19
Jan 2005Dust
I’ve been pretty active in January, but I’ve finally let this blog gather a little dust. Not much, but a little.
The reason for my recent computer problems was dust. Well, sort of. I opened up my computer because the fan was getting super noisy. That could have been because the ball bearings in the fan were going bad, but it also could have been just due to a huge dust buildup. You see, life in China comes with more than the recommended daily dosage of dust.
So I was cleaning the dust out of my computer’s innards. I used compressed air. (I didn’t know how to say that in Chinese, so I went around the computer market asking for “air in a can” (Ìý×°µÄ¿ÕÆø). I’m pretty sure I sounded like a moron, but it eventually yielded the desired result.) Even compressed air proved insufficient, though. I ended up cleaning a lot of the dust out with q-tips. Big chunks of it.
While cleaning out the dust I carelessly knocked my wireless network card loose (which I’m not even using, ironically), causing my computer woes.
I ended up getting a new power source anyway. The bearings really were going bad on the fan, and the inside was just dusty beyond help. Dust takes its toll.
Shortly after I arrived in China, I went on a trip to a park with some Chinese friends. It had been a while since I had seen grass, so I was happy to sprawl out on it, which promptly resulted in my Chinese friends’ disapproval. “It’s dirty!” they told me. I just shook my head. In a corner of the world where there’s so little nature left to enjoy, they regard what little is left as “dirty”? That’s so sad! Then, as an afterthought, I ran my hand across the grass. My palm was turned gray. Dust. From the grass.
That little incident drove home that I really didn’t know how everything worked here, even when I was so sure I had it all figured out.
I’ve learned to watch out for dust in China. It can choke your computer’s internal fans. It makes daily sweeping almost essential. Dust is even on the grass, and gets into everything if you let it. You don’t realize how much dust there really is in the air here until you experience it.
As with the rest of the dust around me, the dust on these pages will soon be dislodged and released to afflict the less diligent.
16
Jan 2005Technical Difficulties
My computer won’t boot up except in safe mode. Apparently it has something to do with “Secondary IDE channel no 80 conductor cable installed.” Anyway, I’m working on it, but in the meantime, no new posts.
UPDATE: I bought a new power source and new IDE cables and installed them. No change (but I’m not sorry I did it… those upgrades were due). Then I got to work on Brad’s suggestion. I decided to do it by disconnecting and reconnecting things one by one rather than disconnecting everything and reconnecting one by one. That could save me a lot of trouble. The problem turned out to be my first guess: the wireless network card, which had gotten bumped and become partially disconnected. Apparently the network card’s driver won’t let Windows boot up if the card is only partially connected. GRRRR, crappy drivers… Anyway, blog entries will resume shortly.
13
Jan 2005Still Employed with Sanity Intact
I’m kind of surprised myself, but I successfully negotiated a new contract with my employer. I laid out my demands: half the hours, 2/3 the pay, and no more teaching kids. They capitulated.
This is good because I will not go crazy. I can continue to like Chinese children from a distance, keeping the good memories of the times I had teaching them, while the bad parts slowly fade. But I’ll make sure I don’t get roped into teaching kids again.
I have to admit, though… teaching kids has been a great experience for me. I’m going to share what I got out of it:
I got to use a lot of Chinese when I taught. Maybe a really good English teacher would successfully use an English-only method, but I never claimed to be good at teaching kindergarteners, and I’ll readily admit that I wanted to use Chinese as much as possible while still doing a decent job. The kindergartens seemed to like my teaching, though. Win-win.
Teaching kids means you have unlimited opportunities to interact with the kids. This may sound totally obvious, but I’m quite certain that many foreign kindergarten teachers don’t have either the ability or the inclination to do it. I got such a kick out of asking the kids (in Chinese) questions like, “how many people are there in the world?” and getting answers like “100,” “10,000,” and “40” in a classroom with no fewer than 50 people. (The point of the question was to get the kids to use the English sentence “I don’t know.” Only problem is kids often don’t realize they don’t know something. Why shouldn’t the first answer that comes to mind be the correct one?)
Talking to kids in Chinese is simultaneously encouraging and humbling. It’s encouraging (in a petty way) because most of the time I can feel secure that my Chinese is better than theirs. I have to keep in mind that there are tons of words and topics they’re just too young to understand. At the same time, their mastery of the Chinese language is already far more complete than my own, and it’s maddening.
Kids are honest. If you try to use Chinese with children and your Chinese totally sucks, they will tell you. They will laugh at you. But they will also not be totally tripped up by a few off tones here and there, and they don’t have a psychological block against comprehensible Chinese flowing from a Western face. On the other hand, the sight of big scary foreigners makes little Chinese kids cry sometimes.
Kids are impressionable. Perhaps what I like the most about teaching kids in Shanghai is that I’m doing my own small part to shape China’s future. Before you scoff at my unbridled idealism, let me expain. This past semester alone I regularly taught over 600 kindergartners. For many of them I was their first contact ever with a foreigner. This impression might very well last their entire lives.
What impression did I leave? Well, I was friendly and lovable (yes lovable — I say that because the kids frequently won’t stop hugging me after class), I was fluent in Chinese (I killed the “foreigners can’t speak Chinese” stereotype for these kids before they even learned it), and, most importantly, I was just a person. I could be fun and get angry, just like any of their other teachers. They learned this just from sufficient exposure to me. It always felt good when the kids stopped calling me Íâ¹úÀÏʦ (“foreign teacher”) and started calling me “John.” (Sometimes they even understood that “John” did not mean “foreigner.”)
Yes, I will eventually miss teaching the kids. But I’m excited about grad school. My entrance exams are in May, and the semester starts in September. It’s really time to hit the books.
12
Jan 2005Holiday Thievery
You hear it every year from your Chinese friends at about this time: “Be careful with your wallet and your bag. It’s almost Chinese New Year, and the thieves are out in force so they can take home something extra for the holiday.”
I’ve only ever had one crappy cell phone stolen from me in China, but I’m extremely paranoid. The possibility of getting pickpocketed is on my mind constantly when I use public transportation or walk in crowds. I guess that’s a good thing, because it keeps me from getting victimized. On the other hand, it makes trekking through town a lot more taxing.
I thought my wallet was lifted on a bus recently as I was distracted by the snow. I even reported my credit card stolen. Carl found my wallet for me under my bed (d’oh!).
When the credit card company sent my replacement card, I got a notice in my mailbox to go pick it up at the post office (for security reasons). It looked exactly like a regular package notice, though, and Carl is expecting a package, so he went to claim it, with his passport as proof of identity. Despite not being me and showing them the wrong passport (i.e. not mine), they still gave it to him! Unbelievable.
Then when I called in to activate my replacement Visa card, I also had to unfreeze my Mastercard card with that bank because it was frozen when my Visa was reported stolen. Hoping it would be quicker, I used the English language service. As proof of identity, they required such difficult information as my home address, home phone number, and cell phone number. I had to make them wait a few seconds while I looked up my new home phone number because I haven’t memorized it yet. (Not fishy at all, right?) They asked my current credit limit, and I got it wrong. They still re-activated my card! Unbelievable.
If this country really gets into credit cards, credit card scamming is going to be huge. Back to the thieving, though.
Micah’s bag just got stolen. It’s really stupid, because all it had in it was kindergarten English teaching materials. The bag itself was probably worth the most from that take. Bastards!
What can you do when surrounded by all this holiday thievery? Well, just be careful. And if you still fall victim? Curse the waidiren! (外地人 are Chinese people that come from out of town. The stereotype is that they all come from poor rural areas and have little or no morals. The Shanghainese are pretty bad about blaming waidiren for all the city’s evils. I enjoy the irony of pretending to join in on the scapegoatery.)
Inspiration for this post: ShenzhenRen’s post on the same topic. (Well, that and my real life experiences.)
11
Jan 2005Shanghai Maps
Shanghai is big and its streets are confusing, so finding an exact location can be quite an ordeal. I recently found a great new resource to help deal with that problem.
You may know of Wang Jianshuo’s online Shanghai map. I have found it quite useful in the past. Its special feature is the ability to mark any location on the map, which creates a unique URL you can send to someone so they can view the exact location. Other than that, it’s not very different from a paper map (and the map itself is Chinese only).
Now there’s something even more useful. Shanghai has its own site devoted to transportation, and has developed an interactive map. It’s zoomable, draggable (like a PDF), and when you scroll, the street names move too so that the streets you are viewing are always labeled. The coolest feature is that you can actually input full addresses (street name, number) and see them pinpointed on the map! I have used it several times and found the location indicated to be exactly right every time. Extremely handy.
Now for the drawbacks. First, it was designed for IE, so Firefox doesn’t work. You also have to install a small plugin. If you use English Windows XP, you have to have Chinese enabled for non-Unicode applications or you won’t be able to read the addresses. (Just because you can view normal Chinese websites on your English system doesn’t mean you can view this. You have to configure it for Chinese.) Lastly, the zoom can be a little tricky.
Still, if you read Chinese and you frequently need to locate specific addresses in Shanghai, this map is awesome.
10
Jan 2005Real Estate Companies
How do you spot a tiny Chinese real estate (房产) company? First, you should be on a street with lots of little shops. Then you just look for the shop with papers plastered all over the storefront window. That’s it. In Shanghai they are everywhere.
This is the way these little companies advertise their real estate, and the system seems pretty universal. Each paper is marked with either a 售 (for sale) or a 租 (for rent). The 售s tend to be on one side, the 租s on another. There also tend to be a lot more 售s. It’s a handy system because it means you can casually check out the company’s offerings without going in and being hassled by some salesperson.
One of these days I’ll get around to typing up the story of how I found my new apartment. It involves one of these little companies.
07
Jan 2005A Cheat-proof Exam
I was reading Matt’s “Cheating and Chinese Students” entry on Metanoiac, and it made me reminisce about how I dealt with cheating students during my tenure at ZUCC in Hangzhou. My own experiences might be helpful to some teachers out there, so I thought I’d share.
Throughout my 7 semesters of teaching spoken English at ZUCC, my class format never stopped evolving. I just want to share some of the major evolutions here and the reasoning behind the changes. At the root of the changes were always two questions: (1) Will this improve the students’ spoken English? and (2) How will I assess the students (i.e. grade them)?
My first semester I relied heavily on vocabulary. My reasoning was that it’s easiest to grade (by quizzes/tests), and if the students can incorporate the new words into their spoken English, they’ll become better speakers. I focused on common, useful idiomatic expressions and slang. Nothing tricky.
I quickly discovered this system was flawed because: (1) the focus was on learning vocabulary, not improving spoken English proficiency, (2) the students weren’t really learning to incorporate the new vocabulary into their spoken English, and (3) it was really hard to stop the rampant cheating on tests and quizzes. Another unwanted by-product of this system was lots of time-consuming paper grading.
I moved on to a skit-based class. Vocabulary was still important, but grading was based on the use of vocabulary and overall spoken English in performed skits instead of on paper. My students felt very awkward about performing at first, but soon got really into it and had a lot of fun.
Later I learned that the skit-based class only works well for certain groups of students. One of my subsequent classes was almost totally devoid of imagination, and their skits would inevitably be translations of some story they heard elsewhere, with the target vocabulary forcibly (and often painfully) inserted into the dialogue. Furthermore, I began to realize that although skits can be a great fun tool, they’re too fake to be the mainstay of a spoken English class.
I came to understand that as boring as they can sometimes be, discussions really should be the meat of a spoken English class because they’re the realest way to practice spoken English. Over several semesters I developed a discussion-centered class model which proved surprisingly successful, and worked even on somewhat large class sizes. [I plan to put this complete model online in the near future.] Vocabulary was reduced to the role of a tool — as it should be — and was provided to help students through the discussion rather than to drive the activity. Vocabulary was kept to a minimum to promote talking. Grading in discussions was based on preparation and participation.
Finally, I return to my point for this entire post. Following my discussion-based model, I think my exam format was pretty much cheat-proof. I decided that in spoken English class, all tests and quizzes should be spoken. The final exam consisted of small-group discussions (2-3 students each) in which the students discuss amongst themselves one of the topics that we had discussed as a class that semester. They knew all the topics; there were no secrets to obtain from other students. The topic for each group was determined by random, and each group got 5 minutes to mentally prepare (no notes allowed, and nowhere to hide them), followed by 5 minutes to talk. All I had to do was listen to the testing group and make notes or guiding questions while keeping an eye on the preparing group in the back of the class. A new group would be moving in every 5 minutes, so a 40 student class could finish in about an hour and ten minutes, in theory. In practice it wouldn’t exceed an hour and thirty minutes.
The advantages of the system are as follows:
- The students have no way to cheat.
- Students who have regularly attended classes all semester are at a definite advantage.
- The material on the exam has all been covered in class before, so it’s unquestionably legit material (as opposed to some teachers’ finals, which may have nothing to do with the semester’s content).
- The teacher can give adequate attention to each student’s spoken English performance.
- The exam can easily be finished in a normal university exam time allotment.
- There are no papers to grade. When a class’s exam is over, the teacher should already have all the exam grades for that class.
There are some issues, though:
- Classes should have less than 50 students.
- A significant portion of the semester must be spent teaching students how to have a discussion (no joke). This exam format works well as a result of an entire semester of the discussion-based class, and is not expected to work as well independently.
- This will not work on students with only low level English (but should be doable for intermediate).
- Some students feel “cheated” by their foreign teacher if a large proportion of the semester is devoted to the students’ discussion and they don’t get to hear the foreign teacher talk as much as they are used to.
- Some students can’t understand that language proficiency is a skill rather than a form of knowledge, and, as such, must be practiced. That this practice may or may not involve much new material is hard for many to accept.
In conclusion, I’d like to say that the system I developed worked well for me in a certain part of China at a certain school for a certain class at a certain point in time. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I just hope that some of the ideas I present here might help other teachers with their classes.
Related Link: Sinosplice’s Teaching in China: A Guide for the Uninitiated.
06
Jan 2005A Record of Spoken Chinese
According to Xinhua, Chinese linguists are finishing up a huge database of spoken Chinese, and they’re going to use it as a basis for a new dictionary and grammar book of modern Chinese. This is good news! Using actual spoken speech as the source should produce a much more useful dictionary.
I’m a little disappointed that all the spoken Mandarin Chinese samples come from Beijing, though. Yes, I know Beijing is the standard, but wouldn’t real linguists want to get a larger sample? A descriptive sample for the whole country?
But then, maybe they had no choice in the matter. They probably had to act in the interests of the Chinese government. I have this bad habit of thinking of the interests of foreign students of Chinese, who won’t necessarily be living in Beijing when they go to China.
Via Language Log, which has more linguistic commentary on the issue.
05
Jan 20052004's Top Chinese Search Results
Google may be the search engine of the West, but in China it’s still trailing one called Baidu (百度). The name means “one hundred degrees.” I hear Baidu is so popular in China that the word 百度 is starting to be used as a verb in Chinese just like we now say “Google it” in English.
Baidu recently published its list of top 10 searches of 2004, and organized the data in such a way as to actually make it interesting reading. The results are really very illuminating (if you trust internet search results to reveal anything real about a culture). Readers of Chinese, I recommend you look at the original. For everyone else, here’s my select translation:
Top 10 Search Terms:
- MP3
- Pao Pao Tang (an online game: 泡泡堂)
- Dao Lang (a singer: 刀郎)
- QQ (China’s most popular IM software)
- BT (abbreviation for BitTorrent)
- “Mice Love Rice” (a song: 《老鼠爱大米》)
- Guo Jingjing (Olympic gold medalist 郭晶晶)
- House of Flying Daggers (movie: 《十面埋伏》)
- A Chinese-style Divorce (a TV series: 《中国式离婚》)
- “The Legend of Little Bing” (a novel: 《小兵传奇》)
Top 10 How To’s:
- How to kiss
- How to lose weight
- How to put on makeup
- How to use contraception
- How to write a thesis
- How to make a webpage
- How to protect the environment
- How to get pregnant
- How to face difficulties
- How to make money
Top 10 Why’s:
- Why am I always the one that gets hurt?
- Why join the Party?
- Why live?
- Why are you having an affair?
- Why do we need to innovate?
- Why do we need to pay taxes?
- Why do we need to go to college?
- Why can’t I get online?
- Why do we need an education?
- Why do we need to learn English?
Top 10 What Is’s:
- What is love?
- What is health?
- What is a blog (博客)?
- What is a computer virus?
- What is e-commerce?
- What is cloning?
- What is nanotechnology (纳米[技术])?
- What are the ‘Three Represents’?
- What is BitTorrent?
- What is corporate culture?
The other top tens I didn’t translate are:
- Top Ten MP3 Songs
- Top Ten Sports Stars (Michael Jordan is still #3!)
- Top Ten TV Series
- Top Ten Movies
- Top Ten Online Games
- Top Ten Tourist Destinations
- Top Ten Male Singers
- Top Ten Female Singers
- Top Ten Most Photographed Men
- Top Ten Most Photographed Women
- Top Ten Historical Figures
- Top Ten Authors
- Top Ten Cell Phones
- Top Ten ‘Mosts’
- Top Ten History of’s
I found this link via AKEM, a Chinese blogger who has quickly become one of my favorites. She’s a college student in Hangzhou, my original “Chinese home.” If you read her entry, you can see her commentary. She also links to Google’s 2004 Top Search Results, which is kind of interesting for comparison purposes. For one thing, Google’s list is a lot duller. There are no telling “why’s” or “how to’s” “what is’s,” which were the most interesting to read of Baidu’s lists. And Google’s top 5 search terms are all over-sexed female celebrities rather than four computer entertainment-related terms and a singer. Hmmm…
04
Jan 2005大鱼，小池
我想做个实验。我写这个blog的目的还是为了练习中文，但这次我想谈的是英文。
英语有一句俗语：a big fish in a small pond。我觉得它的意思很好理解。就像我以前住在杭州的时候一样：人家都说我的中文太棒了，我还经常上电视，做模特。之后搬到上海来了。但在这儿我没什么特别，因为“池”大了，“鱼”也多多了。因此我可以说在杭州I was a big fish in a small pond。
前不久一个朋友问我：big fish in a small pond用成语怎么说？我实在不知道，所以我查了成语词典。没查到。我用Google搜索了，但还是没找到。到现在为止我还是不知道中文有没有什么词语好表达这个意思。
所以我想问我的中国读者：big fish in a small pond用中文怎么说？
04
Jan 2005Effects of Favoritism
Today I was teaching a young kindergarten class (again) and there was one boy that learned the words quicker and pronounced them better than any of the other kids. He looked like he might have been a bit older than the rest. Wanting to encourage what also could have been a natural talent for acquiring foreign languages, I pulled him aside at the end of class and told him his English was really excellent and that he should keep it up. His response? “I’ve always been really smart!”
Of course I was amused by this response. My teaching partner’s response was, “he sure hasn’t learned any modesty yet!” It kind of made me wonder, though… was it more his own personality shining through, or was his response a result of conditioning by teachers and parents?
Then, as the next class was coming in, my teaching partner did something that really bothers me. In front of all the other kids, with all eyes on her, she singled out a little boy and told him he was the best-looking and that she liked him the best. This is something she does often, and, as with this little boy, she does the same thing with the same boy every time we teach that class.
My teaching partner doesn’t do this because she’s insensitive, and it’s something that I’ve seen a lot of teachers at a lot of kindergartens in Shanghai doing. Apparently they don’t see anything wrong with giving special attention to the kids they “like the best.” (There are instances in China of parents “bribing” teachers with money or gifts in exchange for giving their kids more attention, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, and I know it’s not the case with my partner.)
I think to most Americans, this kind of teacher behavior is unacceptable. When you single out one kid as good-looking and tell him you like him because he’s good-looking, you’re sending out a powerful message to the other kids: (1) You’re not good-looking, and, more importantly, (2) I don’t like you as much because you’re not good-looking. I’ve mentioned my views to my teaching partner, but nothing stuck.
They say everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten. Apparently one of the clearest messages for a lot of Chinese kids is “good-looking people get ahead in life easier.” Call me an idealist, but I think that’s a pretty harsh reality to learn at such a young age.
02
Jan 2005Snow Snow Snow
It snowed in Shanghai all day on Dec. 31st of last year. I didn’t take any pictures, but I did add this cool new Flash banner for the main blog page (with help from Joel and Kirupa). It’s even interactive. Drag your mouse cursor over it. (And yes, I do derive joy from meaningless Flash accomplishments.)
I heard a Chinese person describe the snow we had as “heavy snow.” I may be from Florida, but even I had to scoff at that. Still, there was a decent layer of snow over everything, and the sidewalks were all iced over. I’ve seen quite a few people slip and fall on the ice in the past few days. The grounds crew of our apartment complex was trying to de-ice the walkways by beating the ice with shovels until it broke, and then sweeping it away with brooms. Primitive, but effective.
My camera is broken. If you want Shanghai snow pictures, there are plenty out there on: Shanghai Streets, Shanghai Diaries, Edward’s Photography Life, Make a Wish, Bingfeng Tea House, China Herald, and Wubi.org.
01
Jan 2005The New Year
Happy New Year! Mine was spent with a small group of friends drinking and making merry. Somehow we also ended up playing some blindfolded hide and seek game. Bizarre. Fun though.
I haven’t felt like putting in the effort to write any quality entries lately. It’s largely due to my job. I’m really tired of teaching kids and doing all these holiday-themed activities. Fortunately, my job will change at the end of January. Whether or not I’ll stay at the same company is still uncertain at this point, but if I do stay I’ll no longer be teaching kids. I think I’ve done enough teaching kids for a while. It’s experience I wanted, but it’s certainly not my calling.
2005 will see the following changes to Sinosplice:
- A cool Flash menu at www.sinosplice.com/ which highlights all the non-blog features of my site. I’ve always intended my site to be much more than a blog, but blogging is by far the easiest way to add content.
- New random Flash Sinosplice banners at the top of the blog.
- New learning Chinese resources created by me (as sort of a warm-up for my career in Applied Linguistics, applied to Mandarin Chinese).
- Revamp of the Chinese Study Book Reviews, plus more reviews.
- Extensive revision of my Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese: Setting the Record Straight to reflect what I’ve learned in my Chinese linguistics studies as preparation for graduate school in fall of this year.
- More photo albums (I need to get my camera fixed, but I also have a bunch of old pics on my computer waiting to go online).
- Other random projects that I’m not ready to reveal yet.
Make it a good year.
29
Dec 2004Chinese Flashcards
Lately a few of my friends have been working on bringing Chinese vocabulary study into the high-tech age. Those projects are not yet complete, but I found an impressive flashcard database site called Flashcard Exchange. It also has a Chinese study section.
The flashcard sets are focused on beginners, with Mandarin vocabulary – Kung Fu (I) apparently the best of them. It’s not actually focused on fung fu (which would be kind of cool), and it’s in simplified characters.
The javascript flashcard viewer worked for me the first time I tried it, in Firefox, without the need to install any plugins. I assume it works fine in IE too.
This link was found via del.icio.us’s popular links, and is now in my del.icio.us links as well.
27
Dec 2004Christmas Mutated
Last week at work I had this conversation:
> A: John, you have an activity on Saturday.
> J: This Saturday? The 25th?
> A: Right.
> J: I can’t. It’s Christmas.
> A: Why can’t you?
> J: It’s Christmas. I have Christmas things to do.
> A: It’s just for an hour.
> J: No. It’s Christmas.
> A: OK, I’ll tell them.
Later I was approached by my supervisor:
> V: John, I realize it’s Christmas, but can you please work on Saturday?
> J: No.
> V: Come on, it’s just for an hour…
> J: Don’t you see something wrong with me giving up my own time on Christmas to teach little Chinese kids about why Christmas is important to Westerners?
> V: Ummm…
> J: So I won’t do it.
> V: But the company has already agreed to do it, and the kindergarten has already notified all the parents. Neither side can cancel it now without a big loss of face!
> J: Well, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still Christmas. My answer is no.
They ended up finding someone else to do it.
Christmas Eve
I had nothing specific planned, really. My girlfriend and I went out to eat with Carl and one of Carl’s Chinese friends. We all dressed up a little, and the restuarant was nice. We ate stuff Chinese people like to eat such as crab. It was good.
After dinner Carl’s friend, like many young Chinese people, it seems, wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve partying at a bar. Since no one had a better idea, we headed to Hengshan Lu, Shanghai’s nice bar street. What a mistake. It seemed like all the young people in the city had the same idea. Bars that usually charged no cover were charging cover. Bars that usually charged cover were doubling or tripling it. And yet, the bars were packed. My girlfriend and I decided to go home. We left Carl and his friend to their own pursuits.
Being in China for the holidays creates a lot of weird feelings in me that are hard to put into words. That night, though, my feelings were clear. To me, Christmas Eve is not a time to be living it up at bars. It’s a quiet night meant to be spent with loved ones.
Back at my quiet apartment, sitting in the glow of a cute little fake Christmas tree assembled with care, I started to feel better. But I could still feel a kind of pressure on me. It had something to do with my company wanting me to work on Christmas teaching about Christmas, with the throngs of young Chinese people in bars on Christmas Eve, and with the ubiquitous Christmas decorations that just seemed to try too hard — and for what?
I went to bed fairly early.
Christmas Day
Christmas Day I got up and went to mass at Xujiahui Cathedral. The mass was pretty unmoving, and the Christmas songs came out kinda stuffy. Throughout the mass, tourists were wandering into the service to have a look at what the Christians were up to. They were probably all pretty disappointed. I wasn’t disappointed, though. I felt better.
I’m not trying to write something as cheesey as “I went to church and found the true meaning of Christmas.” That’s not it. It’s more like, “the ‘Christmas’ around me, being constantly shoved in my face, bore only a superficial resemblance to the Christmas I knew, and what lay underneath it all was scary. Getting to church confirmed that what I knew was real, and I wasn’t the one who was losing it.”
After that, Christmas was more fun. We were having some friends over to the new apartment. I just happened to find Knight Rider – Season One from a vendor in the subway on my way to the grocery store that afternoon, so I picked that up. I invented the very simple “Knight Rider drinking game” (anytime anyone says “Michael,” you drink) and we played it to the amazingly long 2-hour pilot “episode.” We had Papa John’s pizza delivered. We played the pyramid drinking game. Then, when we were all nicely happy, we played Eat Poop You Cat. Yes, it sounds lame, and there were definitely skeptics at the party before it got going, but the game won everyone over pretty quickly and we were laughing so much it hurt.
It was a weird Christmas. But it was happy.
24
Dec 2004Merry Christmas
桌子上有蛋糕，蛋饼，蛋块，蛋条。
你吃掉了蛋糕，蛋饼，蛋条。
桌子上还剩什么？
剩蛋块了！
金狗表~金狗表~金狗欧得喂~！
叮叮当，叮叮当~！*
圣诞黑皮，黑皮牛液！
*给你们圣诞任务：这首歌是什么语言？是中国方言吗？
24
Dec 2004Christmas Calvin & Hobbes
I wrote before about discovering Calvin & Hobbes Chinese translations here in Shanghai, and about how the two characters’ names were translated into Chinese. I got some requests for scans.
I think the comics are translated mostly quite well. I’m still unsure of the legitimacy of the publication, though. The cover looks all nice, and I bought the books for 20 rmb each in a major Shanghai bookstore (思考乐), but the paper is rather low quality and the reproduction sometimes comes off as a shoddy photocopy. Also for that reason, my scans aren’t real great. (That and I’m still learning how to get the best scans from my new scanner.)
Anyway, below are the five comic strips I chose to share. I think they have a few interesting translation issues, and they’re Christmas themed to boot. I’m not going to comment specifically on the translations (you readers feel free to go crazy in the comments, though!), but I did provide the original English beneath each panel, with areas of interest highlighted in red.
So without further ado:
3. On a Hypothetical Good/Bad Case
Finally, I’d like to add that I have nothing but the utmost respect for Bill Watterson, so if what I’m sharing here in the name of translation study is deemed unacceptable by Bill Watterson, I’ll take them down immediately. Higher quality English Calvin & Hobbes scans are all over the internet, though, so I doubt this counts as much.
Merry Christmas!