西城区地安门西大街103号，齐鲁饭店后院内.
XiCheng District (In the second ring road, just outside the north entrance to Beihai park)

The outside is nothing special, just a light-up sign saying “vegetarian restaurant”, but the inside is a wonderful haven away from the crowds of Beijing.

The dishes are simple glazed pottery or color glass (No applicaed chopstick holders here!) and the waitstaff are fast and thoughtful. But after a day of Tiananmen vendors and shoulder-to-shoulder bus riders, the restaurant is relaxing and peaceful.

This restaurant is an oasis of calm in a city where elbows in the gut and spitting in the street are common. The half-underground dining room has an impossible amount of sunlight. The staff speaks only Chinese, besides “yes”, but they were quite patient with my struggles and the menu is bilingual. Actually, everything we ate was so good that I’d risk a random assortment of dishes.

Meat eaters needn’t worry, this is no rabbit food. Even dedicated carnivores will feel full after the meatless versions of traditional dishes (Beijing roast tofu, anyone?), or some of the tasty dumplings and fried rice dishes. Careful, though, when they say a dish is spicy, they’re not kidding!

Try any of their amazing teas. Although the Chinglish descriptions of their health benefits can be laughable, the teas are tasty and the thoughtful staff keeps replenishing the pot.

China, with a Western toilet and actual toilet paper.

To get here, take bus 13, 107, 111, 118, 204, 810, 823 or 850 to Dianmen, or walk west out of Beihai park’s north gate.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Vegetarian And Tea Restaurant

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David beat me to the punch on this one, but I wanted to make sure you didn’t forget your vade mecum. Whatever that is.

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Vade Mecum?

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There are a lot of factors leading to Chinglish disasters. First, in many cases, a literal translation just won’t do. Common signs like Take Care Knock Head and Already Broken still crack me up. But no longer thinking of a direct 1:1 ratio between English and Chinese words has really helped in my language learning.

The new English signs and menu are prone to other problems, like the typos of normal human error, rush-job spelling mistakes, confusion between similar letters and words, and so forth. At times, it’s literally easier for me to decipher the Chinese. (Which either means that I rock, or that I’ve memorized the collection of dishes we usually order. You decide.)

Not to mention the obscure English vocabulary brought back to life by electronic translators. Stick and I went to see an apartment recently because the landlady promised us a bathroom containing a lavabo and close stool. That’s a sink and a toilet to those of you without SCA membership. I don’t know if ad and pamphet translators agree with my students, and feel that the longest semi-synonym provided by the dictionary is the most impressive, and therefore the best choice. But you can easily imagine the humor of these BabelFish translations.

The plan is great. A few words of English — even broken English — have helped me out many times. But in practice, there is an East-meets-West problem.  The Chinese praise even the clumsiest attempts at Mandarin and will probably be expecting the same in reverse. They’ll be expecting thanks and praise for their English accommodations. They’re adding English to places they expect foreigners to visit, with the convenience of foreign visitors (or at least the tourists’ wallets) in mind.

But Western visitors of all sorts will be giggling and snapping pictures of Crap Salad or Bland Kitty, which are just too funny not to be shared with folks back home. The offended Chinese will wonder why Westerners have not only failed to thank them for their English translations, but are actually criticizing them, failing to respect the effort that went into creating an English-language menu just for foreigners (even if it was plugged into Babelfish and then printed off).

But I’m worried that this attempt at hospitality is doomed create more international bad blood. Negative comments in the Western press about any aspect of China, are often seen as proof that the Western media is biased against China. I’m sure this will be a general problem with all the foreign reporters and visitors at the Olympics, someone’s going to have something negative to say, but it’s especially rough in this situation. I’m worried that this will feed the Western stereotype of the Chinese producing worthless garbage, and the Chinese stereotype of rude, anti-Chinese foreigners.

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Take Care Knock Heads

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“Sure, I’m free.” I said. “What did their regular teacher cover last week?”

“They don’t have a regular teacher.” Joe said.

“The class is in 4 hours and they don’t have a teacher?”

“That’s why I called you,” he said. (Duh! I know the engine’s on fire! That’s why I called a mechanic!)

Good thing I went, though. While I was in the midst of explaining the rules for Verb Charades, I happened to look at the wall behind my students, and noticed something odd with the language poster.

Usually these posters are something like this:

Language centers are full of these posters. A bit of a random assortment, a touch of Chinglish, and some rarely used idioms but nothing memorable. But what caught my attention — and almost stopped my class — was this one:

I wonder if they make a wallet-sized version for easy reference on the go.

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Adventures In Tutoring

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Edit: You should all know that Stick calls this store Leeroy Jenkins.

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Leroy Merlin Circular

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Lost Laowai talks about the Rape of Nanking. And not in the CCTV9 70th anniversary documentary way, either.

…it surprised me that I had gone a quarter of a century on this planet and never heard of Nanjing, never mind anyone raping it.

When I ended up moving to China not long after, I was a bit taken aback by the overt hate and racism towards Japan and Japanese. I mean, sure I had only relatively recently heard of the horrors that befell Chinese at the hands of Japanese soldiers – but that was nearly 70 years ago, how could they still be pissed about it?

But I think it’s my ignorance towards this part of history that is largely responsible. We shout the loudest when no one is listening, and for a long time no one was listening to China.

Tim Johnson on China Rises talks about Beijing air quality. It’s not alarmist predictions of environmental doom, just an expat and father wondering about the long-term effects of China air. Obviously we don’t have kids, but Stick and I often wonder if the price to pay for our Chinese adventure is a hacking cough.

Beijing is severely polluted. Call me ethnocentric but my experience is that most Chinese have no idea how severe the pollution is. They’ve rarely or never been outside of China, and they’ve grown accustomed to the haze and smog. We Westerners are not. Yet we choose to live here, often for very good job reasons, even enjoying ourselves greatly. And our kids’ health may suffer in the process. It’s not something most parents want to dwell on.

Optimists see the Forbidden City, the Temple Of Heaven and the Rainbow bridge, but blogger Imagetheif wants to know Beijing ugliest buildings. There are so many modern monsters that it’s hard to pick one, and a lot of buildings that look fine alone (the leaning tower of CCTV or the Olympic bird’s nest) don’t look so great when surrounded by Beijing’s grey Soviet blocks and competing neon.

Strolling down Chang’an Avenue recently I was struck by how much of central Beijing’s recent construction is, well, nasty. Seriously: Jianwai Soho, Twins Mall, Wanda, it’s all transforming the Boulevard into one long strip of gleaming, mixed-use wreckage pockmarked with Starbucks outlets.

And an older one, but worth repeating. Sinoplice‘s entry on Why Life In China Is Like An RPG

9. It takes place in a magical world where people believe in mystical concepts like qi and fengshui
10. The people take legends very seriously (even 5,000 year old ones)
11. The word “peasant” doesn’t seem out of place
12. There are plenty of barmaids in the taverns and women of ill repute on the streets
13. The background story: a legendary kingdom has fallen under the control of a powerful, malevolent force, and heroes are nowhere to be found…

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

China Blog Mixtape

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Good things, if not how I usually praise my students. I especially like Love Reading, partly because that’s what my teachers would have stuck on my papers if they had the Hello Kitty assortment pack, and partly because it sounds like an imperative. I guess Adamancy could go either way, either dedicated or stubborn.

But I think I’ll save this one for the bad kids:

My TA said that the Chinese means “soft” or “tender”… I can imagine how that translation came about.

Chinese speaker: What do you call this congee?
English speaker: Bland.

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Hello Kitty Chinglish

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Der Landgraf was easily spotted because it had a winterized beer garden in front, a very auspicious beginning to our adventures. When we went inside, the hostess walked over and stared at us. I know I should be adjusted by now, but I’m not. I’m always touching my hair and making sure my fly is closed.

She then made vague motions in the direction of a table. Actually, in the direction of all the tables. We figured that meant we could pick our own.

The menus were trilingual, and awesome. No “Happy Fragrance Pig Intestines” here… in fact no Chinglish at all! Stick enjoyed it, like me, he learned the foreign-language words for food he likes, so he was all “mashed potatoes” and “sauerkraut”, only in German.

The only German I can say is “This tastes like sh!t,” because when I was in Cambridge, a German girl in my dorm said that every night at dinner. Every night for eight weeks. (If you teach at my school, I apologize for my impassioned speech last week… it’s true, passive repetition will eventually sink in.)

Anyway, it’s a singularly useless phrase to know, since I like the food. If my one sentence was something pointless like “My hovercraft is full of eels” I could at least drop it on Manfred and Xuemei for a laugh. But “This tastes like sh!t”? Probably not.

We had great food, and even better beer. Apparently this Bitberger stuff is pretty famous or something.

After eating, we walked around the neighborhood. I thought that Der Landgraf would probably be in the center of a German bubble or an expat area. There are a bunch of those little foreign pockets near the different embassies, and wouldn’t it be cool of one was close to us? But sadly it was in one of those Gatsby neighborhoods characterized by one KFC per intersection, pseudo-Western shops and knockoff boutiques. (Yeah, I act like I’m too cool for it, but it’s easy to be superior with a smoothie in your hand.)

We took a cab home, and when we got in, the driver gave us detailed instructions on where we can flag down a cab and where we can’t. I understood allowed, not allowed, stand, and taxi BUT the where part was a total mystery to me.

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Der Landgraf

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Anyway, it’s probably better that I’m not allowed to change their names. Sure, I’ll probably call the boys Bill or Joey or Matt, but I might also go with good, old-fashioned Biblical names, like Zebidiah or Nebuchanezzar. You never know.

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Shadrach, Meshach and Abendego.

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If you like the Chinglish blurb, you can read the rest of it here. It’s from the Amazon.com page for Becoming Jane: The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen, by Anne Newgarden. (Scroll down to “Book description”)

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Becoming Jane

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