It’s often said that Americans worship money. This is also true for the Chinese, though they seem to be more transparent about it.

A fellow student of mine in undergrad who came from Macau once said, “Money money money! All I want is to make money!” Her explicit transparency surprised me; I’m used to the token veneer maintained by money-worshiping Westerners. And now comes this article about a Chinese family, written by a Canadian-born-Chinese:

What took me by surprise one day was hearing my friend’s seven-year-old daughter Carrie say, “I love mun-ee.” “You love money? Why?” I asked. She giggled and said, “My mom and dad love money.”

From this review of Richard von Glahn’s book, The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture:

Have you very noticed a brightly-colored picture of a man in traditional costume, flanked by electric red candles, in your favorite, Chinese restaurant, perhaps somewhere near the cash register? Well, that’s a shrine to the god of wealth, the patron deity of millions of Chinese business people.
[...]
Centuries ago, Wutong was feared as a demonic deity who would promise fabulous wealth, but at a price – usually the sexual possession of one’s wife or daughter. Fickle and mean, he would then usually deprive one of the riches he had once bestowed.
[...]
the demonic Wutong changed into a very different deity, the current god of wealth who has no dark side. Gone is the insight that a lust for riches can poison the heart and pervert the family. Chinese today are totally comfortable with the single-minded drive to make money.

And you though they were communists.

One author we’re reading says there’s only one thing that the Chinese love more than money, but that’s for a later post.

Went to a friend’s to make (and eat) 饺子 (jiǎo zi). Lots of fun and good language practice!

They’re kind of like pierogies, only the insides are different and you dip them in black vinegar and pepper sauce. We made/ate too many and waddled home after.

And a word about pirated DVDs… We just watched the new Harry Potter movie. Maybe you didn’t know, but it’s rated R and has the exact same cast and crew as “The Rock” – at least, that’s what the cover of our copy says.

Sadly, it didn’t have negative review blurbs printed on the package like others we’ve seen, or plot descriptions and review blurbs from other movies. Even more sadly, the quality was so brutal that if we weren’t desperate Harry Potter geeks we would have turned it off. We could only hear half the dialogue and it looked like it came from my grandparents’ old family films from the 70’s shot on whatever that old kind of film was called.

But I guess with pirated movies, you get what you pay (65 cents) for.

Pronounced: rén zài xīn bù zài
Literally: person in, heart/mind not in
Means: “The lights are on but nobody’s home!” The idea that someone is “there in body, but there mind is somewhere else.” Notice that Chinese, lacking a Greek philosophical heritage, doesn’t divide people up and pit head against heart, or mind and reason against emotions and irrationality in the same way that Westerners do. 心 (xīn) can be translated as heart, mind, or soul.

Wish I could find that newspaper photo we scanned of a Bible professor we know standing in line with his daughter dressed up like wizards for a Harry Potter book release party.

J.K. Rowling said:

Yes, I am [a Christian]… Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.

We just finished book 7 and pretty much loved it. It’s been said that last weekend may have been the single biggest mass reading in the history of the world. Gazillions of books sold in a matter of hours, etc., etc.

It’s easy to find stuff online where people see Christian messages in the HP series, like here (of course, there’s lots online saying Harry Potter’s the devil, too!). It will be a while before we decide what we think it’s all supposed to mean, but in the meantime Harry Potter freaks can geek-out here. Or, if you’ve read it, tell us what you think!


 

I pretty much never played chess growing up. I like games like Pictionary, Cheat (aka B.S.), President (aka Scum), and Risk, but only if there’s lots of table talk. Chess requires way too much analytical thinking and way not enough free-form intuition.

But in this neighbourhood, chess can be a community event. Most afternoons there’s always a couple games going on in various neighbourhood shady spots, usually with a few bystanders. It’s always men; they said the women do whatever it is they do inside. But when we play, we don’t just get spectators; we get participants. People just reach in a make moves for you, and then someone else takes that person’s move back and makes their own instead, and all the time people are commenting/arguing over what move should be made and why. Or they’ll make several moves in a row and maybe half get taken back. I get totally lost, but that’s fine, because I have almost no idea what I’m doing anyway. I’m still trying to remember what tones to use for each piece’s name while Mr. Sòng is trying to decide if he should beat me quick or let me linger and thus savour his inevitable victory.

Our friendly, neighbourhood ninja
Early Saturday morning I was dreaming that I was sleeping, and someone was standing by the bed yelling at me, “Hey! Hey! Wake up! Hey! Hey! Wake up! Hey!” Then I really did wake up, but the “Hey! hey!”-ing continued. After a few seconds I realized: the ninja is back.

Our friendly neighbourhood ninja. Lately he’d taken a few weeks off. We’ve never seen him. He used to regularly kick off the morning neighbourhood exercise/variety show by breaking the relative silence with about 30 seconds of “Hei! Hia! Hei! Hui!” before coughing, spitting, and mysteriously disappearing. Several times I’d put the camera by the bed so I could shoot him; I wanted to put him in the Good Morning Tianjin video. But he’s always eluded us. By the time he’d wake me up and I’d make it to the window, he’d be gone. So we somewhat affectionately call him “the ninja.”

Someone jacked our kitten!
We, along with Mr. Huì, adopted a stray kitten. It showed up in the neighbourhood one night, and we started feeding it; it lived outside in a community garden and in a pile of junk under Mr. Huì’s first-floor windows. We knew better than to bring it in the house; a girl from California we know who works in Qīngdǎo took in a kitten off the street and got a nasty skin disease on her face from it. Her and her roommates had to turn it back out onto the street, which was about as traumatizing for her as the skin disease.

Anyway, we saw Mr. Huì on the way home today and he told us someone had stolen our kitten! I asked him if they stole it to sell down south in Guǎngzhōu as food (the latest Guangzhou cat-eating drama is here, from July 10). He assured both of us that she was stolen because the thief thought she was cute for a pet, not because they want to eat it. I’m not so sure, considering what happened here this February.

You can see her and hear Mr. Huì in this 20 sec. video (“mi-mi” is how you call to a cat in Chinese).

She had a good time while she was here, chewing cicadas and eating fish caught in the canal.

A Sunday afternoon by the canal, reading Harry Potter (aloud, in the original British).

Pronounced: má guā
Means: muggles (in the Harry Potter series, muggles are the regular, non-magical people like you and us who are oblivious to the world of magic).

I’m on a former professor’s e-mail list, and he recently sent something about how we’re all trilingual – not in the English, Spanish, and Mandarin sense, but in “…the three universal languages of information, motivation, and intimacy.”

Information is language about; motivation is language for; intimacy is the language of being and connecting.

Schools primarily speak information; parents, pastors, coaches, and politicians often speak the language of motivation; musicians, poets, children, and lovers generally speak the language of intimacy.

He explains that we begin life speaking intimacy as infants. In school, we begin to discover a world much bigger than our parents, and to learn about it we use the language of information. Finally, “we realize that words can influence and inspire people for action, so we learn the language of motivation.”

In the process of learning information and motivation, we often lose the language of intimacy. […] People respect knowledge and inspiration so the languages of information and motivation take center stage.

He goes on to imply that the language of intimacy is the most meaningful of the three.

I think I agree. What is the ultimate point of gathering all our information and developing skills to motivate and influence others? Power is one answer that quickly comes to mind, but power to do what? And for what?

Isn’t the point of learning information and motivation so that we can better relate to ourselves and to one another? To better know ourselves, and thus be more able to share ourselves and receive others? To better and more authentically share life together?

I’m personally way more comfortable speaking information and motivation. Maybe that’s why I’ve played guitar for over a decade but never really been able to write songs, nevermind poetry.

If you want the full version of his e-mail (400 words), just let me know.

In My Country and My People, 林语堂 (Lín Yǔtáng) contrasts Chinese and Western thinking this way: Westerners are more inclined to logic, reason, the scientific method, and analysis; the Chinese are more inclined to intuition, reasonableness, and common sense. Here he gives a historical example of what happens when you apply an intuitive approach to, say, human biology and comparative religion.

…the logic of common sense can only be applied to human affairs and actions; it cannot be applied to the solution of the riddles of the universe. One can use reasonableness to settle a dispute but not to locate the relative positions of the heart and liver or determine the function of the pancreatic juice. Hence in divining nature’s mysteries and the secrets of the human body, the Chinese have to resort largely to intuition. Strangely enough they have intuitively felt the heart to be on the right and the liver to be on the left side of the human chest. An erudite Chinese scholar, whose voluminous Notebooks are widely read, came across a copy of Human Anatomy translated by the Jesuits Jacobus Rho, James Terrence, and Nicolaus Longobardi, and finding that in the book the heart is placed on the left and the liver on the right, decided that Westerners have different internal organs from the Chinese, and deduced therefrom the important conclusion that since their internal organs are different, therefore their religion must also be different — this deduction is in itself a perfect example of intuitive reasoning — and hence only Chinese whose internal organs are imperfect could possibly become Christian converts. The erudite scholar slyly remarked that if the Jesuits only knew this fact they would not be interested in preaching Christianity in China and in making converts of half-normal beings.

Such assertions are made in perfect seriousness and in fact are typical of Chinese “intuition” in the realms of natural science and human physiology. One begins to believe there is something after all in the scientific method … He could have at least felt the palpitation of his heart by his own hand, but evidently the Chinese scholar never descended to manual labour.

Thus free from the stupid drudgery in the use of his eye and his hands, and having a naive faith in the power of his “intuition,” the Chinese scholar goes about explaining the mysteries of the human body and the universe to his own satisfaction.

[from pages 90-91 in my 2002 edition.]