Zhang Ai Ling’s words to live by may not apply to life (at least my life), but they do fit something else

I am by nature pessimistic, rather than optimistic. That was especially true during the last few years of my life in America. Back in the United States, I was a struggling member of the academic lumpenproletariat and had little stability or certainty with respect to employment. At the same time, I was marooned in a very conservative city that doesn't have much to offer in the way cultural and intellectual stimulation.

If that wasn't enough, I had two close shaves with being shot at and killed. As a native New Yorker friend of mine quipped, I attracted bullets while living in the US (this happened in my hometown and during a brief and very unhappy stint of living in Los Angeles). One of the many nice things about being in Beijing is the absence of violent crime; I'll have more to say about that in another post.

My outlook on life has brightened considerably since moving to China and particularly since relocating to Beijing. My life here is certainly not as rich as it was back in the states with respect to material possessions. But I feel much more at home in this vibrant and cosmopolitan city, which is filled with history and culture. I can also enjoy its urban amenities at a fraction of what it would cost to live even in the Twin Cities, Portland or Seattle, much less Los Angeles or New York. But best of all, by living in China, I can see first-hand how this fascinating country and society is literally changing at the speed of light.

Although I don't make lots of money, my income, particularly relative to my expenses, is pretty good. I can live quite comfortably and still send large sums back to the US in order to build up a nest egg for a house and my retirement. And most importantly, I have lots of wonderful friends in Beijing—mainly Chinese, but some laowai as well. In my old home town, on the other hand, I always felt like an outsider, even among that city's small and hunkered down bohemian and politically progressive community.

So my life in Beijing doesn't resemble, even at a distance, a bright beautiful gown. However, you could certainly call it a somewhat worn, but still very comfortable and snugly warm cardigan sweater. And I plan on wearing that sweater for another three or four years before trading it in for life back in the states.

Speaking of life back in the states, America's current economic woes makes it look more and more likely that this decision is as much a matter of necessity as it is a matter of choice (of course, the global economic crisis is affecting China, and I'll pass on some of my first impressions about that soon). Reflecting on the current dark economic times in the US, it occurred to me that Zhang Ai Ling's “Words to Live By” are really a very good metaphor for the root cause of America's economic problems.

I'm referring, of course, to those financial “innovations” that promised to both minimize risk and deliver handsome returns to investors. In particular, all those derivatives, as well as the securitization of sub-prime home mortgages, looked like bright and beautiful gowns from a distance. But they were all along crawling with lice. Indeed, one could add that these lice were carrying a really bad contagious disease, like say, typhus, and that the little critters spread the contagion throughout the US economy.

I take a backseat to no one when it comes to loathing President Bush. I'm confident that he will be remembered as being hands-down absolutely the worst President in American history (he's certainly up against some mighty stiff competition here). However, I don't think Bush is mainly to blame for the country's economic woes. When Bush declared in late 2007 that the economy was “excellent,” he was just being his usual clueless self.

However, the majority of economists who failed to see or downplayed the housing bubble should have known better. The data clearly showed, in real time, not only that a bubble did exist, but that the longer it went on, the more painful the consequences would be once it popped (as all bubbles do). This myopia is even more baffling in the view of the fact that the dot.com bubble was hardly ancient history.

Being a pessimistic by nature, I believed from the beginning that the big run up in housing asset prices didn't bode well for the long-term health of the US economy. To be sure, this view was based mainly on my gut feeling. I know something about economics, but am certainly no expert and can't claim any special insight here.

However, some economists, people who are infinitely more clever individuals than yours truly, did see big trouble on the horizon. These folks included Dean Baker, who wrote about it in CALCULATED RISK, this year's Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, recent Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and NYU's Nouriel Roubini. As Krugman declared back in August of 2007, “Americans make a living selling each others houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow that doesn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle.”

Of course, at that time, Krugman and the others who warned about bubble trouble were derided as Cassandra-like “bubbleheads.” And one of the biggest deniers was the man with the most influence over the US economy, namely former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. For this reason, the maestro, or better put, maestro no more, should bear the biggest blame for the US economy’s current woes.

To start with, Greenspan's Fed facilitated the rise in housing asset prices by pumping massive liquidity into markets. At the same time, the Fed Chairman used his immense prestige to help block any effort to regulate derivatives trading, the subprime market, and the like. Indeed, Greenspan claimed only a few years ago that derivatives had made the financial system “more resilient.” And in 2007 he insisted that a “national severe price distortion [with respect to housing] seems most unlikely.”

Well, the October Case-Shiller index drop in US nationwide housing prices was the biggest on record. I'm certain that Greenspan's comment on housing prices is certain to rank right up there with General George Armstrong Custer's statement, “The US Calvary is the Indian's best friend”, in the annals of expert misinformation.

I couldn't resist putting that photo of a very befuddled looking Greenspan at the top of this blog post. The former Fed Chairman now admits that his earlier firm belief that markets could police themselves was … well … kind of wrong.

In his extremely fawning book on Greenspan, Bob Woodward called this man a “maestro.” I think it is now clear that Stephen Roach, who is the Managing Director and Chief Executive at Morgan Stanley, was more on the mark when he called Greenspan a “serial bubble blower” some years ago. And now that these bubbles have all burst, the truest verdict on the former Fed Chairman is that offered by Steve Goldstein of Market Watch: “For a man who was once remarkably hard to decipher, Alan Greenspan is now as clear as an empty Lehman Brothers office.”

As my colleague Mike Watts, who has no love whatsoever for investment bankers and financiers, told me when he read this quote (also from Krugman's blog) and saw the photo, “Now that's absolute, utter class!!”

Zhang Ai Ling's Words to Live By

生命是一袭华美的袍子，里面爬满了虱子. For those readers who are interested, the pinyin and tones of this quote, as well as the other characters in this post, are for the most part listed below the main text body.

The gist of this quotation from Zhang Ai Ling (张爱玲) (see the two photos above) is as follows: “Life on the outside appears to be a bright and beautiful gown, but this gown is really crawling with lice.” While this is certainly not a cheery view of human existence, one can't really blame Zhang, who was one of China's greatest 20th century novelists, for uttering such sentiments. Her life was very much like a gown that from a distance appears to be beautiful, but when looked at closely is really crawling with lice.

Zhang was born in 1920 in Shanghai into a famous aristocratic family. Her grandfather, Zhang Peilun, was the son-in-law of the 1ate-19th Century statesman and high ranking Qing Dynasty official, Li Hongzhan. But while Zhang's childhood material circumstances were good enough, saying that her relations with her parents were “troubled” would be massively understating things.

When Zhang was five her father took in a concubine and then quickly became addicted to opium. Her mother reacted by leaving the family to tour Europe for four years. Despite having bound feet, she was one of the first Chinese women to ski in the Alps. She returned only after her husband promised to quit smoking opium and throw out of the concubine; however, the two divorced in 1930.

Zhang's father then married his concubine. Zhang did not get along with her step mother, and her father, who was a violent patriarch, beat and imprisoned his daughter for six months when she 18 over some perceived minor slight to his second wife.

Even at a young age, Zhang displayed considerable literary talent, and her writing provided an escape from her unhappy childhood. She was also intensely ambitious, declaring in 1944, “To be famous, I must hurry. If it comes too late, it will not bring me much happiness … Hurry, hurry, or it will be too late, too late!”

Zhang didn't have to worry. She became famous overnight in 1944 when her first writing, which was penned in 1943-1944, was published. Much of her most famous work, including “Love in a Fallen City” (倾城之恋) and “The Golden Cangue” (金锁记), were written during this first burst of creativity. The first edition of her collected short stories sold out in four days after it was published in 1944.

Zhang's early writing established her as the most important literary chronicler of life in 1940s Shanghai. Her stories focused on men and women struggling to deal with the day-to-day dislocations brought on by war and modernization. For example, in the short story, “Sealed Off,” two Shanghai strangers, an unhappily married man and a lonely single woman taking a tram, are drawn into a dreamlike conversation as their car is being searched by Japanese troops.

The Taiwanese film director, Li An (李安), whose previous films include “Brokeback Mountain” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” has recently sparked a revival of interest in Zhang Ai Ling with his film adaptation of one her most famous short novellas, “Lust, Caution” (色戒).

In this story, a young college student, played by the beautiful Tang Wei (汤唯), is sent by an anti-Japanese resistance group to seduce a top official in the collaborationist Chinese Government so he can be assassinated. However, it is the student who winds up being seduced by the official, played with reptilian charm by the still very dashing Liang Chao Wei (梁朝伟). At the end of the story, in a self-destructive change of heart, the student warns her prey of his imminent danger, thereby allowing him to narrowly escape the trap that has been set for him and dooming herself and her comrades.

The story 色戒 illustrates another notable feature of Zhang's work, namely the extreme economy of her prose. Zhang uses no more 15,000 characters to write an intensely atmospheric and tautly plotted espionage story that morphs into an erotically charged story of seduction. The novella, which has been reprinted by Penguin Books, is a mere 33 pages long.

Indeed, in contrast to most film adaptations, Li An actually added material to the literary work on which his film was based. For example, the very disturbing scene in which the student follows her prey into a Japanese military brothel and sings to him in a private room does not appear in Zhang's novella.

I think that Li An's film is certainly a terrific adaptation of 色戒. In particular, it depicts very well the sinister and harsh atmosphere of the collaborator’s villa, together with his grasping wife (brilliantly portrayed by Joan Chen) and mahjong (麻将) playing female friends.

But one thing the film doesn't convey, that is captured in Zhang's prose, is the collaborator's warped sense of triumph after the assassination plot is foiled and his temptress turned mistress and her friends have been executed. Zhang chillingly writes:

“He was not optimistic about the way the war was going, and had no idea how it would turn out for him. But now that he had enjoyed the love of a beautiful woman, he could die happy—without regret. He could feel her shadow forever near him, comforting him. Even though she had hated him at the end, she had at least felt something. And now he possessed her utterly, primitively—as a hunter does his quarry, a tiger his kill. Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost.”

Liang Chao Wei is a great actor and does as good a job as could be done in conveying, with his body language and facial expressions, the collaborator's conflicted state of mind after his subordinate informs him about the arrest and execution of the student and her friends. But the scene lacks the devastating punch of Zhang's writing. And putting the above comments into the film with a voice over narration would be awkward and a bit contrived and artificial to boot.

While Zhang achieved early literary fame, she never had a very happy life. She was particularly unfortunate when it came to her relations with men. Her first husband, Hu Lan Cheng (胡兰成), whom she secretly married in the winter of 1944, was very much like the collaborator in 色戒. This man served as the Chief of the Judiciary in Wang Jingwei's collaborationist Chinese Government.

Indeed, when Zhang and Hu married, she was still technically a student. Zhang had a semester of coursework to do at St. John's University in Shanghai but was forced for financial reasons to suspend her studies. And after Zhang's writing made her instantly famous, she never finished her studies. 色戒 is thus a very autobiographical story. And even though Hu was a Japanese collaborator—the Chinese refer to these folks as 汉奸—Zhang married him because he was a very handsome, elegant, and cultured literatus.

Unfortunately, Hu was not only a 汉奸, but an incorrigible philanderer to boot. In fact, when Zhang married Hu, he was still married to his third wife; hence, their secret wedding and common-law marriage. In 1945 Hu moved to Wuhan to work for a newspaper and while staying in a hospital, he seduced a 17 year old nurse. And when the war ended, Zhang's husband fled to Wenzhou. He had yet another extra-marital affair, or 婚外情，while hiding in that city.

Zhang moved to Hong Kong five years after her and Hu divorced in 1947. In 1955 she left China for good to move to the United and a year later, married the prominent American scriptwriter, Ferdinand Reyher, who was several decades older than Zhang. This second husband suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and 1962, which left him paralyzed. He then died in 1967.

While living in the United States, Zhang wrote film scripts, translated her earlier fiction and other Chinese novels into English, and held brief visiting appointments at Radcliffe College and Berkeley. She kept up this work after permanently relocating to Los Angeles in 1972, but became increasingly reclusive. She died there in 1995 as a lonely old woman.

So Zhang's life was indeed much like a beautiful garment that, when closely examined, is crawling with lice. To be sure, she made some bad choices and was to some extent the author of her own misery. However, this behavior, particularly her first disastrous marriage was also in no small measure related to her very unhappy childhood over which she had no control. As Marx famously insisted, men do make history, but can't choose the circumstances in which they make it.

Fortunately, Zhang bequeathed a great literary legacy to the world. I've already read some of it in translation, including, of course, 色戒, and can hardly wait to read her work in Mandarin in the not too distant future.

A change in this blog's format:

A number of friends, readers, and critics—these categories of course are not mutually exclusive—have told me that putting the pinyin and tones of Chinese characters after the characters is distracting and breaks up my writing's lovely flow (he! he!). So from now on, I'm going to put the pinyin, i.e. the way the characters are spelled in the Roman alphabet, along with their tones, below the main text body.

I hope this blog will get a few laowai and China and people back in the states interested in learning Mandarin and give them a bit of help in doing so.

Mandarin has five tones and the tone of each character is the number after its pinyin. 1 is a flat tone, 2 is a rising tone, 3 is a falling and rising tone, 4 is a falling tone, and 5 is a neutral tone. The characters below appear in the order in which they appeared in the blog post:

生命是一袭华美的袍子，里面爬满了虱子: sheng1 ming4 shi4 yi4 xi2 hua2 mei3 de5 pao2 zi5, li3 mian4 pa2 man3 le5 shi4 zi5
张爱玲: Zhang1Ai4Ling2
倾城之恋: Qing1Cheng2Zhi31Lian4
金锁记: Jin1Suo3Ji3
李安: Li3An1
色戒: Se4Jie4
汤唯: Tang1Wei2
梁朝伟: Liang2Chao2Wei3
麻将: ma2jiang4
胡兰成: Hu2Lan2Cheng2
汉奸: han4jian4
婚外请: hun1wai4qing2; literally translated, it means “marriage outside love.” As in so many other cases, Mandarin word order is a bit different from English word order.

Another type of Vehicle(s) you never see in China

While this is still fresh in my mind, I can make one note of one other vehicle you'd never see in China. I'm talking about motor homes (房车, rising tone “fang” and flat “che”) and trailers. During my visit to America, I saw more than a few RVs parked in suburban driveways. And the fact that they're parked in a suburban driveway is one big reason why hardly anyone in China owns a motor home or trailer.

In contrast to America, there is very little residential parking space in Chinese cities. Even many of the newer apartment complexes don't have underground parking garages, or 地下停车场 (falling tone “di” and “xia”, rising tone “ting” and the last character is a falling and rising tone “chang”). And of course Chinese cities are too built up to have space for big open parking lots, especially in and around their centers.

For example, my complex in Dongzhimen doesn't have an underground parking garage. The same goes for nearly all of the other complexes nearby. And people only recently moved into these buildings, in 2003 or thereabouts. The one exception is the recently completed “Naga Life” luxury apartment community; I'll talk about this place in a future post.

Thus nearly everyone in my building and the other nearby buildings who have cars have to find a place on the street. Most park them on the wide alley, which used to be a hutong back when all the residential buildings were siheyuan courtyard houses just east of the Dongzhimen Dajie or “Ghost Street.”

A few of them can purchase spots. These places come with a bar which is locked in an upright position when the parking place is vacated to prevent other cars from using the spot when the owner is away. But most car-owners have to hunt for a place to park their cars.

In fact, one former student from the language center where I teach on Sundays lives in my neighborhood and owns a car. This fellow was a manager in a private company and I recall him having an SUV—yes there are a few them parked around where I live. He once told me that he wasn't able to purchase a parking spot, adding that it was a real hassle trying to find a place to park every evening in the neighborhood.

And even if you're lucky enough to be in a new building with an underground parking garage, you'll have to pay a lot of money to park your vehicle inside the garage. In America, of course, apartment and condominium complexes with undergraduate parking garages typically give tenants/owners at least one free parking space. However, my colleague here at CNLC, Yao Ling Ling, informs me that she has been paying 500 RMB (around $70 at the current exchange rate) a month for a parking space.

Yao and her husband now intend to buy this parking space. To do so, they'll have to pay 120,000 RMB, or around $18,000 at the current dollar-RMB exchange rate. That's more than they paid for their car, so as Yao told me, it's a good thing they don't have a second car!!

Thus if one did own a motor home or trailer in China, you would certainly spend a small fortune parking a vehicle that typically isn't driven/used all that much. It comes then as no surprise that Chinese nature reserves don't have campgrounds for motor homes and trailers. People who visit places like 云台山 (rising tone “yun” and “tai” and flat tone “shan”), Henan Province's most famous nature preserve, stay in a hotel.

I also don't recall seeing any tent campgrounds there either. And I suspect this is the case for most Chinese nature preserves or national parks. For example, my Chinese friend and language partner, Vivian Wang, told me that one can't pitch in tent anywhere near beautiful 九寨沟 National Park’s gorgeous, multicolored lakes. 九 (falling and rising tone jiu) 寨 (falling tone zhai) 沟 (flat tone gou), which means “Nine Stockade Gully,” is located in Western Sichuan Province and in addition to its lakes, boasts waterfalls, high rugged peaks, and immense glaciers.

Despite the restrictions on tent camping—扎营, a flat tone “zha” and rising tone “ying”—backpacking is gaining popularity in China. Indeed, there's a store selling backpacking gear, tents, and other equipment on the Dongsishitiao Beidajie not too far from where I live in Dongzhimen.

One place people backpack and camp at are the mountains around 九寨沟 (these peaks are also quite beautiful and spectacular). At least I remember seeing a party of backpackers on a CCTV 9 “Travelogue” show about this area. And the more rugged and less heavily visited parts of the Great Wall outside of Beijing, like 司马台(flat tone “si”, falling and rising tone “ma”, and rising tone “tai”) are popular backpacking and camping destinations. Peter Hessler, the author of RIVER TOWN and ORACLE BONES was found of camping at the Great Wall when he lived in Beijing.

In fact, one of my Chinese acquaintances, Phyllis Yu, runs an outdoor travel adventure service called “Pixie Adventures”. There are lots of really cool looking trips on the “Pixie Adventures” website (www.pixieadventures.com). The one that caught my eye was an extended trek through Sichuan's high mountains. I recall reading that the altitude through most of this jaunt stays at or above 12,000 feet.

REI has now opened a store in my hometown. I paid it visit during my late November-early December vacation back to the states and bought a pair of nice hiking boots that were on sale (I have large feet, so it's next to impossible to shoes that will fit me here). People who have read my personal introduction in this blog know that I love to hike in the mountains and did lots of trekking in California’s High Sierra Nevada. Now that I have a good pair of boots and possibly have found the right group trip, it's the Sichuan Mountains or bust!

A Final Word on "Pickup Truck" in Mandarin, Plus More Transliteration Mysteries

In an earlier post, “More on those darn pickup trucks,” I stated that Mandarin has no word for “pickup truck”. I further wrote that the absence of this word is no doubt related to scarcity of such vehicles on the Middle Kingdom’s roads and highways.

I'd still stand by the second claim. You don't see very many pickup trucks here in China. In particular, there are hardly of them in the big cities. Again, practically all of China's city-dwellers live in apartments and hence have no need for such a vehicle to do things like hauling out trash from the yard. And in the countryside, an American style pickup would be prohibitively expensive for most farmers, who typically make just a 1,000 or so RMB per month (that's about $200 at the current exchange rate). These folks are lucky to have a tractor big enough to pull a cart with all their produce into the nearest town or city.

I now vaguely remember seeing some pickup truck like vehicles during my first year in China. I then lived in a relatively small city, 新郑市 (flat tone “xin” and falling tone “zheng” and “shi”), located in rural Henan Province. However, these vehicles were not only smaller than American-style pickup trucks, but many also had just three wheels—one in the front and two in the back.

Of course most of the farmers drove their tractors into the city or, in other cases, used three-wheeled bicycle carts and horse and mule-drawn wagons to get their fruit and vegetables into town.

Indeed, a fellow teacher that year hitched a ride, or perhaps better put, passed out, in one of those tractor drawn carts after drinking large quantities of that disgusting Chinese liquor, 白酒. The first character is a rising tone “bai” and means “white,” while the second character is a falling and rising tone “jiu” and means liquor. The stuff is typically distilled from corn or wheat is 50 proof. I'll have more to say about it in another post.

Getting back to pickup trucks, my first supposition about there being no word for this vehicle in the Chinese language is wrong. One of my excellent former Erwai students, 侯坤 (falling tone “hou” and flat tone “kun”), has informed that yes, Mandarin does have a word for pickup truck. It's 皮卡, or a rising tone “pi” and a falling and rising tone “ka.”

The first character is pronounced like “pee”, while the second character is pronounced like “k-ah.” The character 皮 means “leather,” so the Mandarin word for leather belt, for example, is 皮带 (the second character is a falling tone “dai,” which is pronounced as “die”). 卡 is the first character in basic Chinese word for truck, or 卡车—the second character, a flat tone “che”, refers to any kind of moving land vehicle.

So, in other words, literally translated, 皮卡 means “leather truck.” Of course, this character combination wasn't chosen because these trucks are made out of leather. The pairing is chosen because it sounds like the “pickup” part of “pickup truck.” As I noted in an earlier post, since Mandarin writing is based on characters, it's not easy for the language to absorb words from foreign tongues. The only way to do this is to find some character combination that sounds like the way the word is spoken in its native language (or, in many cases, given its status as the world's language, English).

Thus whenever one runs across a really nonsensical character combination, chances are the combination is some foreign word. This pairing of Mandarin characters to sound like foreign words is called “transliteration.” The problem is that in many transliteration cases, it's not immediately obvious what's being transliterated.

The Chinese word for pickup truck is a case in point. Once you know what the characters mean, you'll probably say, “Yeah, that kind of sounds like pickup truck.” However, it's certainly not immediately obvious. Fortunately, one has a clue here, namely the 卡 character, to tell you that we're talking about some kind of truck.

But no such clue exists in the transliteration for “jeep”, or 吉普. The first character is a rising tone “ji,” while the second character is a falling and rising tone “pu.” The first character is pronounced like the “gee” in “gee whiz,” while the second character is said like the “pooh” in “Winnie the Pooh.”

“吉” is a Chinese family name and is also an archaic term for “lucky,” while 谱 means “common” or “universal.” Thus the meaning of these characters gives no clue about the transliteration’s meaning. And the pronunciation of these characters doesn't help much either, as the word jeep is missing the “pooh” vowel sound.

There are certainly some transliterations that sound exactly like the foreign word equivalents. For example, the Chinese word for the African country Sudan is 苏丹 (flat tone “su” and falling tone “dan”). The first character appears in the name of the famous city in Jiangsu Province, Suzhou, while the second character is one of the Chinese words for red (and is a popular girl's name). And the Middle Eastern country, Yemen, is 也门. The first character, a falling and rising tone “ye”, is pronounced like “yeah”, while the second character, a rising tone “men,” is pronounced like “mun.” Together they mean, “also gate.”

In other cases, the transliteration of foreign country names is not an exact match, but pretty close to it. Malaysia is a case in point. It’s 马来西亚. “马” is a rising and falling tone “ma” and is pronounced like “ma” in “mama”, “来” is a rising tone “lai” and is pronounced like “lie,” “西” is a flat tone “xi” and is pronounced like “she”, and “亚” is a falling tone “ya” and is pronounced like “yah.” Together literally they mean “horse come west Asia;” however, any reasonably intelligent person would be able to guess it means Malaysia.

Other transliterations of foreign country names are not so obvious. For example, one could probably, albeit with some difficulty, guess that 法国 (falling and rising tone “fa” and rising tone “guo”) is France. This is because the second character means “country” and the first character, which is pronounced like “fah,” kind of sounds like France. This character means “rule”, so France in Chinese literally means “rule nation.”

That's an odd name for a country that from the late 18th through the mid-19th century experienced three revolutions and whose people even today still protest at the drop of a hat. It would be better to give this name to Germany, but that country is 德国—the first character, a rising tone, “de”, is pronounced like “duh.” It means “virtue,” and kind of sounds like the “Deutsch” part of “Deutschland,” which is the German name for Germany. So according to the Mandarin naming scheme, the French follow rules, while the Germans are virtuous. Go figure!

While one might be able to figure out that 法国 means France, I suspect that nobody could guess about the meaning of 西班牙. “班” is flat “ban” is a pronounced like “b-ah-n,” while 牙is a rising tone “ya” and is pronounced like “y-ah.” 班 is one of the characters in the character combination for “go to work,” 上班, while 呀 is the Chinese word for teeth. The pronunciation bears only a passing resemblance to the way Spain is said in English and has an even more tenuous relationship to its Spanish name, “Espana.”

The same could be said for the Chinese name for Indonesia, which is “印尼”—a falling tone “yi” and a rising tone “ni”. This is clearly a transliteration from the English name of the country, as the first character is pronounced like the “E” in “E.R.” and second is pronounced like “knee.” I suspect this has nothing in common with the way Indonesia is said in Bahasa, the country's official language (I did a quick web search on this matter, but couldn't find get that information).

Finally, to end this discussion, there is one transliteration of a country name that is not as literal it could be. I'm talking about the Chinese name for America’s northern neighbor, Canada. It's 加拿大 in Mandarin. The characters are a flat one “jia,” meaning “add to/addition,” a rising tone “na”, meaning “take/hold, and a falling “da”, meaning “big” (in terms of size, not quantity). While this kind of sounds like “Canada”—gee-ah n-ah d-ah—the character trio, 看那大, sounds almost exactly the way “Canada” is said by English speakers. As noted above the last character is a falling tone “da”; the first one is a falling tone “kan” and the second is a rising tone “na”.

When learning a foreign language, one necessarily engages in word sleuthing. Good and really serious students will try to learn words from their context, rather than looking them up in a dictionary and trying to memorize them.

This is especially true with Mandarin. And this is really the case when it comes to learning the language's characters. This discussion has tried to show that one can turn this task into a fun and interesting activity. And since Mandarin is such a bloody difficult language to master for non-native speakers, you might as well try to have some fun while learning it!

Yet more bloody trailers

I'm about ready to head back to my current home, i.e. China, but did manage to squeeze in a viewing of the new James Bond film, "A Quantum of Solace," during my visit back to the states. In an earlier "reverse culture shock" posting, I kvetched about all the idiotic trailers one has endure before viewing a film in a movie theater here--cinema goers in China are spared all of that. Well, the new Bond was preceded by no less than SIX TRAILERS! Again, these were all almost certainly films with utterly no artistic or cinematic merit whatsoever. One of them, for example, was Adam Sandler's latest pathetic stab a comedic acting. I don't believe this man is even remotely funny and he's hands down the most obnoxious human being on the planet to boot.

Fortunately, the new Bond film was worth putting up with all this pre-screening pelf. I thought Pierce Brosnan was a very good Bond, but Daniel Craig is even better. As the critics have said, he's certainly the most pyschologically interesting and complex Bond so far. One other notable feature of this film is that is skipped altogether two staple elements of earlier 007 movies. One was the flirtatious banter with Moneypenny that preceded 007 being briefed by "M" on his new mission (the first Moneypenny, the Canadian born actress, Lois Maxwell, passed away last year). The other was the 007's obligatory visit to "Q" to be equipped with all kinds of devilishly clever weapons and gadgets.

I'm returning to China in a few days and look forward to leaving the film trailers behind me!

Coffee Culture comes to the 国子监 street

In an earlier post, put on the blog just before I returned to America for a visit, I wrote about a cool coffee café, “Waiting for Godot,” which is located just west of the Nr. 5 Line Beixinqiao Subway Station. A bit north of this place, on the 国子监街 (rising tone “guo”, falling and rising tone “zi”, and flat tone “jian”) street, are a number of other cool coffee cafés.

The 国子监 is more a wide alley than it is a street, and is one of my favorite places in Beijing. The Confucian Temple, or 孔庙 (falling and rising tone “kong” and “miao”), is located on its east end. Farther down the street are three coffee cafés. One of them, “Crown Coffee”, is shown in the two photos above. The two young ladies were clearly having a nice time relaxing over their lattes or whatever it was they were drinking.

However, my favorite café is the one shown in the photo below. I now go there sometimes for breakfast, as they have bacon, eggs, toast, and one cup of coffee for 30 RMB deal. The café’s interior features some nice art, sky-lights in the roof, exposed beams running below the ceiling, and nice, comfortable couches to sit in and spend an afternoon reading and book and sipping coffee. I definitely intend to spend some more time there.

Readers who know a bit of Mandarin will immediately notice that the English title of this place differs completely from its Chinese title. “喜鹊" (falling and rising tone “xi” and falling tone “que”) of course means “magpie” in Mandarin. I guess they figured that laowai wouldn't want to go into a place called “Magpie Coffee!”

Actually, my Chinese friend, Vivian Wang, has informed me that Magpies are seen as a magical bird here in China. This has to do with an ancient love story in which magpies formed a bridge enabling a pair of lovers to connect with each other. No wonder this place has such a Chinese name (难怪这个地方有这个中文的名字).

Reverse Culture Shock III: Going to an American Movie Theater

I got another bit of reverse culture shock a couple of days ago which has definitley made me miss one aspect of movie-watching in China. This happened when I went to see Kevin Smith’s new film, “Zack and Miri make a Porno.” As usual, I got to the River View Shopping Mall’s Edwards Multiplex Cinema a bit early and plopped down into my plush reclining seat only to endear 10-15 minutes of commercials and movie trailers.

The commercials were totally moronic appeals to buy coke, beauty products, and computer games and software. This was followed by five or so trailers of upcoming films, all of which I’m sure have no redeeming cinematic merit whatsoever.

Two stick out in my mind. One was an idiotic comedy starring Anne Hathaway, fresh from her triumph as Agent 99 in “Get Smart”, about a pair of beautiful young women cat-fighting over reserving a room in a posh New York hotel for their respective weddings. The other movie, “Confessions of a Shop-aholic”, is yet another Jerry Bruckheimer atrocity about … you guessed it, some dumb but beautiful shopping obsessed bimbo. Perhaps Bruckheimer is making a lame effort to rouse the now suddenly frugal American consumers back into their big-spending habits just as the US economy slides into the dreaded liquidity trap. In any case, given the economic hard times ordinary Americans are now enduring, screening such a film at this particular moment strikes me as being rather obscene.

The nice thing about watching movies in China is that cinema goers are spared all of this pre-screening pelf. I’ve now seen about a half dozen films in various movie theaters in Beijing, and none of these movies was every preceded by a trailer for another film, much less advertising for products.

On the other hand, a movie like “Zack and Miri” would, due to its content, certainly never ever make it on to the Middle Kingdom’s movie screens. But notwithstanding its title and some of the things that happen in the film, “Zack and Miri” is hardly pornographic. Kudos to Kevin Smith for turning a tale about two down and out people making a cheap porno flick in order to get some cash—both have dead-end, low-paying jobs and face imminent eviction from the apartment they share—into a rather sweet romance and love story. And compared to "Confessions of Shopaholic", "Zack and Miri" is much more in sync with today's troubled economic times.

While Seth Rogin and Elizabeth Banks are Zack and Miri, the rest of the cast includes two people from Clerks I and Clerks II. One is the fellow, minus his long hair, who played “Jay”, or “12-Step”, one of the two dope dealers in these films who hang out in front of the convenience store in Clerks I and the fast food joint, "Mooby's", in Clerks II (his partner, “Silent Bob”, was played by Kevin Smith). And the actor who starred as the wonderfully misanthropic Randall Graves in Clerks I and Clerks II, is also in “Zack and Miri” as Zack and Miri’s video camera man.

However, my fellow laowai Kevin Smith aficionados need not despair. It will certainly be possible to download “Zack and Miri” from the internet and I have no doubt that DVDs of this movie will be showing up very soon, if they haven’t already, in DVD shops. I had no trouble buying a DVD of “Clerks II”, which, after all, featured a bit of “inter-species erotica”. Kevin Smith fans will know what I’m talking about and the rest of you can figure it out on your own, although what was actually shown in that particular scene wasn’t at all explicit (at least they didn’t get any complaints from the Humane Society).

In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying viewing mainly Chinese movies in the cinema without the highly annoying pre-screening commercials and trailers.

More on those darn pickup trucks

After finishing the earlier blog post about pickup trucks, it occurred to me to me that there might not be any word in the Chinese language for this vehicle. The word “truck” in Mandarin is 卡车 (falling and rising tone “ka” and flat tone “che”).

I then thought that the Chinese might call such vehicles a “小卡车”. The first character is a falling and rising “xiao” and means “small”. Mandarin is such a wonderfully logical language, so why not call these trucks “small trucks,” as that’s basically what they are!

However, when I emailed one of my former Erwai students, a very bright and clever young lady named 冯岑 (a rising tone “feng” and a rising tone “cen”) about this, she informed me that 小卡车 doesn’t really refer to a small truck, but a truck that is used to haul automobiles. Such vehicles, of course, would be a good bit larger than a standard sized American pickup truck.

There are only two other Mandarin words for truck. One is 房车—the first character is a rising tone “fang” and appears in the Chinese word for “home”, or 房子—which refers to a vehicle or mobile home one can live in. As was said a moment ago, Mandarin is very logical in the way it pairs different characters together. The other word is 大车, which literally means “big truck”. The first character in this couplet is a falling tone “da” and means big, in the sense of size, in Chinese.

The story illustrates how a language is rooted in its underlying social and physical environment. Since there aren’t any pickup trucks in China, Mandarin doesn’t have a special word for these types of vehicles. Conversely, the language spoken by Inuit Eskimos has 30 odd words for “snow.”

I studied German as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California and still speak and read it fairly well. I checked in my dictionary and, unlike Mandarin, the German language appears to have two separate words for “pickup truck.” When in Germany, you can call this vehicle either a “kleiner Lieferwagen” or “Kleintransporter.” I guess, in contrast to China, “Im Deutschland gibt es Lieferwagen” (there are trucks in Germany).

In order to be fair and balanced ...

In my "Reverse Culture Shock I" post, I invoked John McCain's problems with geography to illustrate how even leading American statesman don't know that much about the world. Lest anyone think that this blog isn't "fair and balanced," I'll be the first to concede that many Democrats are similarly challenged when it comes to knowing about the outside world. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, was notorious for his ignorance of other countries; indeed, had he been better informed and more sure of himself in this area, America might have been spared all that unfortunate business in Vietnam.

However, the best illustration of Democratic ignorance in this area is a comment I vaguely remember being made by Richard Daley, the late and unlamented mayor of Chicago. He famously insisted, "No man is an Ireland." Well, Ireland is an island, so he was sort of on the mark in saying this. And the statement is literally true, as no man is indeed big enough to be an Ireland!

This quote, along with other hilarious comments, like Thomas Watson's infamous statement, "There is a market for exactly one personal computer," is in Victor Navasky and Christopher Cerf's great compendium of expert misinformation, THE EXPERTS SPEAK (Watson, of course, was the founder of IBM). Indeed, this book makes for an excellent post-meal dinner party entertainment helper--one can amuse one's guests with similar comments like that made about Willie Mays ("a so-so center fielder"), Mick Jagger ("the lead singer will have to go"), and rock and roll music as a passing fad ("Maybe next year it will be Hawaiian music").

Reverse Culture Shock II: We don't have these vehicles in China

On my second or third day home, I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood to see how it’s changed and get some exercise. I’m staying with my folks, and they live out in the countryside, beyond even the Clovis suburban fringe—the Chinese word for suburban fringe is 郊外 (flat tone “jiao”, falling tone “wai”; countryside is 乡下, flat tone “xiang” and falling tone “xia”).

Since I was walking about on what was basically a country road, the majority of the vehicles driving on the streets were pickup trucks. After the sixth or seventh truck passed by, it dawned on me that I have never seen such vehicles in the Middle Kingdom. The absence of pickup trucks in China is not at all surprising: most Chinese urban dwellers live in small apartments and have no need to haul about trash or other things from their homes.

People living in expensive villas are wealthy enough to simply pay someone to come out and haul stuff away rather than using their own vehicles to do it. Many of these folks do have SUVs and have formed SUV off-road clubs and drive these vehicles in the mountains around Beijing during weekends.

Finally, farmers, who still comprise the bulk of China’s population, are too poor to afford a pickup truck. Even well-off farmers typically have just one tractor and they drive it into town, pulling a cart, to sell produce, such as watermelons, apples, and the like. Really poor farmers will haul that stuff into town on horse- and mule-drawn carts.

Several of these carts would typically show up every weekend outside the north gate of my first Beijing home, the Beijing International Studies University, which is located on the Beijing 郊外just east of the Fifth Ring Road. Indeed, I’ve seen farmer’s horse-drawn carts appear a bit further into Beijing, on the fourth ring road.

Since China doesn’t have pickup trucks, it also doesn’t have the hick-redneck pickup culture. I should state here that most pickup drivers, of course, aren’t part of that subculture—most drive pickups for very practical reasons, like one of very best friends in CA who has done excellent writing about the Sierra Nevada mountains here. He drives, or used to drive, a pickup truck simply because it was the best way of getting about the mountains and a very good vehicle to camp out of to boot.

That said, there are a not insubstantial number of young rural American men who drive pickup trucks not because they need to use them to haul things about or camp in the outdoors. The vehicle rather serves as a statement identifying themselves as young men who are not only “rednecks”, but might proud of being “rednecks.”

They consequently adorn their vehicles with gun racks across the back window—in China, of course, gun ownership is strictly regulated—and redneck pride bumper stickers. And many of these vehicles, including several that passed me by during my countryside stroll, sport big oversized wheels that thrust the vehicle way up from the ground. I can’t think of any practical purpose these wheels serve, so they must have been put on to make some kind of a statement about the size of the driver’s sexual organ.

Although I haven't missed this aspect of US society while living in the Middle Kingdom, there are certainly many other facets of America I do miss. These include its beautiful scenery, vibrant urban popular culture, jazz music, and above all, its multicultural tolerance. One can certainly disagree with Obama’s policies, but everyone in America ought to be very proud of the fact that the country could elect a black president just three decades after scores of blacks and whites involved in the civil rights movement were murdered because they agitated for equal schools and an end to segregated drinking fountains.

As the Chinese would say, 美国最近在这个方面进步很多—“mei[falling and rising tone] guo[rising tone] zui[falling tone] jin[falling tone] zai[falling tone] na[falling tone] ge[falling tone] fang[flat tone] mian[falling tone] jin[falling tone] bu[falling tone] hen[falling and rising tone] duo[flat tone]—America has recently progressed a lot in this area/sphere. I could add that all my Chinese friends were very happy about Obama’s election and believe that Sino-American relations will improve a lot under this watch.

Reverse Culture Shock I: Who's that on the bill?

It’s been two years and three months since I was last in the United States. I’ve been back in the states since last Thursday and am experiencing big-time what expats who’ve lived overseas for long periods of time call “reverse culture shock.” That’s when one has become so accustomed to life overseas that one finds life in the old country to be all strange and different.

The first day I was home, for example, I was given a stark reminder of how absolutely and pathetically parochial and uninformed most ordinary Americans are about the broader world. My folks picked me up at San Francisco International Airport and drove me back to their home town of Clovis, CA, which is located just east of the larger and better known city of Fresno.

Just before getting home, we stopped off at my bank to deposit a chunk of cash I had brought back to the states from China. As the teller was counting the American money, I asked her if she’d like to look at some Chinese money—I had taken all my RMB with me, as I didn’t want to leave any cash in my apartment. When I showed her a 100 RMB bill, she asked me “who is that on the bill?” Of course, like 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 RMB notes, 100 RMB notes have the facial portrait of the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, on the front of the bill. Indeed, since the 100 RMB notes are red-colored and have Mao’s picture on them, we laowai call them a “Red Mao.”

To be sure, Mao died some 30+ years ago. Yet whatever one thinks about him, everyone would have to agree that he was one of the 20th century’s most influential figures. Due to his impact in changing the course of Chinese history, one could also argue that Mao did more than anyone else to alter the course of world history during his lifetime. And this teller wasn’t the only one who couldn’t identify who was on the front of Chinese money. Clerks at several other stores drew a blank, until one fellow at REI—I stopped there to buy some hiking boots, as I anticipate using them in future trekking in Sichuan and Yunan’s mountains—said, “Oh, that’s Chairman Mao!” (His co-worker thought it was Zhou En Lai.)

This ignorance extends beyond ordinary Americans right up to the country’s leading statesman. For example, during the recent presidential election, McCain started blathering on about the Zapatistas in Mexico when someone asked him on a Spanish language radio station about his views regarding Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister, José Luis Zapatero.

Well, as that oldie and baddie 1950’s pop song went, “Don’t know much about history/don’t know much about geography …”

Yes, this place does indeed exist

I first noticed this place while walking down the Dongzhimen Dajie after getting off the bus following my National Day Holiday visit to Beihai Park. “Waiting for Godot” is, of course, the title of a very famous play by Samuel Becket, who was born in Ireland, but lived in Paris for most of his life. I love the photo of Becket below, as it shows him doing what most people spend lots of their time doing in Paris, namely sitting in cafés.

Beckett moved to Paris in the late 1920s, after graduating from Dublin's University College, and wrote a number of novels before the Second World War. One has of them has the very interesting title, MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS. Beckett remained in Paris after the Germans occupied France in 1940 and worked for the French Underground as a messenger and translator.

In 1942 one of the members of their resistance cell was arrested and revealed the names of the other members of Beckett's resistance cell to the Gestapo. Beckett and his girlfriend escaped literally minutes before the Gestapo showed up at his doorstep and spent the rest of the war hiding in southern France (these two lived together for decades before marrying and then divorced quickly after tying the knot).

“Waiting for Godot” was written and performed in Paris shortly after the Second War. Beckett wrote the play in French and translated it into English. This work made him famous overnight and he went on to write other, even bleaker plays like “Endgame” and “Happy Days.” “Waiting for Godot" is a play in which nothing really happens—two tramps named Didi and Gogo (or Vladmir and Estragon) are waiting on a road by a tree (the tree is the only stage prop) for a fellow named Godot. Unfortunately, this Godot chap never shows up. The most famous exchange between the two actors is, “Let's go/We can’t/Why not?/We're waiting for Godot/Oh!”

They thus pass the time discussing sundry subjects, like the merits of auto-erotic strangulation, and are briefly visited by the play's two other characters, Pozzo and Lucky. The former literally has the latter on leash, and Lucky spends several minutes rapidly spewing out some meaningless and unintelligible blather. That was Beckett's way of heaping scorn on highly refined, hyper-intellectual, but ultimately meaningless discourse (he would have had field with the likes of Jacques Derrida and other so-called “deconstructionists”).

The Chinese characters in the first photo are a falling and rising tone “deng”, rising tone “de”, first tone “ge”, and a first tone “duo.” The 等得 character combination means “waiting for,” while 戈多, or a flat tone “ge” and “duo,” is a transliteration of the name “Godot.”

Because Mandarin is a character-based language, when the Chinese want to write out a foreign proper name of a country or object, like a country, they typically select a character combination that sounds like the way the name is said in its native language. Thus the combinations are often nonsensical—the Chinese “Godot” translated word for word means “dart/lance” (戈 is the dart/lance radical) “many/much” (多).

My favorite example of this is the Chinese way of writing the common Russian given name of “Dmitri.” Last January I attended a New Year's performance by the China National Ballet with a Chinese friend and the program included music by Dmitri Shostakovich. We noticed that “Dmitri” was transliterated as 德 (rising tone “de”) 米 (falling and rising tone “mi”) 特 (falling tone “te”) 里 (falling and rising tone “li”). Translated word for word, this means “Virtue rice special inside.”

Several days after first noticing the café, I paid the place a visit. It's a pretty cool establishment. In keeping with the existentialist thrust of Beckett's plays, the walls are all black, with small, scratch-like graffiti covering their surfaces, while the interior is dimly lit by a few floodlights hanging for a myriad of pipes below the ceiling. I found a comfortable chair, switched on a reading lamp beside it, and spent a very enjoyable two hours reading and drinking coffee. I certainly plan to return and other laowi and Chinese people living in or visiting Dongzhimen might want to go there as well.

Something fishy at Yuyuantan Park (玉渊潭公园)

The first three characters in the brackets above can be translated as “Deep Jade Pool”. “Yu”, which is a falling tone, means “jade,” while the flat tone “yuan” and rising tone “tan” are the “deep pool” part of the park's name (the last two characters, a first tone “gong” and rising tone “yuan”, mean “park”).

I spent an afternoon during the National Day Holiday strolling about this park with my Chinese lady friend before we headed over to a Mongolian restaurant in West Beijing for dinner (this lady is Han Chinese but hails from Baotou in Inner Mongolia). She pointed out the fish-shaped floral arrangement in the above photo to me; otherwise, I wouldn't have noticed.

In addition to the flowers, Yuyuantan Park boasts a small lake. A picturesque arched bridge connects the lake's north and south shores to a little island located in its center. There are also lots of nice trees and paths along the shoreline. Here are a couple of photos:

However, Yuyuantan Park's main attraction is its cherry trees, which are located at the north end of the park. I can hardly wait to go back there this spring with my camera and take a lot of photos. And you can surely bet that I'll be posting them on my blog.

For people interested in visiting this lovely and tranquil place, you can get there by taking the Nr. 1 Subway Line to the Military Museum Station in West Beijing. It's about a 15 minute walk from the station to the park's south entrance. This can make for a pleasant stroll by itself, as one will pass through a nice flower garden on their way to the park.

Fall flowers in front of the Forbidden City

I was busier than usual during this year's National Day Holiday, but still managed to squeeze in a relatively quick visit to Tian'anmen Square on the way over to the Cui Wui shopping mall/department store in West Beijing. Each year our company gives us a card worth 2,000 RMB to shop there or at the North Star Shopping Mall opposite our Ren Ming Plaza corporate headquarters near the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium.

Unlike the rest of the National Day holiday, this particular day was a bright and sunny blue sky day. As is usually the case when I'm out and about in Beijing, I had my camera with me and spent about two hours enjoying the weather, people-watching and taking photos.

The Olympic floral display photos were not the only shots I took that day at Tian'anmen Square. I also shot the photo posted above of the Forbidden City's South Wall and Entrance. In addition to the beautiful shrubs and flowers, I quite impressed on this occasion, as on other similar occasions while visiting this place, by all of the banners fluttering in the stiff breeze.

What does it mean?

Everywhere one goes in China, one sees lots of banners in public places. Tian'anmen Square, in the very center of Beijing, is no exception to this rule, particularly around the National Day Holiday, or 国庆节 (rising tone “guo”, falling tone “qing”, and a rising tone “jie”). The National Day Holiday and the Spring Festival are China's two one-week long holidays. National Day falls on the first week of October and celebrates Mao's October 1, 1949 proclamation of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which he made from the south entrance of the Forbidden City to a huge crowd in Tian'anmen Square.

I took the above photo a couple of weeks before this year's National Day holiday. The obelisk like tower in back of the banner is the Monument to People's Heroes, while the flat roofed building just poking above it is the Mao Memorial House. The banner’s Chinese phrase, “改革开放共谱和谐篇章,” is said as “gai (falling and rising tone) ge (rising tone) kai (flat tone) fang (falling tone) gong (falling tone) pu (third tone) he(rising tone) xie (falling rising tone) pian (flat tone) zhang (flat tone).”

The slogan on this banner is best translated into English as “Together we play a harmonious tune.” The characters 开放 is the verb to play, as in play music or open up a concert—Mandarin uses an entirely different verb, 打 (falling and rising tone “da”), when it comes to playing most sports—while the last two characters, 篇章, are used to denote both a tune and chapter in a book. Finally, the 和谐 character combination means “harmony” and “harmonious”. This banner's content is very much in line with the current emphasis the government here places on building a harmonious society, or 和谐社会. The last two characters in this quartet, a falling tone “she” and “hui”, is the Chinese word for “society”.

As long as I'm doing a Mandarin mini-lesson, I could note that the characters in Tian'anmen, 天 (tian [flat tone]), 安 (an [flat tone]), and 门 (men [rising tone]), stand for “heavan”, “peace”, and “gate” respectively, or “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” This name was also the title of what I believe was the first book I read on Chinese history, which was written by the eminent Yale historian, Jonathan Spence; it was subtitled, “The Chinese and Their Revolution.” This was one of Spence’s early books, and he went on to write many others, the most notable of which was TREASON BY THE BOOK. One could a lot worse for reading material about Chinese history!

Tian'anmen Olympic Floral Displays

From gas to flowers, what a change! But it's time to get off my energy/environmental soapbox and talk about a more pleasant and beautiful subject. Both before and after the Olympic Games, really gorgeous flower displays graced Tian'anmen Square. The display in the photo above was located on the northeast corner of Tian'anmen Square, while the Para-Olympic floral display was in its center.

By the time the National Day holiday rolled around at the beginning of October, the Para-Olympic display was replaced by the one in the photo below, featuring the large and really cool traditional Chinese lamp.

Good news about the subway system

Of course if people are going to drive less, they've got to have other ways of getting around. Beijing's buses are often pretty crowded and have to fight their way through traffic. While the subway trains are also usually crowded, they don't have to fight the traffic and are hence a much quicker way of getting from one place to another.

There is some really good news here. Beijing's subway system has gotten much better since I moved here in 2006 and will get even better in the near future. I've inserted a map of the planned subway system above. The only lines operating in 2006 were the Nr. 1 (East-West, Red line), 2 (Loop/Ring line), 13 (Orange Line), and Batong Line (extends east from the Nr. 1 Line). The 5 (Green) line opened up on 2007 and the 10 (Pink) line and airport (Brown) express became operational in 2008. Further expansion is slated to occur over the next three years. For example, the Nr. 4 line, which makes a slanting east-west run through central Beijing, will open next year.

(I should note, the map gets the colors of most of these lines wrong: the 1 is red, but the 13 Line is yellow, the Batong Line is orange, the Nr. 2 Loop line is dark blue, the North-South 5 Line is purple, and the 10 line is light blue; sorry for the confusion, but visitors to Beijing can sort that out pretty easily after a couple of days here.)

While I do miss at times the convenience of using a car to get to places, I don't miss the costs associated with car ownership. I reckon that I spend at most 100 RMB, or around $14 at the current exchange rate, a month on transportation, mainly because I mainly use the buses and subway to get around (I hardly ever ride a cab except when I'm returning home late at night, after the subway and buses have stopped operating). So by not having and driving a car and using public transportation instead, I'm doing both the environment and my pocket book a favor.

You've wondered about the price of tea in China, but what about the price of gas here?

Another way to get people to drive is less is to raise the price of gasoline. According to one of my Chinese colleagues at work, she is paying 6.24 RMB per liter of 93 octane gas. This works out to $3.47 a gallon at today's (11/17) 6.83 RMB for $1 currency exchange rate. It also about matches a figure a saw cited on a CNN story I shagged on the internet, which stated that motorists are charged $3.24 for a gallon of gas here.

Thus gas prices here exceed somewhat those in the US. The latest check on the internet reveals that they're back down to well under $3 a gallon, due no doubt to sharply falling crude prices brought by the current global economic slump. However, Chinese gas prices are nowhere near what motorists in Europe pay for fuel. Due to heavy gas taxes, drivers in Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands, drivers pay from $8-10 for a gallon of gas. No wonder European motorists drive more fuel efficient cars and make greater use of public transportation!

But the Middle Kingdom is nudging in the right direction. Fuel taxes have been recently boosted, which is why gas prices have risen from under $3 a gallon to their current level. One does have to commend the government here for taking such steps, which are naturally not very popular.

We'll see if Obama and the Democrats can show the same kind of political courage. As any economist will tell you, a carbon tax is the best way to reduce oil consumption and all the bad externalities that go with, most notably air pollution and global climate change. It's certainly much simpler and more workable than a cap-and-trade system. And America will have hard time telling China to take serious measures to address this crisis if it continues to delay getting its own house in order.

The Olympic Games are over, but some of the measures adopted for the games remain in place

Even though the Olympic Games ended almost two months ago, two measures put in place for the games remain in force in Beijing. One is the mandatory screening of all bags, including handbags, at subway stations. This precaution clearly helped prevent a bombing attack on the subway; a few of my laowai friends, I might add, were certain that something like that was very likely to occur.

Thus this measure is a minor inconvenience I'm more than happy to put up with. Better to endure a slight delay in going through the entry gate/turnstile than to endure greater risk of a either a Madrid style bombing or the 1995 Sarin Gas attacks the Japanese cult group, Aum Shinrikyo, mounted against the Tokyo Subway. Some readers may know from my profile that one of my favorite novels is Haruki Murakami's NORWEGIAN WOOD. One of Murakami's other famous novels, HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD, was written in reaction to the Tokyo Subway Sarin gas attacks.

In addition to tightened subway security, driving restrictions, albeit not as draconian as the odd-even regulation, have been re-instituted in Beijing. Under the odd-even system, motorists with odd-numbered license plates drove on odd-numbered days, while ones with even numbered license plates drove on even numbered days. Those caught driving when they weren't supposed to be driving were heavily fined.

About a month ago motorists were told that they could not drive on certain weekdays, depending on the last two digits in their license plate numbers. Thus drivers whose license plate number ends with a “one” and “six” are not permitted to drive on Monday. The same goes for other digits for different weekdays. Basically, this means that people can't drive their one weekday every week. Motorists caught breaking this rule are being fined 100 RMB.

My current Chinese lady friend lives in Southwest Beijing and works near Chaoyang Park. She thus has to drive all the way across town on the Third Ring Road—during the rush hour, this highway is as jammed as Los Angeles’s San Diego. We often say here that during such times, the Third Ring Road, or 三环 (flat tone “san” and falling tone “huan”), is Beijing's biggest parking lot. Despite all of this and even though her commute by car lasts two hours one way, my lady friend still drives because going by bus and subway takes even longer, namely 2.5 hours one way.

Of course, the best way to solve this problem is to do what was done in London, namely allow people who want to drive into the central city to do, but force them to pay a congestion charge. Under this system, motorists retain the freedom to drive into the city center, but bear the full costs of this behavior. The proposal worked wonders in London: when motorists faced the prospect of being charged for externalities, like clogged traffic, they quit going into Central London by car for non-essential errands and the like.

However, the restrictions, while flawed, have made a noticeable impact in lowering congestion. I commute to work by using the bus—I'll put some bus stories in another post—and, on the way home at least, have been stuck in traffic far less than was the case before the driving restrictions were put into place (I typically get on the bus at 6:05 in the morning and arrive at work at 6:35, so congested traffic isn’t a problem commuting to work). And the air does seem to be a little better, with more blue sky days. Be thankful for small blessings!

A bit more on the Dongsishitiao Subway Station Area

Like the area around the Dongzhimen subway station—see my earlier October 23rd, “That was then, this was now” post—all kinds of new construction had been going on around the Dongsishitiao subway station. For example, the lighter colored building off to the side in the photo above, which is a luxury apartment community, was still under construction during the spring of 2007.

Two other luxury apartment complexes, “Sun City” and the “Seasons,” are located a little ways further down the Dongsishitiao Dajie and a bit off to the other side of the street. For three months or I visited the “Seasons” every Sunday to I tutor seven year old Chinese girl in oral English and earned around an extra 2,500 RMB in cash.

While a majority of the residents are rich laowai holding high level positions in foreign companies and joint venture enterprises or in Non-Governmental Organizations, a not insubstantial number of wealthy Chinese families own apartments here. The husband in this particular family was a Bank of China Vice President while the wife worked for Oracle Software. She drove an Audi, and the family also had a driver, who took us down to the Wangfujing Pedestrian Mall's Foreign Languages Bookstore when I wanted to pick out study materials for their daughter.

The apartment itself would not have been out of place in Manhatten's Upper East Side or in some posh London neighborhood. The sitting room was very big, the furniture in it was French provincial style, and there was a big plasma TV set. The entry hall boasted a shrub in a small, shallow pool with running water. There was a large dining room and a western style kitchen and bathrooms. Finally, there were clearly more than two bedrooms in this apartment—the one bedroom that I could seem from the entry hall area was being used as a home office.

Decades ago Deng Xiao Ping proclaimed that to get rich is glorious. China now has lots of wealthy people. And like wealthy people in the West, these people are indeed different from the other 99% of the Chinese because the lives they lead are, well, quite different from those led by the Middle Kingdom’s ordinary and less well-off citizens.

Another Really Memorable Para-Olympic Related Event

As the above bit of Chinglish shows—a former laowai teacher colleague during my first teaching job in Henan passed it on to me—the Middle Kingdom's attitudes vis-à-vis handicapped people could use some adjustment. However, like many other things in China, change for the better is taking place here. Having the Para-Olympic Games certainly helped raise public awareness and understanding on this issue. For example, lifts for wheelchairs were installed in all of Beijing's subway stations before the Para-Olympic games.

As part of the Para-Olympic Games opening celebrations, the China National Disabled People's Performing Arts Troupe put on a show at the Poly Theater. I've included a photo of this beautiful facility, which is located right on the Dongsishitiao Subway station and is about a half hour walk from where I live.

Our company gave all of the foreign workers free tickets to attend this show, and I was very happy to have the opportunity to go see it. It was a truly memorable and moving event; I have to confess that my eyes got more than a little misty toward the end of the performance.

The acts included singing by paraplegic and blind singers and a dance performance by blind people who were attached to each to form a human chain. Another highlight was a dance number that included two fellows missing both of their arms. These young men used their shoulders and feet to do interesting things with poles that had water buckets hanging from both their ends.

However, I think that the best highlight of the show was a traditional dance number done by beautiful young deaf women dancers. I shagged a photo of this act off the Troupe's website and place it blow in this post. Non-handicapped performers, of course, move to music while doing this dance, which one of my Chinese friends, Vivian Wang, told me was based on the Buddhist divinity, Kwan-Yi. This divinity is said to have a thousand arms, so the dancers will form a line, and do most of the motion in the dance with the arms, so to resemble this Buddhist figure. They move to music, and the deaf performers obviously couldn't do that, so they were cued with sign language by people standing off to the side of the stage.

It is impossible not to deeply admire the courage and fortitude shown by these people in overcoming their physical handicaps. I'm going to try very hard to keep them whenever I feel down or am dealing with some relatively minor problem in my own life.

Inside the "Water Cube;" plus, the German Embassy was under wraps during the Olympic Games

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Summer Olympic Games showcased two iconic sports facilities. One was the Niao Chao track and field stadium. The other was the equally stunning “water cube” swimming and diving arena.

According to my friend, Flora Lu, the Chinese have two names for the water cube: 水立方 and 国家游泳中心. The first set of characters, a falling and rising tone “shui”, a falling tone “li”, and a flat “fang” can be translated as “water cube.” The second set of characters, a rising tone “guo”, flat tone “jia”, rising tone “you”, falling and rising tone “yong”, and flat tone “zhong” and “xin,” means National Swimming Center.

I alas never got inside the Water Cube. However, my Chinese friend who did the Niao Chao that appeared in a recent post did pass on one of her photos of it to me. As you can see, it truly is an amazing and beautiful facility.

This bit on the Water Cube gives me an excuse to note something interesting about the German Embassy during the Olympic Games. Beijing has two embassy areas: the one off the Jianguo Dajie mentioned in the previous post and another near Dongzhimen, fairly close to where I live. Indeed, if I'm not in any kind of hurry, I can walk to the German Embassy from my apartment.

Alone among all of Beijing's foreign embassies, the German Embassy really got into the Olympic Spirit by putting some blue plastic bubble wrap around its exterior. This bubble wrap had large bubbles, resembling the ones gracing the exterior of the Water Cube. I guess the Germans figured that if they let the visionary artist Christo wrap the Reichstag during its renovation, why not do something similar to their Beijing Embassy to mark the Olympic Games. They at least got my thumbs up. Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of this, but the memory will last quite a long time!

The other "Niao Chao" (Bird's Nest)?

That's at least what the famous “Silk Street”, 秀水, called itself with respect to shopping during the Olymic Games (the two characters are a falling tone “xiu” and falling and rising tone “shui;” the second one means “water”). I saw this sign, “Merchant’s Bird Nest,” flashing while visiting the market during the Mid-Autumn Festival and couldn't resist taking the above photo.

The Silk Street market is located beside diplomatic compound and foreign embassy area on the north side of this stretch of the Jianguo Da Jie. The buildings over to the left of Silk Street in the photo above are some of the diplomatic residences.

One can surmise from all the laowai sitting about in that photo, Silk Street's clientele consists mainly of foreign tourists and foreigners living in Beijing. Tourists visiting here will find that this so-called “market” is unlike any kind of store in the West. It consists of literally hundreds of small stands—the individual shopkeepers lease space in the market building.

These people sell everything from clothing and apparel and foot ware to jade, pearls, tea sets, and small consumer electronic goods. While the place is always crowded, it’s not nearly as jam packed as the Xidan, 西单, in West Beijing; that market's customers are almost entirely Chinese (both “xi” and “dan” are flat tones). As one walks past Silk Street's stalls, many of the shopkeepers will literally grab you and say, “Lookie, lookie!”

Of course you can buy lots of things for a fraction of what they'd cost in North America or Europe. However, you need to be a hard bargainer, particularly if you're a laowai. The shopkeepers routinely charge extra high prices for us folks, figuring that we're rich and can pay them.

In fact, during a 2007 National Day Holiday visit to Silk Street, one of the merchants told me, “You can have these shirts for 14 RMB ($2-3 at the current Dollar-RMB exchange rate), business is really terrible right now.” Since I needed a couple of short-sleeved dress shirts to wear to work during Beijing’s stifling hot summers, I was only too happy to purchase them. Those kind of prices are the ones you can get at the Ya (rising tone) Shua (flat tone) market (牙刷), which is located at the south end of the Beijing’s so called “Bar Street,” the 三里屯 (flat tone “san”, falling and rising tone “li,” and rising tone “tun”). After being offered this price, I was immediately told not to repeat it to any of the other laowai shoppers.

Thus when my mother visited me in Beijing in May of 2007 and wanted to do some shopping at Silk Street, I had two Erwai students, one of whom was said by all her classmates to be a champion bargainer, go with her. These young ladies ensured that my mum wasn't ripped off by the rapacious 老板 (falling and rising tone “lao” and “ban”), which can be translated as both “boss” and “shopkeeper” into English.

One person who really fell in love with Silk Street, particularly its inexpensive ties, was Rupert Murdoch. One wonders, was he “fit to be tied” on the he first visited Silk Street?! That's at least what Bruce Dover says in a ripping yarn he wrote about this Aussie’s adventures or, better put misadventures in China entitled, RUPERT MURDOCH'S CHINA ADVENTURES: HOW THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MOGUL LOST A FORTUNE AND FOUND A WIFE.

Dover worked for Murdoch during his ill-fated efforts to break into China's media market, so this is truly an insider's account of what was a long-running debacle, lasting more than a decade. While Murdoch found he could easily get his way with Western Governments by a combination of schmooze, threats, and manipulation, he found that dealing with the Chinese Government was an entirely different kettle of fish.

I'd have to say, given his role in utterly debasing TV news journalism in the US through that appalling and tabloid Fox News Channel, that this monster got his just desserts, comeuppance, call what you may, in the Middle Kingdom. I should note, in the interest of being “fair and balanced”, that Fox's British counterpart, Sky News, isn't all that bad and is a genuine and serious news network. Oh yes, the Chinese name for Fox News is 福克斯, or a rising tone “fu”, falling tone “ke”, and flat tone “si.”

However, Murdoch did find a new wife here, Deng Wendi, who's several decades younger than he is. The former's Chinese name in characters is 邓文迪—the tones in this name are falling, rising, rising—while Murdoch's name is transliterated as 默多克, or “mo” (falling tone), “duo” (first tone), and “ke” (falling). Ironically, that first character means “silent” in Chinese, and Murdoch has spent his life being anything but silent.

I include two photos of the charming couple. Two former Erwai students I had lunch with on November 16th told me that Chinese people despise Deng Wendi, believe that she is a gold digger, and find her quite unattractive to boot. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I'll leave it to me readers to judge for themselves Deng's looks after looking at the photos.

I heard somewhere that they have a huge, luxury traditional style Siheyuan Courtyard House. The Chinese word for these classic Beijing dwellings is 四合院, or a falling tone “si,” rising tone “he”, and rising tone “yuan”. Murdoch's China digs are located around Hou Hai. Hou hai, 后海 (falling tone “hou” and a falling and rising tone “hai”) is the city’s hottest new entertainment and bar district, plus is an exclusive residential neighborhood. It's located north of the Forbidden City and Jingshan and Beihai Parks. I certainly plan on doing some future posts about this area.

Getting back to Silk Street, like the rest of Beijing, this place has changed radically over the past decade. Up through the late 1990s, it was an outdoor market. The structure shown in this post's photographs is less than a decade old. Since most of Silk Street's clientele are well heeled laowai, the bottom floor of the structure boasts a number of cafés, including SPR coffee, Sarpino’s Pizza, O'Brien's Irish Sandwich Shop, and the Flat White Café.

The last place was formerly known as the Café L'Affaire. Even though its Lattes are a bit steep at 32 RMB a cup, the place has good house, techno, and acid jazz music. I thus occasionally go there, as it is a cool place to spend some time people watching. A photo of it is below.

Niao Chao Views

Of course the Niao Chao gets its name from the steel lattice like webbing, which resembles a “bird's nest,” enclosing the actual stadium. While I never got a good picture of the stadium, my Chinese friend in our sister company passed on to me a really nice shot she took of it while carrying out her liaison/hosting duties.

After we finished paying a quick visit to the Niao Chao's upper level seating areas, Mike and Xu Mei headed off to visit the Olympic Green area. I stayed in the Niao Chao for a bit longer. On the way over to the upper level seats, it struck me that I could get some cool photos shooting through the open steel lattice work and using it to frame the views looking out from the Niao Chao.

The blue building in the photo below is the 34 story Ming Ren Plaza (名人广场; rising tone “ming” and “ren”, falling tone “guang”, and a falling and rising “chang”), which is where I work in Beijing.

The next photo is the so-called “Pretty” shopping mall and high rise, which is across the street (the Anli Lu) from the Ming Ren Plaza.

The next photo is a shot looking north toward a media communications tower outside the Niao Chao.

And the last photo is also looking north, this time to some high-rise apartment buildings.