20
Oct 2007
No One in Beijing Can Cut Hair
Yeah, I’ve had exactly two experiences whereby hair was removed from my head in Beijing, and both were less than satisfactory. So I feel complete confidence in making this huge generalization: no one in Beijing can cut hair.
The first time was when I was doing the tourist thing with my parents over the summer. I decided to try to get a shave from a barber shop rather than do it myself. Big mistake. I should have been clued in by the hesitation when they replied that “yes, they can give me a shave.” Maybe it was my morbid sense of curiosity as to how well they could do it. (Not well, as it turns out.)
They knew it involved a hot wet towel, some form of lubricant, and a razor. (Yes, a new, clean razor.) They didn’t use shaving cream, so I think it was some form of lotion (or maybe hair gel… ha). The shave was kind of painful and took waayyy too long. They didn’t have chairs that reclined to the right angle, so one of the barber shop guys’ job was to hold my head during the shave. (That must have been tiring… I have a big head, and it’s relatively full of stuff.)
Anyway, it took over 40 minutes, and I was left with a shave that looked OK, but was clearly a bad shave if you touched my face.
Last Thursday night in Beijing I decided to shave my head. I had been attempting to grow my hair out a bit, but I was getting tired of it, and I also came to the startling revelation that I am not a hippie. So Frank Yu and I ended up in a tattoo/piercing parlor at midnight, where the guys said that shaving my head was no problem.
Photo by sandyland on Flickr
The thing is, their electric razor choked and cut off about 2/3 of the way through shaving my head. The front was still long. They got the razor working again, just long enough to give me the traditional Chinese little kid haircut, and then it quit again. (I like to think it was my thick, manly shock of hair that choked the feeble device, but realistically I think they just didn’t charge it well enough.)
Anyway, what should have been the simplest haircut ever ended up taking over an hour as they struggled to get the electric razor working. In the end, the barber had to finish the job with scissors.
So, after living a lie on this blog for over a year, probably, my haircut once again matches the one in the picture at the upper right corner of Sinosplice.
17
Oct 2007Beijing Beckons
Late Monday, Beijing flashed the Pasden Signal into the dark night. So now I am on my way to the capital for a quick trip.
More blogging when I get back!
14
Oct 2007When a Fever Is Not Just a Fever
Towards the end of September, on one particularly nice Friday afternoon, I suddenly came with a fever. I went home to get some more sleep.
Photo by DooogwoooD on Flickr
My wife got home and proceeded to freak out. To the Chinese, a fever is serious, much more so than a cold. Somewhere in the Chinese psyche there’s a line about “fevers kill people” and modern medicine has yet to edit that line. My wife wanted to take me to the hospital that night.
I didn’t see what the big deal was. Our honeymoon to Turkey was coming up the following week, but I felt confident I would quickly get over whatever little bug I had caught. I didn’t remember ever going to the hospital for a fever growing up, and I had a few fevers back in the day. My mom also never seemed overly concerned when it happened. To me, fevers just meant temporary discomfort. I even thought they were kind of cool, the human body’s rather “creative” way of trying to burn its invaders.
From Wikipedia:
> Theoretically, fever has been conserved during evolution because of its advantage for host defense. There are certainly some important immunological reactions that are sped up by temperature, and some pathogens with strict temperature preferences could be hindered. The overall conclusion seems to be that both aggressive treatment of fever and too little fever control can be detrimental. This depends on the clinical situation, so careful assessment is needed.
> Fevers may be useful to some extent since they allow the body to reach high temperatures. This causes an unbearable environment for some pathogens. White blood cells also rapidly proliferate due to the suitable environment and can also help fight off the harmful pathogens and microbes that invaded the body.
Photo by Tinn Tian on Flickr
But when my fever didn’t go down, my wife called her mom and they started group worrying. I was afraid my mother-in-law might even come over. So to spare the womenfolk their worrying, I agreed to go to the hospital that night. Unsurprisingly, I was given an antibiotic IV, and also a shot in the butt (just below the waist, really) to make the fever go down. Over the weekend I started feeling better. I went back to work on Monday feeling like I had a normal cold.
Then Tuesday I woke up with another fever. I called in sick. My fever went back down by that evening. I felt OK Wednesday.
Thursday was the day we left for Turkey. Over the night I came down with a fever again, and had horrible fever nightmares all night. They were horrible not because they were scary, but because they were maddening, like a kind of unsolvable logic puzzle that nevertheless had to be solved. It was something about building an ever-changing machine out of steel and fur that contained all the functions necessary to allow me to get to Turkey. Every time I thought I had my furry device complete, it would change, thwarting my departure to Turkey over and over and over again.
When my wife found out I had a fever of 39.2°C/103°F (again), she flipped out. She was upset not because she was afraid we couldn’t go to Turkey that night, but because I had a fever for the third time, and it was so “high.” She thought I was dying of some mysterious disease.
I explained to her that I actually felt OK, that I had had higher fevers before and never even went to the hospital, but she wasn’t having it. Secretly, I was wondering if those heat detectors at the airport set up during the SARS scare would detect my fever. Reason told me I had better not try to get on an international flight with a fever. Curiosity wanted to just try it (yeah, curiosity can be kind of dumb sometimes).
So that afternoon I was back at the hospital, luggage in tow and plane tickets in hand, for another IV and another shot in the butt. My wife had the hilarious idea of getting my IV “to go” and doing the drip in a taxi on the way to the airport, then ditching the bag at the terminal. Unsurprisingly, the doctor didn’t go for that scheme.
My first five days in Turkey involved dutifully taking my medicine three times a day and my wife frequently feeling my skin for signs of a fever (that got interesting after I got a sunburn in Cappadocia). Still, it was an amazing trip to Turkey.
More on Turkey next post.
12
Oct 2007WP 2.3
Despite all the dire warnings against it, I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 without disabling any plugins. And it went fine! Whoo-hoo! Don’t try this at home, folks. I live on the wild side.
It didn’t work for my Chinese blog, though. I had Ultimate Tag Warrior installed, and the upgrade totally broke the blog. I had to go in through PHPmyAdmin to manually deactivate that one plugin to get the blog working again. Then after running the upgrade script, I got two errors (which I plan to just ignore, reckless fool that I am). Shouldn’t matter much, considering how seldom I update that blog these days.
Regular posting (not about WordPress) to resume this weekend!
08
Oct 2007Not Missing
You know blogging is a real part of your identity when you stop blogging for a little while and people start e-mailing you asking if you’re OK. Thank you for the concern.
I was sick for a week, then went to Turkey for a week. The blog had to wait. It’s been a nice break.
Regular blogging to resume very soon.
23
Sep 2007Chinese Test for Foreigners: A Fantasy
So while some of us foreigners are feeling eager to be tested by the HSK, a portion of the Chinese population is wishing a more arduous kind of standardized testing upon us:
> When China becomes more powerful, we’ll make all the foreigners take band 4 or 6 exams! Classical Chinese would be too simple; it’ll all have to be answered using calligraphy brushes, but that’s going easy on them. Going hard on them would be a knife and a turtle shell for each person, and they have to carve in the oracle-bone characters! The essay topic would be: discuss the Three Represents! For the listening comprehension section, it would all be Jay Chou‘s songs, two listens for “Shuangjiegun” and one for “Juhua Tai“. We’ll tell them this is a totally normal speed that Chinese people speak at! Reading comprehension will be all government work reports, the spoken component will require Beijing Opera, and the practical component will be wrapping zongzi.
The original:
> 等咱中国强大了，全叫老外考中文四六级！文言文太简单，全用毛笔答题，这是便宜他们。惹急了一人一把刀一个龟壳，刻甲骨文！论文题目就叫：论三个代表！到了考听力的时候全用周杰伦的歌，《双截棍》听两遍，《菊花台》只能听一遍。告诉他们这是中国人说话最正常的语速！阅读理解全是政府工作报告，口试要求唱京剧，实验就考包粽子。
I love the humor with which the poster handled (1) the frustrations of being forced to learn English through a horrible impractical exam, and (2) the ridiculous complexity of his own native tongue, while (3) it was all set against the backdrop of China’s coming ascendancy as a world superpower, which isn’t a joke at all.
Thanks to John B for finding this.
22
Sep 2007Chinese Skanking
Some wisdom I gained the other night:
> You can teach your Chinese wife to skank to old Less Than Jake tunes, but you can’t make her really enjoy it.
OK, I’ll admit, I don’t enjoy Less Than Jake now nearly as much as I did at the Gainesville shows back in the day. Despite the somewhat disappointing outcome, it was more than worth it to see my wife skanking. (Has anyone ever been to a ska or ska-punk show in China where the whole crowd was skanking?)
20
Sep 2007ChinesePod Does Integrated Chinese
Since I’m spending a fair amount of time on it these days, I figured it’s about time I plugged a blog I’m doing for ChinesePod: The ChinesePod Integrated Chinese Blog.
The idea is to take a textbook that a ton of universities are already using and connect it to other online resources and free materials in digital form. Through this blog, college students motivated to really learn Chinese can easily complement and beef up their IC studies.
Obviously, ChinesePod has something to gain by doing this, but I think the general idea is a good one. The exchange works both ways: the blog could lead to web surfers buying the book, and also to textbook users getting into online resources. More of this kind of online-offline educational exchange (whether it involves either IC or ChinesePod) would be beneficial for everyone.
Anyway, check it out. Especially if you’re using Integrated Chinese.
Related: Sinosplice Chinese Study Book Reviews
- Integrated Chinese: Level 1 (by me)
- Integrated Chinese: Level 2 (by me)
- Integrated Chinese: Levels 1, 2 (by Prince Roy)
18
Sep 2007Choose Your Stereotype
Image from Authorize.net
I’m probably just being over-sensitive here, but when I saw this image on Authorize.net‘s website, this is what went through my mind: Is this “positive racism” (read: Asians are smart and good with computers, so they can protect you well from fraud) or “negative racism” (read: guys in China are totally trying to defraud you)? I’ve had enough issues trying to use an American card in China and being flagged for fraud (despite repeatedly telling the bank that I live here) that I’m inclined to suspect the latter.
Of course, I’d like to be able to say, “it’s just an Asian guy’s face in a graphic,” but I’m American, and everyone knows Americans are obsessed with race. We just can’t let it go.
16
Sep 2007A Report on the New HSK
Jonathan of The Art of Living has e-mailed me with a link to his report of the new HSK. Although not yet officially in use, the new Chinese proficiency test is apparently already being tested on groups of students.
Some telling passages from Jonathan’s report:
> I have to say, it was a big improvement. The test was neatly organized into four sections that covered all aspects of
communications: listening, speaking, reading, writing. The old test only covered listening and reading (receptive abilities) and ignored speaking and writing (productive abilities), which encouraged the Korean study bugs to lock themselves in their dorm rooms with tapes and books and totally avoid actually talking to Chinese people.
> They also cut out all the one-liner grammar questions, fill-in-the-blank segments, and dissect-a-sentence sections, and focused exclusively on reading comprehension, which was always the most challenging anyway.
> The listening was pretty much the same, and the writing was just a simple composition assignment, but the speaking component was crazy: we were given 15 minutes to prepare a five minute oral presentation that addressed the specific prompt questions of two different scenarios: in one scenario, we were calling a friend to arrange details for a weekend outing; in the second scenario, we were factory workers lodging a complaint with a boss.
And, perhaps most interesting to me:
> The new H.S.K. couldn’t care less about 成语. The content was fully geared towards operating efficiently in modern Chinese society: the listening content included a customer-service hotline dialogue and a television ad for cell phones. The reading comprehension material included a standard business contract and a report on a recent summit on environmental protection. For our writing assignment, we wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper to share our views on recent local government policy (how democratic!).
For the whole thing, go read Jonathan’s account.
14
Sep 2007The Other David Lancashire
I saw this Globe and Mail article today: Journalist Lancashire dies at 76.
I’m starting to wonder if one of my co-workers is a pirated person. I mean, come on. He’s also Canadian, from Toronto. He has a great interest in China. Oh, and his name is also David Lancashire.
Fishy indeed.
12
Sep 2007Three Watches on River Crabs
What’s going on here?
It’s actually a case of subtle, punny Chinese dissidence online. Rebecca MacKinnon explains.
10
Sep 2007Big Brother Godzilla
Godzilla photo by Nanther
For reasons which will become clear soon, I was researching Godzilla recently. I was curious about the name. Godzilla seems like a great English name, but it’s a Japanese creation, and the Japanese name is ゴジラ (Gojira). So I had to wonder… did the Japanese start with the English name “Godzilla” and transliterate into Japanese, or did they start with “Gojira” and semi-transliterate into the fantastic “Godzilla?” The use of katakana for the monster’s name to me suggests the former.
According to Wikipedia, it’s the latter. The Japanese name is a blend of the Japanese words for “gorilla” (ゴリラ) and “whale” (くじら), referencing Godzilla’s enormous size and power. That “Gojira” transliterated so neatly into “Godzilla,” a name which conjures images of god-like power in lizard form, is largely coincidence. I don’t know how the Japanese feel about the name, but I can’t help but feel that the connotations of the English translation of the name are even better than the Japanese original.
Then there’s the Chinese translation of “Godzilla”: 哥斯拉. All three characters could be considered meaningless transliteration, and only the first one could be considered remotely relevant semantically. 哥 means “big brother.”
So let’s sum that not-very-objective analysis up in a nice visual aid:
08
Sep 2007Cross-cultural Honesty Catalysis
I recently read an interesting and provocative article about a movement called radical honesty. The founder posits that everyone would be better off–that we’d be taking the steps to true communication–if we would all just say exactly what is on our minds. It’s not meant to be hurtful; you don’t insult people and walk away. After you speak your mind you stick around for the fallout, because radical honesty tends to beget radical honesty, and once you strip away the white lies and false smiles, revealing true emotions, you have a basis for a genuine human connection.
I’m not saying I’m a convert, but the ideas are worth thinking about. And it makes for a very entertaining article.
It also got me thinking about whether this could ever conceivably be tried in China, and about some people in my life who might be considered unknowing practitioners. It seems to me that the ones who come closest are certain English-speaking Chinese women, in their dealings with foreigners.
The standard explanation is that due to cultural differences, even if you speak another culture’s language, you can come across as very forward or overly blunt in the context of another culture. This could happen to a Chinese person trying to emulate the brashness of characters she sees in Hollywood movies. But then, maybe she’s trying to carve out a piece of radical honesty in her own life, and the microcosm of foreign culture seems the best place to do it. Maybe she wants to be blunt and direct, because ordinarily she never can be.
It makes me think back to my early days in Japan and China, struggling to make conversation. I could be remarkably direct back then, because I didn’t know how to say a lot, or I simply couldn’t think of much to say and I wanted to keep the conversation started. And it’s true… radical honesty begets radical honesty. Interesting things are said. I think that’s one reason some people like talking to foreigners that don’t speak the local language well… they’re refreshingly blunt in their views.
I am even reminded of a friend who was told by a taxi driver that he was going to commit suicide. Why would he tell a foreigner?
Society will never have that degree of honesty, but I do believe people are looking for it outside their own cultures.
OK, this post is a little over the top… but I think that’s exactly what you should expect of something inspired by radical honesty.
Related Link: Radical Honest homepage
04
Sep 2007Who can memorize the Chinese family tree?
A recent ChinesePod podcast got me wondering: how many foreigners really learn all the forms of address for family members? I’m not ashamed to admit that I never did. Not only do you have separate words for whether they’re on your mom’s side or your dad’s side, related by blood or by marriage, older or younger than your parent, but there are also issues of formal vs. informal and regional variation. I think most of us give up on learning any of this vocabulary unless it’s immediately applicable (i.e. you’re going to be calling someone by their title while you’re staying with them). It’s the kind of thing that you forget right away even if you go to the trouble of memorizing it.
Does anyone actually learn this stuff?
03
Sep 2007Tickets to Turkey?
My wife and I would like to go to Turkey soon. However, over the past few weeks I’ve been discovering that it’s kind of difficult for Chinese people to go to Turkey. Difficult… but not impossible.
Now that we’re sure we can both actually get in, we just need to buy plane tickets, but we want to go during–you guessed it–the October National Day holiday. Somehow we kind of forgot that there are a freaking bazillion* people in this country, and a good number of them also plan to leave the country during the same time period. Demand drives plane ticket prices up. Good old capitalism.
Anyway, if anyone has some suggestions for travel agencies or other good ways to get to Turkey from Shanghai, please let me know, either by e-mail or comment. Thanks!
* Rough estimate
31
Aug 2007Shanghai VS Dubai
Some may view Shanghai as glamorous, but it’s got its share of expat whiners. So how does it compare with Dubai, one of the richest, most exotic expat destinations?
According to this analysis, it’s got a lot of the same issues.
I’ll leave the item-by-item comparisons to you, but Shanghai still seems pretty good to me.
28
Aug 2007Putin knows… t-shirts
The latest t-shirt design, inspired by an Economist cover (pictured below):
“Putin” in Chinese is 普京. 知道 means “to know.” If you think it doesn’t make sense, you’re thinking too much. It’s just a t-shirt.
The black t-shirt looks better, but the white t-shirt is a lot cheaper. Blame CafePress.
I’ve been busy writing papers lately, so I haven’t been working on t-shirts much, but there are others in the Sinosplice Shop, of course. Thanks for your support!
26
Aug 2007Proxy Tricks and Flickr
The Great FireWall of China (GFW) is quite a nuisance, but I haven’t been thinking about it much lately. That’s because all Flickr pictures display fine for me when I have the Access Flickr! Firefox plugin installed, and Wikipedia, Blogspot, and others display fine for me since I started using an automatic proxy trick for Firefox which I first discovered on Lost Laowai. The combination of these two tricks satisfies most of my regular browsing needs. They most likely won’t work forever, but they work for now.
This attitude is a little self-centered, though. A lot of visitors may not have these tricks at their disposal, and if they’re in China, they can’t see the Flickr-hosted images I use regularly on my blog.
I contacted Yee of Ya I Yee, the blog which tipped off Lost Laowai about the proxy trick. Yee seems to be quite the knowledgeable guy, and he pointed me to:
– a WordPress plugin which makes substitutions in Flickr image URLs, rendering them visible in the PRC (I am now using this plugin on this blog)
– a site which discusses the Flickr block in some detail (in Chinese), including a manual workaround
– a site which shows how the Access Flickr! Firefox plugin works
Enjoy them while they last.