“But how will we attach the fake xiăo jī jī to Butters’s chin?”

Tonight we watched some episodes of South Park and discovered the best way ever to learn and practice reading Chinese. The method is as follows:

1. Turn on the Chinese subtitles.
2. Hit play until a subtitle appears, then pause playback.
3. Scrutinize the subtitles carefully, and look up any unrecognized characters in a dictionary.
4. Practice reading the sentence several times.
5. Repeat steps 2 through 5 until you’re too tired to go on.

I think South Park episodes are great for this. The language is very common speech, the dialogue is repetitive and reinforces characters learned in the previous line, the paused graphics are engaging (it’s like looking at a page from a childrens’ book), and I find the show to be entertaining even when paused and even if I’ve already seen the episode.

DVD pirates in China generally put out a decent quality product, at least when they’re copying a DVD that is already on the market. But the English text and credits on the jacket are an afterthought. Nearly always the summary text on the back of the DVD will contain typos, or will refer to the wrong movie, or will be the right text but will simply end in the middle of a paragraph. All of these errors are smile-worthy. But today I was at a music store and saw a DVD of a 2004 Wim Wenders film for sale, and I couldn’t help but laugh and laugh as I read the summary text. I shot photos of the front and back of the packaging, click either thumbnail to see a larger full image. How did such a negative review end up on the DVD jacket?

My guess is that the enterprising folk at the black-market DVD factory first put together a very nice looking DVD cover (full color on card stock, with gold metallic text on the title), placed an enticing summary of the film in Chinese on the back, and then chose to copy and paste a review from the internet that was about the right length to fit in the remaining space. Of course these professionals had to put in the effort to add nice typographical flourishes to the English such as large red caps on the first letter of each paragraph, but reading English is hard, so no effort was made to understand the text –why bother, the customers will only read the Chinese. For their sake, I hope the Chinese isn’t full of the English text’s negative statements, such as:

Land of Plenty is not a film. It is a tombstone for the directorial career of German Director Wim Wenders.

and

horribly weak and superficial stories and scenes

Harsh! I wonder if the writer of those IMDB comments, Anakitsuke Hidetora, would be amused. I know I am.

Is there enough room on Beijing’s streets for the increasing number of cars and the incredible amount of construction equipment shuttling around the city? Given the manner in which people drive around here, I’d say no. See photo for details. In case you’re curious whether that bus ever got past the wreckage, the pedestrians standing in the street eventually did coax the bus into squeaking past the truck. Meanwhile, a 2 block line of cars behind the wreckage proceeded to bang on their horns to express their frustration.

I just tried to create a new label in my gmail account (labels are roughly equivalent to mail folders in an ordinary mail system), and my proposed label was denied. The label was ‘voicemail’. This leads me to speculate that perhaps google is reserving this label for future use.

Google has already moved into the voice-over-IP arena, so it is not difficult to imagine that they will update gtalk so that people can use it to receive voicemail (which would be stored in that user’s gmail account under the label ‘voicemail’). Just a tiny tidbit of idle speculation. It’s not that much of a long-shot really, Skype just announced free outgoing calls to land-lines on their network, so it won’t be that surprising if other VOIP providers follow suit in a race to the bottom.

But back to Google and Google’s future; I think this label creation method could be used to divine what other features Google plans to unleash. I haven’t yet succeeded at guessing any other blocked gmail labels, but an enterprising competitor could throw the dictionary at the label creation form and perhaps mine some useful information. Here are the results of a few of my other attempts, none of which were blocked:

I was perusing the net, reading some China stories I intend to share on this blog, when I realized, as I often do, that China has a constant presence in the news in the U.S.A. Open any big city newspaper, turn to page A2, whoomp there it is.

One reason for this could be that as people in the U.S. try to make sense of globalization, this new “flat” world (to paraphrase the title of a book I haven’t read), they end up clamoring for news about China, and the press responds to the demand. Or at least that is one plausible idea why China is always in the news in the U.S. these days. Call it the “look out! it’s coming right at us!” theory.

Another reason could be that not all the world’s news takes place in a country that makes up only a little less than %5 of the world’s population (the U.S. — “we’re number 5!”). Some newsworthy things do actually occur in a country that makes up a little over %20 of the world’s pop. and the U.S. press has finally caught a whiff. Call it the “a welcome correction to the U.S. media’s traditional inward focus” theory.

But the big problem with these theories (ok, hypotheses) is that they don’t explain the lack of such a level of India coverage in the U.S. Sure there are some stories about India (almost 17% of world pop and climbing), but they’re easily dwarfed by the number of China stories. And they’re boring; stories about datacenters full of C++ developers or stories about yet another call center full of Indian folk who answer US customer support calls by saying “Hi welcome to Dell, this is Bobby-Sue Lee Johnson” (1 2 3 4 etc). Neither of these conventional hypotheses can adequately explain why stories about China take up such a disproportionately larger amount of space in U.S. newspapers than stories about India.

I have a different theory which I think explains everything and is airtight when compared to the straw-man theories I’ve fabricated above. The theory: China is the funniest country on earth.

Sit a spell and let that idea roll around in your head while you peruse the following articles and see if you aren’t convinced.

• Almost all of town’s couples divorced, and that’s just the beginning of the tale
  summary: 98% of the married residents of a Chinese town divorced in order to take advantage of a lucrative legal loophole which the government quickly rescinded, leaving everyone poor, single, and bitter.

  
  

• Not from the Western media, but still funny: Photos of the massive crowds at popular tourist sites during the May holiday

  
  

• China’s Spitting Image
• China Changes Coarse
• China warns tourists against spitting overseas
  summary: More on the Chinese Government’s attempts to change the “manners” of Chinese folk. People spitting in the street might not seem funny at first glance. But the fact that it’s such a widespread practice, that people here seem to think spitting improves health (aigh, the “purges toxins” meshugaas knows no border), and that the local government has stooped to driving a camera equipped van around on the street to videotape people spitting and then make them clean it up or face a 50RMB fine (about $6 US) seems pretty funny to me. The cameras are because the perps routinely deny their action.

  
  

• As China goes ecological, Japan fears shortage of disposable chopsticks

And there’s plenty of humor here that has yet to be mined by the media. For example, David Wong’s recent blog entry Laugh or Cry records how a man received 3 years in prison for a spitting-related infraction during the cultural revolution. Ha ha ha!

Hmmm, maybe everything just seems funny from within China?

Several people have asked me how a trip to Hong Kong can be considered leaving the country of China when everyone knows that Hong Kong is part of China. The answer is that Hong Kong is indeed now part of China, but it is also somewhat autonomous. It is less socialist than the mainland, with more press freedom, has an apparently uncensored internet, features fewer men spitting and hacking in the street, and will remain this way for at least the next 50 years.

To be extra-precise, I didn’t visit the country of Hong Kong, but visited the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China”. So it is a region of China, but has its own currency, passports, policies (no one-child policy, the HKSAR government encourages its citizens to have 3 kids), and is separate enough from the mainland that a trip to Hong Kong is considered to be leaving the country of China.

On this trip, I travelled to two regions of China that have recently been returned to China: Hong Kong and Macau. At each border I had to fill out departure and entry paperwork and get my passport stamped. To the right you can see the page from my passport that features all the stamps related to this journey. It seemed a lot of bother waiting in lines at customs at each border since technically all of these places are now part of China again, but even more technically speaking, they’re not part of China. Something like that.

It  appears that internet service in Hong Kong does not go through the great firewall of China. From  this internet terminal I can access both wikipedia and blogspot pages (such as the official Google blog), both of which I am always unable to reach from within China without using tor.