I’m exhausted after a few very full days, I’ll post properly tomorrow. I had dinner and KTV tonight with the awesome CNReviews team, Elliott Ng, Min Guo and David Feng, and talk turned to checking blog stats and search terms, so I can’t possibly go to sleep without checking my own info.
It turns out the top two searches on Simpson’s Paradox are “names for Voldemort” and “Bon Jovi’s home”.
Finally, my fashion sense is appreciated.
In Beijing, it’s hard to get away from the Olympic improvements. I think the changes are somewhere between using the good china for company, and completely reinventing your wardrobe, habits and personality to attract some guy from history class. (Not that I ever did that) I’m seeing more and more English around town, and English-language menus, maps and information are supposed to be readily available in Beijing before the Olympics. Unfortunately, I’m afraid these Chinglish attempts will cause more confusion.
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.
Well, that’s annoying. PayPal noticed I made a purchase in China and froze my account while they look into it.
Yesterday, we went up to Wudaokou to visit Sven. Wudaokou is a cool college-town area in northwest of the city, Propaganda is down the street, and a Pizza Hut, and an English bookstore. Our favorite Indian restaurant, Ganges, is just down the street. As soon as we got off the subway, I started to feel a bit jealous of Sven. Where we live, in Fengtai, is where you end up if you’re going someplace interesting and accidentally get on the bus going the wrong way.
We wanted to check out a coffeeshop and library near the Old Summer Palace. The library’s called One Way Street (not to be confused with my Yantai haunt, the One Way Ticket), and it’s separated from Beijing traffic by a garden of the Old Summer Palace, and shaded by trees. Not newly-transplanted saplings in a row, these were big shady climbing trees, with hammock-style camping chairs underneath. We got some coffee and tea from nearby Mima coffeeshop and played with the bookstore cats. I understand the summer palace much better now that I’ve used its old grounds as a peaceful escape from frantic Beijing.
I had a fantastic afternoon talking with Sven and Stick, so good that I had Harry Potter open on my lap the whole time and didn’t read it.
Thanks to Sven (who does not foster age-inappropriate crushes) for the title.
I asked one of my classes to write about their Chinese names. What’s your Chinese name? Who choose your name? What does it mean? Are you named after someone? Do you like it? Is it common?
This assignment was suggested to me at LCC as a non-threatening way to let American immigrant students share a bit about their cultural and personal backgrounds. It was pretty successful, as people shared their baby nicknames and laughed about the way Americans mispronounce their names. (No topic is ever completely safe, and one of my students wrote that her name was chosen by the nuns who found her.)
It’s an even better assignment in China, because the students all write out the lovely characters in their names. It’s always interesting to hear the stories behind Chinese names, I know a girl called “Only Treasure”, because of the one-child policy, and Stick works with a girl called “Rebeautify” since she was born right after a massive storm. My students wrote about how their parents consulted an astrologer, gave them the five elements in their name, one character from an illustrious ancient scholar or poet, plus a homophone for beloved, intelligent and successful.
Now I’ve now got a leg to stand on when they want to change their English names to MooMoo or Watermelon.
Stick and I went back to our possible hutong home, mostly to see if we could find it on our own. We were successful, and I fell even more in love with the neighborhood. The area is Brick Factory Road, where the workers who built the bricks for the drum tower lived, but the inside has been renovated to include hot water and internet. I’m really hoping the bargaining stars will align and we’ll get our high-speed hutong.
Then we took a roundabout trip home, and stopped at Xizhimen to check out a sushi place. It’s on the 5th floor of the Xizhimen mall, but I don’t know the name. Well worth a visit if you’re looking for cheap, good sushi. (6-30 RMB for orders of various rolls) The beer is unfortunately restaurant price, it always makes me giggle to see a bottle that goes for three kwai in the supermarket appear on a menu for twenty. Not that that stopped us from ordering it.
The food was very good, the Tsingtao was Tsingtao, and Stick wasn’t quite done explaining the theory of relativity (I am not kidding), so we ordered another plate of cucumber sushi. The waitress came back a moment later with 12 RMB.
“Oh, I didn’t see you pay!” Stick said.
“What? I thought you paid!” I said.
Stick called the waitress over, and then I opened my mouth like a fish a few times. My survival Chinese has never been put to this test, I’ve never had to tell someone to take their money back! When she realized I had a problem with my change, she counted it back to me and showed that it was indeed 12 RMB. I finally made myself clear with my broken Mandarin (Women bu ge chien which I believe is the Chinese equivilent of “We no give money”). It is amazing that anyone ever understands me! Our waitress thanked us and sorted it out, but I think we gave her more than twelve kwai of trouble.
My long battle with the Great Firewall is coming to an end, I’m finally moving off Blogspot. My new blog is at SimpsonsParadox.com. Come see my new home!
Since I’ve brought all 762 posts (not an exaggeration) over, it seems like a good time to change my blog name to something a little less high school goth girl. I even made a banner!
There are still some formatting problems and links that don’t quite go anywhere. I’ll continue to update here for a few weeks, until I’m sure I won’t accidentally blow up my new site.
Just wanted to reassure everyone that the earthquake was very far from Beijing, and Stick and I are fine!
If I weren’t so classy, this is where I would put a joke about the earth not moving for either of us.
We were coming out of the Hou Hai Starbucks this afternoon, and saw a water poet. I’ve written about this before, I think it’s awesome to watch them paint disappearing poems with their giant brushes. We went over to watch him work, which means I hopped around calling out the characters I recognized before sadly telling Stick that no, I have no idea what it says.
When he finished his piece, the poet turned to me and offered me the giant brush. Never wanting to miss an opportunity to publicly make a fool of myself try something unusual and new, I accepted. A crowd gathered and they guessed aloud what I was writing as I slowly and carefully wrote out three characters.
I have newfound respect for the waterpoets’ use of the giant unwieldy brush and unevenly flowing water-ink. They make it look so simple and smooth, but it was extremely awkward and made my usual childlike writing even worse than usual.
I wrote the top three, Mei guo ren, American (it was that or Ni Hao, I’m not playing with a full dictionary here), then handed the brush back to the poet, who whipped out the next two lines in the time it took me to write one word. It says:
nan something ming something
nu something tian hua
This proves that understanding greater than 50 percent can still leave me totally clueless as to the whole meaning. Men something, women something else.
I hope it says “Americans: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.”
