In LA

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.

“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.

The title of this post is an exaggeration, I did shower yesterday at a local gym. But at home, forget it. The problem is that the water pressure and the water temperature both dropped late last week. Bathing under a mild drip of cold water is no fun. So after a couple of days without a shower, and after fiddling with the dials on our water heater (neither of us can read the labels), I went down to the building’s office and asked for help.

I had planned to tell them the water was cold, but Lisa informed me that I had to tell them the water was “not hot” or they wouldn’t understand my issue. I guess in Chinese when you state that your shower is “cold” people must think you are crazy and just don’t know how to turn the knob to “hot”. So I told the nice lady at the desk that “shuĭ yŏu wèntí” (lit. “water has a problem”) followed by “shuĭ bù rè” (“water not hot”). The stakes were high, because if I put the wrong tones on the word for problem (wèntí), I’d probably be remembered as the crazy foreigner who wandered in babbling about how water has a “literary genre” (wéntĭ). I think I did ok at first, but then they peppered me with a bunch of rapid-fire questions I couldn’t understand, at which point I called Lisa on my cell phone and handed it to them.

The photo of a beautiful mountain spring is a dead giveaway that this is the card for water. I have to use the process of elimination to determine which of our many other cards is for electricity, which for gas, and which for yoga.

That did the trick. They sent their maintenance guy up to the apartment. He said the water heater had a literary genre. He left. Then later that day, the water stopped altogether. To fix this we had to go to that same office in the basement of the building armed with a plastic card. We paid some money and this “recharged” the card, which we then stuck in the slot in one of the water meters that lives in a kitchen cupboard. By “we” I mean “Lisa”, I didn’t think I’d learned enough Chinese since my meeting with the people in the basement to be of use.

me want plastic cards

Our running water was now back, but the shower still wasn’t working. So “we” called the landlord and then finally reached the water heater folk after another day of no shower.

Today I stuck around in the apartment so that I could be present when both the water heater repairman and the landlord’s wife arrived. The water heater guy verified that the water heater was working properly on its own, then verified that hot water did come out of a pipe before it got to the shower head, then realized that the shower fixture was restricting the flow of water to the point that the water heater didn’t recognize that the water was on and thus did not activate. It took a long time to figure this out. He then removed the shower fixture, found some clogged filters, cleaned them, reassembled the shower, and turned it on. The flow was better, just enough to trigger the heater, but it was still very low pressure.

the tankless water heater that could

He removed the shower fixture and squatted there poking at all its pipes with a screwdriver. He and the landlady sat there staring at the shower fixture mournfully for a while, occasionally poking it. He reinstalled the shower. The landlady stepped away and made a call, perhaps to her landhusband to tell him the bad news. Then she called Lisa and told her something. Then the repairman left. Then she left. I took a long shower under the barely flowing hot water.

Rumor has it we’ll be getting a new shower in a week.

Gotta love that “Falling ObjectG”

“Chinglish” is the word often used to describe the strange mistakes that occur in English on signs and clothing made in China (see “FALLING OBJECTG” for an example). But what word can be used to describe mistakes in Chinese characters on signs and clothing made in English-speaking countries?

Hanzi Smatter highlights many examples of such misuse of Chinese characters outside of China, unfortunately including many tattoos containing mistaken Chinese characters, unintentionally humorous meanings, or that are just outright gibberish.

goodbye beautiful Santa Monica

Well I’d tell you, but that’d take some of my time away from the insane amount of work required to move out of my apartment. Once I have finished moving items into packages and shuffling packages from place to place I will get down to the business of writing about my impending move.

But here’s a brief rendition:

1. My sweetie has been living and working in China for several months. We want to be together in one place.
2. I like to study languages, and have always wanted to become fluent in a second language. Chinese is fascinating, and I’m looking forward to living in an immersive environment in which to practice and learn.
3. Chinese food! 很好吃！

I’d detail more reasons, but I’ve got to return to the hurried business of packing and moving and storing.

I just arrived home after a long nighttime bike journey (a highly recommended experience), and noticed that Showtime was airing the film Hero in HD. I honestly did not love this film when I saw it in the theater — I like my kung fu films with less computer graphics, more fun, and less emotional artifice — but I figured I could watch it and maybe brush up on my Mandarin. And maybe I’d enjoy it, my expectations were probably too high for the film the first time around.

But even though this film played an extremely successful theatrical run in the United States in Mandarin with English subtitles, Showtime has deigned to show the film dubbed into English. I watched a few minutes, and it is horrific. If I weren’t so annoyed, I’d be laughing every time the Emperor King of Qin opened his mouth. The voice work is distractingly bad.

A word to Showtime — show films in their original language. Dubbed films are like a bizarre puppet show.