Creepy Enough Yet?

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."