In LA

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.

I’ve been using the Adso firefox plugin for a while to pop up translations for Chinese characters in web pages. It’s a great tool, brought to you by the same people who make the great language-learning resources NewsinChinese and adsotated Chinese texts, but the plugin can only be used when online because it has to load the translations from a server, and given the slow speed of my net connection it can be less than responsive. I’ve recently found out about a couple of other tools that have similar functionality but use a dictionary stored on the local computer and as such are much faster to use. Here are links to adso and these other pop-up dictionaries:

• Chinesepera-kun: Chinese Popup Dictionary (free, open-source)
• HanziBar (commercial, $10)
• Adso firefox plugin (free)

There’s a summary of these and some other Chinese learning tools here.

I’ve been watching Chow Yun Fat on film since 1986’s A Better Tomorrow, so it’s a thrill to have been on the set in Gansu province to watch him act in his next film. At one point, I got a chance to say hello, and we chatted for a minute or two, and spoke a little bit in mandarin. I’m not generally a terribly star-struck person, but this is Chow Yun Fat we’re talking about here.

While we spoke, he complimented me on my Chinese. Foreigners to China are frequently complimented on their Chinese here if they can even manage to say “ni hao”, but as I said before, this is Chow Yun Fat we’re talking about. I’m pleased as punch.

If you don’t know who Chow Yun Fat is, head to your local video store and rent Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Killer, two of his best IMO, and discover what you’ve been missing.

As for my Chinese skills, they’re coming along nicely. I can get by in Mandarin a lot better than I had thought possible, have had some 5-10 minute conversations aided by the sporadic use of a dictionary, and have even been pressed into occasional service as a translator in the office when the real translators were away. It is encouraging, but I still have a long way to go.

In a tangentially apropos comment to my Hao Wu post Angus asks “I really enjoy your blog but why do you call it Spiritual Pollution?”

The answer is that the title of the blog is actually In Beijing, which I plan to keep in place. But below the title is space for an amusing or evocative phrase, a subtitle. At the moment, that subtitle is Spiritual Pollution. I love this phrase, it is so colorful, and springs from such a grand utopian vision.

I ran across this great little phrase when I was reading about the Chinese novelist Mian Mian. She wrote a very popular book entitled Candy which was banned by Chinese censors. The barely-fictional book includes both sex and heroin abuse, and I guess the censors weren’t too keen on either topic. Most articles about her mention that authorities or censors have called Mian “a poster child for spiritual pollution.” You can see Mian Mian read some excerpts from Candy on the internet, courtesy of U.S. Public Broadcasting.

I’m embarrassingly ignorant of Chinese history, so it is fun to learn so much about of it by merely investigating one catchy little phrase. The phrase spiritual pollution did not originate with Mian Mian, nor is she the first Chinese novelist accused of spreading spiritual pollution.

Spiritual Pollution’s heyday was back in the early 80s. Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese leader generally described as a reformer, had opened China economically, but was very wary of Western cultural influences. He gave a speech calling for a campaign against spiritual pollution (精神污染 - jīngshenwūrăn) an umbrella phrase used to categorize Western influences, bourgeois attitudes, and anything considered vulgar or anti-party. Painter and author Ma Jian was interrogated by China’s Public Security Bureau and faced arrest on the charge of spiritual pollution after neighbors reported his “bourgeois” activities to the police (activities such as reading xeroxed underground magazines and chatting with dissident friends late at night). Ma fled Beijing and travelled through remote areas of China for 3 years under pseudonyms. He wrote a book about his 3 year journey entitled Red Dust: A Path Through China. The book was translated into English, and I’m now a couple of enjoyable chapters into it.

Prosecutions on the charge of Spiritual Pollution seem to be much less in vogue these days than they were back in ‘83. China has opened up culturally to the point where kids here happily flaunt NBA basketball jerseys and watch the latest US blockbusters on readily available pirate DVDs without worried neighbors turning them in to the police. But though the phrase may have lost its (punitive) bite, the comments from censors about Mian Mian show that it is not dead.

Here’s a bit more history on the phrase. According to an article entited China; Rectification and Reform:

… A campaign against “spiritual pollution” was initiated by a speech given at the Second Plenum by Deng Xiaoping (see Policy Toward Intellectuals , ch. 4). The campaign targeted “decadent, moribund ideas of the bourgeoisie” that questioned the suitability of the socialist system or the legitimacy of the party’s leading role. It also sought to establish a basis for ideological continuity between the emerging younger generation and the older, civil-war-era veterans. Conservative Political Bureau members attempted to use the campaign to rectify what they considered decadent behavior and corrosive liberal thought. Following this example, some lower-level party cadres began to exhibit behavior similar to that of the mass campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. Young men and women with long hair or Western-style clothing were subjected to ridicule and abuse. Peasants who had prospered were accused of selfishness; in response, some ceased to participate in rural reform. Intellectuals were again under suspicion, and party and government cadres adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude to avoid making political errors. …

I hope this answers your question.