Wooowooo! My brother’s a dad, I’m an uncle, and my parents are old grandparents!

26 March 2007, 19h43, 6lbs 9 ounces.

The kinds of things that make you really wish you weren’t on the other side of the Pacific.

(PS – about time someone sent us pictures!)

pps – lots of photos here.

We are overdue to have Chinese names. But for Westerners, choosing a good Chinese name is harder than you might think. One American that my teacher knows picked her own name, choosing the characters in part based on what looked nice. She didn’t know it, but her named ended up meaning “insecticide.”

People have to call you something, and the average person on the street in China is going to have serious trouble hearing, pronouncing, and remembering most English names (and vice versa in North America).

Chinese given-names also carry relatively more meaning than English names do. Many Chinese are very careful about what name they choose for their children, sometimes even paying professionals to pick the best sounding and most auspicious name. It’s a popular belief that a name can affect a person’s destiny and success.

When Mainland Chinese choose English names, it’s often based entirely on meaning. For example, a friend of ours is teaching several hundred students at a local university. In her classes she has students named: “Star,” “Moon,” “Taste,” “Apple,” “Banana”… and every English teacher here has lists like this. In Taiwan they seemed to do much better with their English names, though we did get a “Grack” and a “Neo.” Often the English teacher gets to give the students their English names. Peter Hessler, author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, used names of his family members and stereotypically African American names like “Shaniqua” to name his students. Other teachers name their students after characters from their favourite TV show (like Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, and George). Sometimes boys accidentally pick girls’ names. In Texas we knew a girl from Macao who changed her English name from Sam to Cinderella when she found out Sam was a boy’s name. “Cinderella” went on to become the first international student (and probably the first non-sorority president) to win Homecoming Queen. We were proud.

So, choosing a Chinese name… How do you avoid getting the Chinese equivalent of Taste, Kramer, or Grack when you are new to the language and it would take decades to learn and feel all the possible meanings associated with potential names?

You could get a Chinese name from your Mandarin teacher. They often give names, sometimes simply assigning the transliteration of the student’s English name on the first day of class. Neither of us want that; transliterated names sound funny to native Mandarin speakers, and the first character of mine is also apparently shared by George Bush. You could also ask (and trust) a really close Chinese friend who knows you well to give you a good one. Jessica I think will go this route. I’m going a third route: pick some ideas/themes that you like, decide if you care more about meaning or phonetic closeness to your English name, and ask a bunch of Chinese friends to suggest some names with explanations. I sent the e-mail out Sunday and suggestions are coming in. I’ll post them when most or everyone has replied.

For two years now, I’ve been trying and failing to say “toilet” in Chinese. I was so bad at pronouncing “toilet” that people couldn’t even guess what I was saying. And “toilet” is an important word to know; I’ve had the “I really gotta go and this convenience store clerk can’t figure out what I’m asking about”-experience one too many times!

“Toilet” in Mandarin is 厕所 (click for dictionary), pronounced cè suǒ (click each word for audio). I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what my problem was. I was sure it was the beginning sound, which is represented by a “c” (click for audio) in pinyin (? in bopomofo, I think). I just found out in class that actually, it was the “e” sound (ㄜ in bopomofo, I think). It’s one of the sounds that native English speakers typically mangle because we don’t usually hear any significant difference between it and one of our short vowel sounds (short u). Plus, it’s really like two sounds pressed together; your teeth and tongue (apparently) change position slightly as you say it (the audio I’ve linked to doesn’t demonstrate this very well).

Long story short, for two years I’ve been not making a sound that I couldn’t hear anyway, even when people said it to me, and that’s why it took me two years to learn how to ask for a toilet in Mandarin. And, of course, it turns out that it’s more common to use either of two other phrases for bathroom that are easier to pronounce anyway.

For a while there the world threatened to end, what, with three weeks and no internet in the apartment. Of course this gave us plenty of time to reflect on the nature of the relationship between humanity and communication technology, who owns whom, and the human penchant toward creating things to which we give control of our lives.

Actually, that’s my doomsday scenario (if the plug doesn’t get pulled first): We create something to which we sort of unintentionally give up control to, and it kills/neutralizes us all. Not robots; something seemingly more passive and unconscious, like a super fantastic communication/entertainment/psychedelic technology that we’d all rather be hooked up to 24/7 than live for real. If I was writing the Matrix movies, I’d have removed the sinister computer entities/machines and made the Matrix a thing that people created and voluntarily gave themselves to because they preferred the fake virtual world. In (over)developed countries, don’t we sort of live that way anyway?

ANYWAY – the point is that we now have high speed internet in the apartment, so now we can Skype! We couldn’t actually get internet installed in our apartment because we’re only here for another month or two, and it was way cheaper to buy a wireless router and 34 meters of ethernet cable, and split our neighbour’s ADSL bill (I’m pretty sure that’s legal).

Pop quiz: Distinguish the men from the boys. Mouseover each picture for clues.
(Bonus Hint: “pablum face”)
 

 
A recent poll on TMB* asking, “Ladies – do you prefer a Clean-cut or Rugged man?” is split down the middle. I’m beginning to suspect that the equivalent poll to an audience of Chinese women would produce pretty different results. (Seems the poll forgot to consider McManhood.)

It’s no secret that what we find attractive has a ton to do with the families and cultures in which we are raised. My language tutor in Tanzania laughed out loud at the idea that white men prefer skinny women over fat women; he could hardly believe it. In the comments on this post we got into stereotypical differences between Chinese and Western perspectives re: what makes an attractive man. It’s a topic that came up occasionally with friends in Taiwan, too. One used the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean as anecdotes, saying that in Taiwan Orlando Bloom was the runaway heart-throb in LOTR, partly because Aragorn was too dirty. But he wasn’t so well received in Pirates with the little bit of scruffyness he’d tried to get going.

Recent personal anecdote: On Sundays in Taiwan I wore jeans and don’t shave because it was our day off. One weekday a young woman who normally only saw us on Sundays walked into the school and saw me in my teacher clothes (shirt and tie), “Oh, today you are so handsome! Not like Sunday.” (Yes, they really can be that straightforward in Chinese cultures; the foreigner blog world has all kinds of stuff on Chinese ‘compliments.’ It doesn’t offend us – it’s actually really funny – and it’s not as shocking as it was when we first got here. And of course the kids say stuff all the time.) But anyway – rugged is out; metro is in.

All this reminded me of a conversation I had a couple years ago with a guest lecturer from Hong Kong, and this perhaps touches on the historical legacy of ethnocentricity (“Middle Kingdom” = center/zenith of civilization) and xenophobia (foreigners = barbarians). During the mid-class break I asked him what he’d say to North Americans who wanted to live in China. He looked at me – and my beard and long hair – and said, “Well, it really helps if you try to look Chinese as much as possible.” Not what I was expecting. I suspect it was his polite, indirect way of saying, “If you go to China without a makeover, you’ll be a hippie freak show.”

Of course these are just anecdotes and stereotypes, but I still think they reflect significant differences in how beauty is defined in our cultures. The anecdotes are just instances where we bump into these differences.

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*If you’re not married, at work, and/or not a fan of explicit sexual discussion, you might not want to click this.

On my List of Fun Saturday Afternoon Activities, shopping usually ranks a little below scooping dog poo. But here it’s not really shopping; it’s language practice. Taking home groceries is sort of a bonus.

Yesterday, after doing homework for an hour or two, I headed out on foot because I had the time and wanted to look around the neighbourhood. We needed groceries and extension cords. The road in front of our building was busy with bikes and cars, and the sidewalks had the usual car mechanics and bike repair guys working on vehicles dissembled to various degrees. I bought a late lunch from a window shop – three hot biscuit sandwiches with grilled chicken slices inside called 烧斌鸡肉 for about 60 cents – and then walked down and around the corner in search of an alleged electronics store. On the way I found another window shop advertising light bulbs, and poked my head in.

What I’m calling window shops are where people that have turned a room in their 1st floor apartment that has a window facing the street into a shop. They sell from the window, occasionally jumping in and out to run quick errands as if it were a door.

It took about 45 minutes to buy extension cords from Mr. Zheng, who considers himself a chef and doesn’t appear intimidated by foreigners. First we had to argue about the price, and then his teenage nephew wanted to come see the foreigner, followed a few minutes later by his teenage niece. The nephew, Chen, was older, tall, and I wondered if he was trying to remember phrases from an English lesson. The niece, Han, stood back and stared. Her face especially seemed to betray a conflict between shyness and curiosity, her already wide eyes getting even wider when her uncle stepped out leaving just the three of us and I started asking her and her 哥哥 (older brother) about their names and family. (Sometimes the expressions on people’s faces here are priceless! I don’t know what they’re thinking, but I bet it’s really funny. I don’t remember us getting this kind of reaction in Taipei, where they’re more used to foreigners.) After getting over the shock of having a 老外 speak to them, their curiosity won out and they laughed and smiled as we tested the limits of what two weeks of conversational Mandarin lessons can communicate. Other customers came and went during this time, and every few minutes we’d come back to the price of the extension cords. Eventually he knocked a few kuai off the price, but I suspect it was just to make me feel good. He was cooking shrimp and let me try some.

After declining their polite gesture to come inside and sit for bit, I headed to the 菜市场 (vegetable market). I didn’t get better prices than last week, but this time the numbers all came to me quickly and I didn’t have to take so long translating in my head, and I could make a little conversation with the market ladies. Many of them originally are from the countryside. They seemed to laugh easily and enjoy the diversion, which is something I loved about Yonghe and I’m also discovering here: people here still take time to talk and still have some general willingness to chat with random foreigners. Of course, the additional general curiousness here can really get on your nerves, too, but I love being able to go for a walk and easily find people to chat with.

Pronounced: d?ng xi
Literally: east west
Means: stuff, things.