--that chaos never made an appearance. Instead the whole night seemed subdued.

Two days later, Winnipeg and I went into Hong Kong for their fireworks display. Beforehand, I had a good Reuben and some chili-cheese potato skins at Murphys, and we managed to get relatively close to the display (though a million people or so must have been between us and the water). Last year, we'd watched from the wrong spot in the rain, and the whole show had looked like a backlit cloud of smoke. Though our view this year was partly blocked by buildings, the sky stayed clear, and we got a fantastic show for our time. In the first thirty seconds of the display, we must have seen more explosions than we did during the whole display last year.

好冷, 雨好大, 风好大: Bleak Days

2008-02-09T22:31:00.000-08:00

Good cold, rain good big, wind good big: This more or less sums up the weather over the past week and a half in Shenzhen. My vacation has, of course, been relatively dull by most standards, but it seems my decision to celebrate the days off in the nerdiest way possible has been a profitable one. With China experiencing the worst winter in, some say, fifty years, transportation has been largely shut down--many routes northward from my southern province of Guangdong are either closed or too dangerous for travel. So, unlike many I know, my vacation plans carried through more or less exactly as planned, though colder, wetter and gloomier than I'd hoped.

My tutor and I met each day from the 2nd through to the 8th, and if I didn't get everything I wanted out of the 40+ hours of lessons, I at least got a great deal of practice in. My tutor, hired just for the week, had difficulty grasping the idea of forming new words from the hanzi I already know (now around 400 that I can use well) and her idea of "useful" language differs from mine rather significantly. Much of this is just due to a certain inflexibility built into the Chinese mindset. Their mindset is often incredibly immediate, and they can sometimes miss the forest for the trees. For example, she complained that she couldn't teach me 天气 (tian qi, or weather), since I couldn't write the character 冷 (leng, cold) by hand and since to her mind the only good, useful sentence to learn regarding the weather at the time really was, "The weather is too cold." That I might be able to use a sentence like "The weather is warmer this week" apparently didn't occur to her.

By the third day of classes, though, she did start giving me some new words and phrases, and she proved remarkably dedicated to the lessons, often going well over time to compensate for the time we spoke English. And the practice of just speaking constantly, going over the same sentence patterns again and again have made some formerly difficult constructions much more comfortable. In Mandarin, conditional statements almost always follow a "If . . . then . . . " form, and it used to be difficult for me to remember to say "then," but it's much easier to recall now. More importantly, I've finally gotten comfortable with the Mandarin version of our "Because . . . " sentence; in the Mandarin, you have to say both "because" and "so"--"Because I didn't sleep well, so I'm tired"--a construction I struggled with just two weeks ago.

The new phrases I did pick up seem remarkably useful ones. For instance, a set phrase "意想不到" is used to indicate something as surprising, so I can now say, "意想不到, 在中国我学习knitting" ("Surprisingly, in China, I study knitting."), though I still have to learn to word for knitting. I also picked up a new hanzi, 被, which I don't understand yet, but which is apparently the key to forming passive voice in Mandarin. So, though I may still speak like a five-year-old, I'm at least making some progress.

All around, then, the vacation has been good. I did get to celebrate a few nights and spend some time with friends, of which I'll write more later. Had the weather not been so absolutely miserable, or were Shenzhen apartments better constructed for cold weather, I might be able to say the vacation was fantastic. Six to ten degrees Celsius isn't that miserably cold, but when it's accompanied by a steady drizzle, wind, and no central heating, it makes for a rough time. I'm optmistically anticipating the day when I don't have to wear a jacket, scarf and two pairs of socks indoors, and the next day I can take a shower without seeing my own breath may well be the happiest day in my life.

Behind the 可爱: JingJing's Dark Past

2008-01-29T02:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T02:20:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-24T20:21:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-22T03:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-21T02:03:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-17T02:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-15T22:21:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-15T02:39:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-12T01:44:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-08T04:25:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-07T01:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-03T01:50:00.000-08:00

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).

新年好呀: Happy New Year

2008-01-02T01:41:00.000-08:00

And Merry Christmas from blogcharm.com: to get into the spirit of the season, blogcharm decided to go out of business, and to wipe out everyone's existing blogs in the process--with no prior warning. (Perhaps it makes sense that a dot-com company would fold if they don't have the technical know-how to send a mass email to their subscribers.) But they're providing a great opportunity to get in on livevideo--another company they'll probably manage to screw up.

Fortunately, Google does a great job of caching Internet pages, and I was able to get back most of my entries. So I'm at a new location now, and once I've got the hang of using the Putonghua menu blogger is currently giving me, I'll be posting a little bit of old and a little bit of new when I get the chance.

What Does it Mean in English?

2008-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Here, I'll be setting up a glossary of just a few phrases, either hanzi or pinyin that pop up from time to time on my blog, so that folks don't have to search through pages of posts to find out one little phrase. Entries will be alphabetized according to pinyin. (Look for this page to grow.)

比胜客 (Bi sheng ke): Chinese name for Pizza Hut
不好意思 (bu hao yi si): Literally translated, "Not good meaning," this is often used instead of "I'm sorry."
等等 (deng deng): Usually translated as "and so on" or "etc.," this phrase sometimes actually means, "End list," as in "Three aspects to consider are quality, speed and quantity, 等等."
加油! (Jia you!): Literally "Add gas!," this is a cheer similar to "Let's go!"
可爱 (ke ai): Cute, lovely, beautiful, or (as it often refers to adult females dressed like children) cutesy.
老师（lao shi): Teacher
雪碧 (Xue bi): Chinese name for Sprite
意想不到 (yi xiang bu dao): Surprisingly, used only for good surprises
外国人 (wai guo ren): Literally, "Outside country person"; foreigner(s)
找不到 (zhao bu dao): Not able to be found; not available.