The editor and I drove a few miles West the other night to get some food just outside of Lowell, and ended up stopping at La Te Da’s. From the road was visible a large banner across a truck reading “American Food”. As we approached the door, I noticed an older sign on the restaurant that read Hunan Garden. Perhaps there’d been a recent change in ownership?

Once seated inside, all became clear, or somewhat clear. The waitress/owner handed us two menus each, one a La Te Da’s menu and one Hunan Garden. She’d opened Hunan Garden at that location about 12 years ago. Recently business had slowed so she’d changed the name of the place to La Te Da’s and had made a new menu of all-American food, but she also hands customers the old menu containing American Chinese food standards as well as a section of burgers. At the bottom of the new La Te Da’s menu small print states “A Hunan Garden Restaurant”.

It’s a family-run place, everyone working there was a niece or nephew of the waitress/proprietor. Nobody in the family appeared to be Chinese. I asked her why her original restaurant had been named “Hunan Garden”, why Hunan?¹ She responded that Hunan is a Chinese vegetable².

Faced with two menus and a bewildering array of choices, I went for one of the daily specials, the “fish fry”. The cole-slaw and the breading on the fish were both pretty tasty.

1. I figured maybe she’d met someone from the region, or liked Hunan cuisine. [↩]
2. It might be time to edit that wikipedia entry. [↩]

As if figuring out the pinyin romanization system wasn’t enough of a pain. Am I going to have to learn another romanization system in order to be able to learn Chinese from fortune cookies? It literally took me 10 minutes to figure out what Chinese words were written on this little scrip of paper.

Anyone know what romanization system would turn “你要什么?”¹ (pinyin: “ni yao shenme”) into “nee ya shau mor”? Bizzarity.

1. That’s my best guess as to the Chinese phrase they’ve attempted to convey. I’d translate it as “What do you want?” [↩]

This is by far the weirdest, most entertaining, and simply the best talent display at a beauty pageant that I’ve ever seen.¹ That’s Lisa Wong, the winner of this year’s Narcissus pageant² . I feel mildly proud of myself for recognizing the character with which she stamps her work in her final flourish³ , and mildly amused that it’s also the last name of a ton of my friends. Wong or Huang (黄) is apparently the 7th most common surname in China⁴ . Score yet another win for the Wongs, perhaps both the world’s largest and most talented family.

Happy year of the Ox y’all!

1. Props to the blog angryasianman for introducing me to this great find. [↩]
2. a pageant thrown by the Hawaiian Chinese Chamber of Commerce [↩]
3. my pride tempered by the fact that it’s a really common character, it’s the word for the color “yellow” [↩]
4. Wang (王), meaning “King”, is apparently the 8th most common surname in China [↩]

People have written me today to remind me that it’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The most basic way to celebrate this recently-created holiday is to randomly scatter the word “arr” into one’s utterances. Arr. People here in the U.S. think this is “fun”, but they only get to do this one day a year.

One of the characteristics of the Beijing dialect is the addition of a “retroflex ‘r’” to the end of many a word. When I lived in Beijing, I liked to imagine that every day was “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, arr.

Given the fact that modern piracy is more likely to involve someone holding an RPG while shouting commands in Indonesian or Somali than anything resembling Captain Jack Sparrow and friends, and given the fact that Beijingers today say ‘arr’ more frequently than has any pirate in the history of piracy and piracy-related entertainment, I’d like to propose that this international holiday be renamed to “Talk Like a Beijinger Day”. Who’s with me? Arr.

The wonder of modern Beijing. No tilt-shift action here, just a photo taken in the Beijing Urban Planning Museum

You knew that fortune cookies are an American invention, right? They’re related to a Japanese pastry, and were either invented in San Francisco or LA early last century. They do not exist in China. Armed with this knowledge, please to enjoy youtube clip:

Thanks to boingboing.net for bringing this video to my attention, and Jennifer 8 Lee for creating it (I think). I love it. I don’t know where the video was shot exactly, but it makes me miss the people of Beijing. There’s a nice cross-section of people and places in the video. Their good-natured reactions to the strange cookies are awesome.

There’s a video up on one of China’s youtube clones of a Chinese TV broadcast, which features footage of actress Li Bing Bing re-recording some lines of dialogue in a session with director Rob Minkoff and ADR Editor Chris Sheldon. It’s over here.

It would seem that progress has already been made on porting my favorite Chinese input method for OS X to the iPhone (Chinese URL, English URL¹ ).

If 3rd party application development is to proceed at this rapid pace in countries in which the iPhone is not even yet sold (China), and without the distribution of an official SDK, and with not just a lack of support but an antagonistic attitude on the part of Apple towards the use of 3rd-party applications and the users who love them –just imagine how quickly the stable of quality iPhone apps will grow with the existence of an SDK, as iPhones begin to be sold around the globe.

A very good call on Apple’s part to open up the phone to outside developers. As a wise man once said, “developers developers developers developers!” Apple does well to not give a cold shoulder to the people who actually want to develop apps (and thus add value to) the iPhone.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Chinese, Chinese IME, Chinese Language, IME, iPhone, Macintosh, OS X, Pinyin, SMS, software

1. half-assed translation courtesy of babelfish [↩]

(hover over any of the Chinese text below to see a pop-up translation. Technique grabbed from the tip here.)

My cell phone just rang, I fumbled to place my bluetooth headset on my ear and answered.

Caller:	Can I speak to Yang Xiao Hong?
Me:	Who?
Caller:	mumble fuzz mumble Yang Xiao Hong
Me:	您找谁
Caller:	杨小红
Me:	我不认识杨小红，我是范杰。杨小红是功夫之王的演员马？
Caller:	不是， 杨小红是什么什么什么什么什么
Me:	Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Is Yang Xiao Hong related to the film 功夫之王? I ask because I might know who you’re looking for. I was just in China working on that film.
Caller:	Oh, sorry, this is a wrong number. 杨小红 just called me on the other line. Your number is very close to hers.
Me:	OK.
Caller:	Sorry, bye.

There were many odd things about this conversation:

1. Someone with a 626 area code called me, looking for someone with a Chinese name.
2. I heard a Chinese accent and reflexively switched into speaking mandarin –This is something I do with some regularity now in China when communication in broken English doesn’t seem to be working out. I did this quickly and without thinking.
3. Conversation continued for a bit in Mandarin.
4. When I realized I was not in China, was missing some relevant vocabulary, and that communication would likely be more fluid in English (the caller’s English was likely way better than my mandarin) I switched back.
5. My mandarin pronunciation sounded significantly worse to my ears than it did when I was in China –gotta get more practice.

Technorati Tags: Chinese Language, context switching, mandarin, wrong number

Well, everyone else gets just one International Talk Like a Pirate Day, which was yesterday. But if you live in Beijing and missed it, don’t worry. Every day there is “Talk Like a Pirate Day”.

In the Beijing dialect, tons of words lose their final consonant and instead end in a strong retroflex ‘R’. For example, “zài nălĭ” (在那里, “where?”) becomes “zài năr” (在那儿), “wán” (玩, “play”) becomes “wánr” (玩儿).

If you study Chinese, try adding the curled-tongue Beijing R to a few words every now and again. Ask your Beijingr friends which words to arrrr, or just listen closely to a Beijing taxi driver sometime and attempt to figure out what he’s saying. It’s fun.

All the VFX folk have left, which made me the last resident of the VFX villa. I finished my last day of work in Hengdian (which consisted of packing boxes and printing up manifests for all editorial’s boxes) and headed home. As I rode my bike up the hill to the villa, I passed a group of four college-age Chinese kids and greeted them with a ni hao as I passed.

Arrived home, showered, changed, and heard a noise outside. I walked out on the balcony outside my room to take a look, and saw the same group had set up a tripod on the street in front of the villa and two of them were in costume.

I walked out and watched for a bit, then talked to the director. The director was wearing a yellow Beijing Film Academy T-shirt and an askew black bowler hat (a prop? was he trying to create his own signature look?) They were all Beijing Film Academy students making a short film set in (if I understood correctly) 1910 era Shanghai or thereabouts. The scene involved a couple meeting on the street, the woman (in heels and a red dress) showing the guy a couple of photos, and then the two of them leaving. I looked up the word for ‘viewpoint’ (观点) in my Chinese dictionary, and told the director (Lou Sai) that he was welcome to take a shot from the balcony if he wanted a higher view. He came up and got the shot.

Afterwards, we went downstairs, and I spent a while generically helping and talking to one of his colleagues (Ling Yi Qing) who was working as the assistant. She kept alternately lifting one leg and then the other, apparently to ward off mosquitoes (蚊子). I tried to show her the tons of bats (蝙蝠) that were flying around eating mosquitoes, but they were being elusive. There really are massive number of bats that come out in Hengdian as the sun sets, and often as I walk around I feel like one of the characters in the film Pitch Black as they walk along carrying torches to ward off the creatures of the night.

I let them know that they’d be welcome to shoot from the balcony again the next day or two, not knowing that the next morning I’d have to move back to the main hotel housing the rest of the crew (影都兵馆).

Eventually the filmmakers departed and I went to sleep.