Roy & Patty K. and family (we knew her as Patty Jacobs) are in China right now picking up their newly-adopted baby girl! Click the picture to go to their livejournal site, which has all kinds of great photos.

Many of us were blessed greatly by Patty’s service all through junior high and high school. It’s so great to see them hit such a milestone in this adventure.

Pronounced: �i
Means: love

After sending out our most recent newsletter, we have been overwhelmed with the amount of encouragement, affirmation, blessing, and love-filled responses we’ve received.

While we never doubt that there are many people that love us, care for us, and pray for us…there are times (like this) when the loving hug of the Family around us becomes even more evident.

It’s a nice feeling…so, I just wanted to share it with all of you. Thanks for loving us and journeying along with us.

We love you too! :D

Pronounced: j? ch?
Means: (1) motorcycle/scooter (Also ???).
(2) annoying person. “j? ch?” sounds similar to a Chinese swear word, and the last few years in Taiwan they’ve started saying “j? ch?” as a replacement, sort of like “heck” or “dang” (only the word they’re replacing is stronger). Still, after living here a few months, we totally understand describing annoying people as motorcycles!

Try to imagine living in a city where the thickest areas are 51 people per square metre. Could you ever feel like this guy if someone pushed your buttons on the wrong day?

“I want you to apologize!”

“Sorry. … You want to save face. Sorry, Uncle” (a respectful address to an elder).

“I don’t want to save face! Hey! I didn’t disturb your conversation. Why did you blame me for talking too loudly? … I face pressure! You face pressure! Why did you provoke me?! … This is not resolved! This is not resolved!”

And it’s all way downhill from there.

Normally someone freaking out on someone else in public isn’t news. But this particular incident tapped a culturally significant nerve in HK’s general population and mainstream media. People in cramped Asian cities face pressures to degrees that we (Westerners) usually can’t understand.

In May on HK public transit, a younger guy tapped a middle-aged guy on the shoulder and respectfully asked him not speak so loud on his cell phone (we’ve witnessed the full-volume cell phone talking in HK – it’s obnoxious). The older guy blew a gasket! He chewed/cussed the younger guy out for a full six minutes. Another passenger recorded the whole thing on his cell phone and put the video on the internet. It quickly gathered an internet cult following, and now the guy has pseudo-celebrity status in the mainstream media. He’s a household name in HK. Chinese rap and pop artists even made music videos about it. “I face pressure! You face pressure!” and “This is not resolved!” are catch-phrases now.

From a various news articles (CNN, South China Morning Post (HK)):

“Bus Uncle” is also seen as real, strong and honest, using language close to the heart of Hong Kong people and catching the collective emotional pulse in a city where people live cheek to jowl, and don’t generally socialize with strangers or say how they feel, local experts say.

“He is not pretending to be someone great,” says Fung, who says Hong Kong’s youth can’t find heroes in the textbooks they read. “But he is expressing the true feelings of ordinary people.”

Chan’s phrases reflect the pressure that comes from living in a city where 6.9 million people are squeezed into 1,104 square kilometers (426 square miles) of land. In its most densely populated parts — like the old airport area of Kwun Tong — as many as 50,820 live in one square kilometer.

When I first heard that there was a ‘hero’ I thought they meant the young guy who finally said something about the obnoxious cell phone behaviour (personal pet-peeve of mine on any continent). But no – the general population likes the guy that freaks out, violates all sorts of cultural standards, and genuinely expresses how they feel in the process.

Our brief trips to Hong Kong (here and here) made Yonghe, one of the most congested parts of Taiwan, feel spacious. HK’s population density is incredible.

And how did it end? From The Washington Post:

Like all great films, this one has a perfect conclusion. Just when you start to think there’s no way the encounter can end without an actual fight, Bus Uncle’s cellphone rings. He curses and abruptly turns away to answer it.

You guys all know the story where the younger of two brothers runs off with his inheritance early and blows it on parties and prostitutes. He comes grovelling back to his father, who meets him in the road with tears of joy and throws a huge party. The older, well-behaved, hard working, respectful brother gets mad because he thinks his father is unfair and loves the younger brother more.

Our weekly adult English class was discussing this story, and we heard a rather passionate comment from one of the adult women who has better-than-average English (almost a direct quote):

You know, the real problem in this story is the Father. He’s not fair. He loves the younger son more and that’s wrong.

And she wasn’t saying this in a “this is just how I initially react emotionally, even though I know it’s not really unfair” kind of way. She was saying, “No, really – the Father is wrong.”

An older class member pulled Jessica aside after the class,

I though you should know that in Taiwan most parents don’t treat daughters like they’re anything. Daughters don’t get anything from their families because in the old days they would marry into another family and out of their family.

Now, understand that I’m paraphrasing his “explanation” (this conversation happened 6 days ago) and you have assume that much nuance is lost in translation. We can’t know from his English just how strongly he means for this to sound, or how universal he intends it to be meant. But we also happen to know that he was rather harsh with his own daughter, by North American standards, when she was growing up (she’s told us). So what do we do with all this? How should we understand it?

These aren’t the kinds of experiences with which we can go assuming/concluding things about Taiwan’s society and culture. But these are little clues – little anecdotes that will hang around waiting to be filled in with understanding later as our cultural study progresses. They become blips on the cultural radar, that slowly form pictures with other blips on the radar, as if to say, “Hey, something significant is going on here. Pay attention.”

Pronounced: hu? l�ng gu?
Simplified: ???
Literally: fire dragon fruit
Means: (these things…)

Pronounced: b� sh?
Literally: nose poop
Means: booger

Today we had swearing, drugs, people that can’t keep their pants zipped, a monk driving a Lexus, and a cat who… ‘went swimming.’

Disclaimer: the Chinese grammar in this post is atrocious, and at this point there’s nothing we can do about.

Nose sh*t & the hazards of language learning
After spending the morning passing out ads for PEI, during which a dog ran up and pee’d on my bag of fliers, we hung out with the college-age group all afternoon. At one point we were talking about names for pets, and one of our good friends (whom we’re not naming) mentioned that in college her friend’s dog was named “Booger” in Chinese. Jessica asked how to say it, of course (can’t pass up a learning opportunity like that!), and our friend answered, “鼻屎.” She knew that we knew 鼻 (nose), so in a very matter-of-fact kind of way, she added, “屎 means sh*t.” Jessica, caught slightly off guard, gave a quizzical look.

Our friend repeated with extra clarity: “Sh*t.”

“So it means, ‘Nose sh*t’?” Jessica was beginning to laugh.

“Yes. Nose sh*t.”

Jessica started laughing so hard she almost knocked an old lady off the sidewalk who happened to be passing by.

Now, you have to understand, this particular friend is a leader in the young people’s group, a choir member, a prayer warrior, enthusiastic core member of the congregation… the kind of girl who ditched her boyfriend of 5 years when it became obvious that he was not interested in considering her beliefs. She knew what the word meant, but had no idea what she was saying. She felt a little embarrassed when we explained the various English terms for poop and their shades of meaning, so we haven’t named her here. But next time we’ll talk about meaning and context and everyone will have a good laugh.

It’s a great example of how you can “know” the meaning of a word, but not really understand it. Until you feel it like the natives feel it, you don’t really understand it. Roll that into your exegesis papers and smoke it!

Imported drugs, and more hazards of language learning
And speaking of smoking, we also learned another fine “Why tones are important” lesson at dinner tonight. We ate at a Malaysian food place, and the word used for that particular style of food was dà mǎ. So after the meal, I wanted to say, “Dà mǎ food is very good!” (“大馬吃是很好”.) What I actually said was, “大麻吃是很好” – the 2nd character is different, but I was unaware. The guy I was saying this to, whom we had just met this evening, looked at me blankly while our other friend across the table started laughing.

They explained that “Dà mǎ” (ma with 3rd tone) is the name for the food, and “Dà má” (ma with 2nd tone) means marijuana. I had said, “Marijuana eat is very good!”

“So then,” I asked, “jǐng chá lái shuō nǐ yǒu dà má mā? hé wǒ shuō dà má chī shì hěn hǎo!” [Police come say, you have marijuana? And I say, marijuana eat is very good!]

We all laughed pretty hard. (See that kids? You don’t need to actually take the drugs to have a good time.)

What to do when someone is standing in front of a group speaking, and their fly is wide open.
We went along with about 11 others from the young people’s group to visit an elderly couple in a nursing home this afternoon. We were seated in the lounge waiting for the couple to arrive when a girl in her late 20′s stood up in front of all of us to talk about what we’d do with the couple (sing and stuff). Her fly was 100% unzipped and it was impossible to not notice. She was the only one who didn’t know.

These are situations to which we pay exceptional amounts of attention. What will people do? How and who will react? How will the problem be neutralized? We’ve heard so much about “high-context culture” and “saving face” that we expect different rules to apply in situations like the one this afternoon.

One of the guys in the group stood up and walked to Zhi-ling who was sitting closest to the speaker and whispered to her. Then Zhi-ling whispered to the speaker, who laughed sheepishly, turned around, and promptly… neutralized the problem. Everyone had a quick chuckle of acknowledgment and then we went on. We’ve got plenty of questions about it for Zhi-ling that we’ll ask later. But just in case you wondering, that’s how a group of 20-somethings handled a friend’s public embarrassment in Taiwan.

And, we saw a female Buddhist monk get into a shiny new Lexus and drive off. I’m not sure what to make of that, but something’s going on.

ps – as as I’m typing this, the cat just fell in the toilet. I’m not sure what to make of that either. And this morning she actually flushed it all on her own. What a day!…