So I traded our unwatchable, “rated R,” 65-cent copy of the latest Harry Potter movie for a different one, and here’s what it says on the back:

the acting is not really that good. Keanu Reeves is miscast in his role and a better actor could have done more with it…

Ah, China – it’s Harry Potter China-style!

I hope the Harry Potter series makes it huge in China and every kid grows up reading it (the real books, not “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince” or any of the other fake ones).

Why? (Thanks for asking!) Partly because the ever-present sub-surface rumble of culture stress, which is an unavoidable feature of living elsewhere, predisposes me to dislike certain aspects of Chinese culture that are most contrary to my own inherited values as a Westerner, and major themes of the Harry Potter series just happen to run directly contrary to said aspects of Chinese culture. It wouldn’t bother me personally if millions of Chinese children were influenced by those particular “foreign” values.

And partly – and more importantly – because at the end of the day I still buy the notion of absolute truth, moral absolutes, personal responsibility for one’s choices, and that personal agency can play a big, perhaps bigger, role in life on this planet than fate. These are major underlying themes in Harry Potter and I don’t believe they can be completely reduced to mere cultural products. Chinese culture traditionally, and still today among young people, emphasizes the opposite.

From everything we’ve seen, heard, and read, fatalism is still typically assumed in China, and is one of a few major influences perpetuating a legacy of avoiding personal responsibility like the plague, turning excuses for ethically questionable behaviour into moral maxims, and tolerating suffering or oppression with selfish, cynical indifference (ha, this might be the culture stress talking, just fyi). The work of 林语堂 (Lín Yǔtáng), who was critical of Chinese culture but (it seems) still preferred it Western culture, explains and illustrates this for Westerners in My Country and My People and Moment in Peking.

Joanne Rowling’s underlying messages, which become explicit at certain points, are directly contrary to deterministic fate and moral relativism. She manages to emphasize the importance of families and parents while at the same time arguing that a person’s character and identity, while highly influenced by their family, is ultimately self-determined by the choices they make. Family and parents are of utmost importance; Rowling takes great pains to demonstrate the importance of good parents and family life, and illustrates the impact of fathers and mothers on the character of their adult children. But for Rowling, a person’s inherited lot in life does not determine whether they will be good or bad. Everyone has both choices within them, and it’s how one chooses that ultimately determines the kind of person one becomes. And in Harry Potter, individuals are ultimately responsible for their own personal integrity, and personal integrity is clearly more important than securing wealth, power, security, prestige, etc. for oneself or one’s family.

I’m all for tempering popular Western notions of personal agency and “free” will with healthy doses of biology and family psychology. An unbalanced emphasis on personal agency too often results in judgments lacking in compassion, and besides, biology and nurture matter. But not to the point of completely dissolving choice and will. We can make real choices, and our choices can make a real difference. Sure, things in life happen beyond our control and we aren’t all dealt the same cards at birth, but acknowledging that is a far cry from adopting a fatalistic approach to life.

Pronounced: rén shān rén hǎi
Literally: person mountain person sea
Means: to be extremely crowded; a huge crowd.

(this is an old post from when we were teaching in Taiwan that never made it to the blog, but it’s kind of funny, so here it is.)

Funny (and slightly disturbing) experience today. A friend took us around to help with some errands that require Mandarin: wiring money, exchanging money, and getting vaccinations. We had to exchange several thousand dollars. He said the bank’s exchange rates weren’t that great today and he knew a better place to exchange the money.

Ok.

So we went to this popular, busy shopping district kind of like a big outdoor mall. There was an eyewear store. Our friend walks in with two white people in tow and says in Mandarin to the lady at the counter, “I have $300,000 I need to exchange” (that’s about $9k US). A woman immediately goes to stand lookout at the store entrance. Two guys appear from the back as ‘security’ (later he told us they thought he’d said $3,000,000 – that’s $91k US!). They directed us to a set of stairs going down at the back of the store in the corner. Halfway down at the landing there was a big Chinese dragon relief covering the wall, just like in a kung-fu movie. In the basement there were several unmarked doors. A woman standing in one doorway pointed us to another door behind which was a cashier counter. Turns out their exchange rate was the same as the bank’s. I suggested we go back to the bank then, since it’s the same rate and, um, legal. So back up past the big dragon relief and out past the eyewear.

Apparently this sort of thing is like driving 8km over the speed limit back home, from the way he described it. And these places are everywhere (our friend knew of several just in that area). And, for those of you who may or may not be interested, if you ever needed to launder money, this is the place you’d go. Good to know!

“…with Chinese characteristics” is a phrase used when China takes something (like socialism) and changes it to better suit China. Or, when the changes are so drastic that the thing actually becomes something else, “…with Chinese characteristics” is used to refer to the blatant incongruities between what a thing is labeled and what it really is. It was originally coined by Deng Xiaoping, the great reformer of the 80′s who is usually given much of the credit for China’s current economic progress due to his firm preference for economic pragmatism over political ideology. He’s the one who famously said, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice,” which is a very Chinese way of saying, “We’re going to make money in this economy whether Marx likes it or not,” and they call it “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Now, we’ve mentioned tourons (tourist + moron) before, who until recently were comprised almost exclusively of obnoxious white Westerners oblivious to how rude/embarrassing/patronizing we are when guests in other peoples’ countries. The rest of the world has, for most part, more or less graciously tolerated us in exchange for the tourist dollars.

But now the tables have turned! Or, they’re turning. Mainland China is now sufficiently open with enough people sufficiently rich to send waves of tourists abroad. I have no idea how many (100 million by 2020?), but the numbers will only go up. And like most countries, China’s Foreign Ministry offers free advice to its globe-trotting citizens, some of whom have apparently lost no time in joining the rest of us in becoming total tourons, albeit tourons with Chinese characteristics. This isn’t just Foreign Ministry advice for tourists; it’s Foreign Ministry advice with Chinese characteristics (AP via MSNBC):

“Keep peaceful in public places, don’t talk loud and avoid sticking out,” said the guidelines, seen on the Foreign Ministry’s Web site Tuesday.

“Don’t get involved in other people’s quarrels in public places,” it added, a nod to the Chinese habit of gathering in large crowds to observe or even take part in others’ arguments and fights.

The suggestions also urged Chinese tourists to respect local laws and not to attempt to cut corners or make threats.

“When your legal rights are violated, avoid making things worse and resolve the problem through upright channels, not through extortion or other illegal methods,” the guidelines said.

As incredible as it sounds, resorting to threats and “extortion” or threats and an “unofficial out-of-court settlement” is, by all reports we’ve seen, the preferred method of solving public disputes here (and this actually becomes quite understandable when you start digging into the “whys” behind this preference). We’ve blogged before about certain Chinese cultural preferences regarding how to settle/join in public disputes, after one of our associates learned this the hard way when he and his three small children were involved in an accident. His language teacher had to explain during his next class what he should have done (and how to use the surrounding crowd of spectators to your advantage).

Anyway, we’ve used the phrase “…with Chinese characteristics” before, and we’ll use it again in the future. Now you know what it means.

Everyday around 6pm, we cross this street:

And this isn’t even an intersection. This is only a weeny little taste of the rush hour biking action. Once I figure out how to strap the camera to my head, we’ll get some real bike commute footage that makes this one look like a safety video.

They all look the same
The new students are always given a pack of flash cards that have the teachers’ pictures on them, and they are supposed to memorized all their names. Thing is, all the teachers are Chinese, and to some foreigners who haven’t grown up around a lot of Chinese, Chinese all look pretty similar. They were talking about how hard it was during break time this morning. Plus, Chinese names are hard to remember for foreigners, even with pinyin.

But apparently this goes both ways. I’d heard independently from three different Chinese people this week that to many Chinese, foreigners all look the same! This morning my teacher confirmed it. She said before she started teaching Mandarin to foreigners, she also thought we all looked the same. One person explained that, actually, this is not really true – she can easily distinguish foreign men from foreign women. So, fair is fair.

Morning homework adventure
For an oral homework assignment I had to go find a doctor and ask them what kind of cold medicine was the best and how to take it. I found a pharmacist (I think) and asked her. She gave me a box of Tylenol and told me that I prefer that kind because it’s foreigner medicine and I’m a foreigner (as if it were possible to forget this even for a second in Tianjin. It’s not, by the way.) So I asked her what she takes when she has a cold, and she pulled out a Chinese brand of cold medicine, which she said she likes better because it doesn’t mess with your head like Tylenol does (I’m not totally clear on that last part).

Anyway, on the way to the pharmacy, I took this video while riding on my bike (it was about 10:30am, so rush hour was done). Turn up your sound:

Lots of older men have birds in identical looking cages with blue covers. There’s a post coming on those, once I get some good video of how they “exercise” their birds.

To kick off our second semester of Mandarin school, here’s a post about a post about “measure words.” If you’re learning Chinese, this is funny. If you’re not… maybe it’s interesting.

I bring it up mostly because the funny 老外 at LaowaiChinese.net does a great job of introducing Chinese measure words (here’s a helpful list), and has a funny post speculating on their origins. Why does Chinese have measure words?

Maybe the cave men were sitting around and they had a conversation like this:

Zhang Thor: Hey look! Big animal coming!

Li Ugg: What’s it called?

Thor: Me not know.

Ugg: Is it “long thin” kind?

Thor: No it’s “big sharp” kind.

Ugg: Oh. We should kill. Eat. Good.

Thor: Dui dui dui. Give me weapon.

Ugg: Which one?

Thor: Me not care.

Ugg: You want “small round” or “long pointy?”

Thor: “Long pointy.”

If you’re learning Chinese, then you already know that Chinese nouns have “measure words” that go before them. You can’t say “one cat”; you have to say (overly literal here) “one zhī cat.” Zhī is a common measure word for animals, but not all animals. Snakes are long skinny things, so you say “three tiáo snake” (three snakes) and “this tiáo road” (this road), since roads also count in the long and skinny category (along with fish, pants, and bread). In English we sort of have measure words, but not in the same way: one pile of paper, three bags of groceries, a piece of cake – and we don’t require measure words for everything.

So why does Chinese have measure words?

… perhaps homonyms are to blame …

A: Hey I’m in the market for a new “ma.”

B: What?! What’s wrong with your current mother?

A: No not “yi ge ma,”* stupid. “yi PI ma.”**

B: Oh, why didn’t you say so! We’ve got these measure words, everyone’s life would be better if you’d just USE them.

A: Maybe if we add tones to our language. That would help too…

It’s worth a click, for the chuckles and the information. We’re in the first week of the semester, and it looks like it’s gonna be good.
———
* one mother
** one horse

Today we were stranded with some friends in a little pagoda on top of a hill in a park during a sudden mid-afternoon rain and hail storm. We were there for a picnic lunch. But after waiting for too long and not staying all that dry anyway because of the wind despite the one picnic blanket we had wrapped around all of us, we decided to just walk through the rain to the opposite corner of the park where we’d chained the bikes. We got soaked, but it wasn’t too terribly cold, and home was just a 5 minute bike ride away. It got interesting when we arrived at the bikes.

We stood under the entrance gate and watched brown waves from buses and cars creep into the park like a swiftly rising tide. It was getting deeper where we were standing. Seeing as how there was no point in waiting, we sloshed a few steps to the bikes and got on. The problem was, the water was so high and so thick that we couldn’t tell the sidewalk from the road, or see any lines, potholes, or manholes. It smelled a bit like sewage. We tried to find a sidewalk to ride on, where we figured the water wouldn’t be as deep, but we couldn’t tell where the curbs were. Figuring this was not the best day to fall off our bikes, we just pedaled on the road, hoping not to land in a manhole-cover-less manhole. Our feet were submerged in what looked like thick tea with floaties in it, except for at the top of the pedal rotation. Oddly, there was still a good deal of traffic, and buses pushed waves higher up our legs. It was actually really funny. There were plenty of other people on bikes in the same predicament we were – parents and kids and stuff – and everyone was smiling and laughing and totally soaked.

Our friend Achim, who took a bus instead of a bike, took this video on the way home. The woman you see is how we were, only we stayed on our bikes!

I wish I’d taken pictures, but all this time it was still raining and the camera was stuffed in the middle of whatever is inside Jessica’s purse, which was inside my shirt – the best we could do at the time, since everything else was soaked. Besides, if you stopped pedaling you’d have to put your foot down.

By the time got home, changed, and left again for a friend’s good-bye party, the rain was done and the water was draining.

Assuming, of course, that the world actually survives this century:

When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take one another seriously.

A little rosy, perhaps – I would put the quote in this century and change the last bit to: “… when some of the peoples of the world were forced to take one another seriously” – but I still like it.

One anthropologist we’ve read considers the “global village” idea, which – you may have noticed – is part of our blog’s tagline, to be misleading and naive.

Societies may appear to be growing similar as politics, products, technologies, Wal-Mart, Coke, Nike, Pokemon, and (please spare us) Hello Kitty spread around the globe. But meanings, worldview assumptions, thought processes… these things don’t change nearly as fast or as easily. Writing in 1996, this author points out that we often speak of Japan as a “Westernized” nation, but the deeper and more important cultural differences remain vast.

We have geographic proximity; international urban centres boast diverse populations, and advances in travel and communication make every corner of the globe easily accessible. But this does not mean we are living together the same world; such an assumption seems, according to him, “the height of naiveness.” In our languages and worldview differences, we in effect participate in separate realities at the deepest levels; the close physical proximity of our homes and products doesn’t change this fact.

Living in Taiwan and listening to our boss talk about underlying causes for differences in everything from rule of law to driving habits has made me consider this critique more than I would have before arriving in Asia. I still think that the spread of technology and products will continue to have a profound effect on the world’s cultures, including our own. But perhaps it’s less potent and slower than I previously assumed.

Regardless of how poorly people of different cultures understand one another, how separate our ‘thought-worlds’ are, or how little of our selves and others meaningfully transcends the cultural differences as we attempt to share our lives, we must at least still deal with one another’s increasing influence on our lives whether we understand it or not.

The way I see it (thanks for asking), we live in a global village that contains many different worlds, and the sooner we learn to understand one another and communicate, the better (in spite of what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says).