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).