Pronounced: bi tu xi l?o
Simplified: ????
Literally: white head together old
Means: “live to ripe old age in conjugal bliss; remain a devoted couple to the end of their lives.” This ancient Chinese idiom is often said at weddings: “Wishing you bi tu xi l?o!” (???????!)
Hopefully we’ll have some info on this soon.
You can read about this surprise parade here:
There’s a video below the photo gallery. Scroll down to read or write comments!
… but the video we took today has a dancer outside the small temple where the parade stopped, standing over piles of burning spirit money and waving a battle axe.
Just when it seemed like nothing interesting had happened in a while, guess who comes parading down the street in a swarm of firecrackers while we were out buying toilet paper?
Uh, we’re still guessing. I asked Mr. Ling the security guard (literally): “Have two big person – their name?” but all we got out of him and his friend was that it’s called 八家将. I found a Wikipedia page on it – in Chinese – and also found out that those translation sites aren’t worth much for stuff like this.
But maybe you not getting an instant explanation to go with the pictures and video is good. No one hands them to us right away when we see stuff like this! We’ll post the Who’s Who when we find out.
For now, check out these pictures.
(rainy day post… pulled this from the drafts I save for times when there’s not much going on.)
This one is closer to home – two different worlds within the same culture.
How valuable are you?
According to the world-story into which we are trying to live more fully, your true, absolute value as a person is not determined by your feelings, abilities, appearance, age, behaviour, or ‘capacity to contribute to society.’
The ‘experts’ – in this case Ivy League medical ethicists – disagree. One of them is the National Institutes of Health‘s department of clinical bioethics chairman, a Harvard University-educated doctor, and a former Harvard Medical School associate professor… I guess that ranks as one of the academic elites who wield considerable relative influence over our culture and society.
Emanuel and Wertheimer agree that the people who make, distribute and deliver vaccines should have priority, but say people between the ages of 13 and 40 should be next in line.They based their recommendation on what they call the “life-cycle” principle. Under this approach, a person’s value is balanced between how many years he expects to have left and how many years he has already lived.
The death of a young person seems more tragic than the death of an elderly person, they wrote, “because the younger person has not had the opportunity to live and develop through all stages of life.”
On the other hand, they wrote, “20-year-olds are valued more than one-year-olds because the older individuals have more developed interests, hopes and plans, but have not had the opportunity to realize them.”
The ethicists said their approach is more focused on saving the greatest number of productive years of life rather than on saving the greatest number of lives.
Emanuel and Wertheimer, of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., published their recommendations in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
In short: when saving lives in a pandemic, aim for quality, not quantity. The value of a person is determined by their potential for productivity.
To be fair, Dr. Emanuel falls into his own “less valuable” category. And my beef isn’t necessarily with the order of priority they suggest. It’s the way they determine people’s relative value that makes me wonder. What criteria are these guys using to determine people’s value? They aren’t stupid. Actually, they’re brilliant, and their conclusions are most likely the reasonable outcome of a long, detailed, and well-fleshed out picture of the universe that meets industry standards for coherency. In one sense I’m glad they’re expressing these conclusions because it helps reveal the honest results of removing certain key factors from deliberations about the Big Questions of life/existence (meaning, purpose, value, identity). People should be honest regarding their worldviews’ implications for meaning and value.
Given the way they handle our relative value, I wonder how much absolute/inherent value they’d attribute to humanity.
What is a person, after all? What criteria do we use to determine a person’s absolute and relative value, and how do we form that criteria? I have my working answers of course, but my worldview isn’t guiding national bioethics, shaping government policy, and getting reported in the popular media.
Fundamental world-story assumptions matter. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the values expressed by these Ivy League ethicists – youth is best; midlife and onward is lesser life – are mirrored in our entertainment media and consumer culture.
The cat bit and/or licked me around 5:30, 5:45, 6, and 6:15 this morning. My alarm clock went off at 6:45 for me to go exercise, and then the obnoxious carbon monoxide sensor went off again at 6:50. To make things better, it also started playing “You Are My Sunshine” at the same time because Mr. Ling and Mr. He at the security desk were calling to help us turn it off (in Chinese). Last time they said (through a bilingual passerby) just crack a window. Well, it’s been raining this week and we’ve had all the windows and the sliding door open for a few days. We can’t help it if the air outside is poisonous, too.
Anyway, it went off on its own even though I was aiming a fan at the alarm, which Jessica pointed out actually isn’t the sensor… that’s on the ceiling in the kitchen.
On the way back in from exercising I stopped to attempt a conversation about it with Mr. Ling and Mr. He. Through a not-so-subtle yet potent integration of limited vocab, horrendous accent, desperate grammar, alarm noise imitations, and charades I deduced that they were saying there’s an off switch on the sensor. Lo, and behold! I have now neutralized the previously ever-present threat of air-raid+You Are My Sunshine. Now if we can just muzzle the cat…
We had more ancient Chinese philosophy for bedtime stories tonight – in DVD computer animated comic book form. Yeah, that’s right: a CG 孔子 on DVD. Jessica fell asleep sometime around, “If one can rectify one’s own self, what problems can there be in governing?”
By the way, “Confucius say” in Chinese is 孔子說. No doubt many of you have wondered about that ever since elementary school and that “Man who stands on toilet” joke. But it’s no joke to the PRC: New/neo-Confucianism is apparently the philosophy of choice on which the government wants to build China’s emergence… but I haven’t read any thing substantial about that yet.
Here’s two other tidbits from this evening’s enlightenment:
“If you repay an enemy with kindness, how will you repay someone who is kind to you? You should treat an enemy with decency and fairness, and you should repay kindness with kindness.”
“While your parents are living, do not travel far away. If you have no choice but to travel far away, let your parents know your whereabouts so that they won’t worry.”
Some day we’ll learn about this stuff for real.
We both write, but Jessica only writes when I bribe her. See all of her posts here.
Pronounced: guāzǐ liǎn
Means: Melon-seed Face. One of the ideal Chinese face shapes.
Albert at Laowai Chinese introduces two ideal and two undesirable Chinese face shapes: The Four Faces of Chinese People (women, really)
- 2012/03/22
Eating Bitterness: an intro to the unprecedented Chinese migrant worker phenomenon
If you're unfamiliar with the urban migrant phenomenon in China -- as in, the people who make the stuff you buy and their lives -- then China’s Urban Immigrants: A Diet of Bitterness is a fine overview with lots of links for further reading.
"Chinese metropolises are now home to an estimated 200 million rural-to-urban migrants . . . who occupy a precarious place in the urban hierarchy: while urbanites appreciate their labor, they are less enthusiastic about the migrants’ presence in their cities."
For more on this topic you can browse our Migrant Workers category, or if you like documentaries, see these reviews of two good documentaries on migrant workers:
- 2012/05/10
Chairman Mao enshrined -- literally
When one of my young, very privileged Party-family students passionately told me, "Chairman Mao is like a god to us!" I understood he meant it as a simile. And the god metaphor is common when discussing Mao and his Cultural Revolution personality cult. But as it turns out, in some incredible irony, some other Chinese mean it literally. I heard about this before, but this is the first time I've found pictures -- Mao actually enshrined in a local temple: Mao Temple in China – Chairman Mao Becomes Local God.
For more about Mao and the Mao Era, you can browse these topics:
- 2012/05/08
A deeper look into the dynamics of living with Chinese propaganda
Two insightful posts from Seeing Red in China, which is probably my current favourite China blog, about living in an aggressively and explicitly propagandized environment, and how Chinese try to deal with it. The propaganda still works, but in ways different than us foreigners probably tend to assume. Without further ado:
I tell [my daughter] that she must not be afraid to take a clear moral stand. “If you see someone is being bullied,” I said, “speak up for that person.” “Be the keeper of the good.” [But] Chinese parents would have to think twice, three times, or even lose sleep, if they are to instill these values in their children, because these qualities won’t serve them very well in the Chinese society.
We've written lots on propaganda, mostly the Chinese kind, including translations of the propaganda we've encounter in China. You can find it all in our Propaganda category.
- 2012/05/06
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