We've Got Your Cultural Sensitivity Right Here

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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.