We needed closure. We returned to Tianjin’s “Milky Way Plaza” (银河广场 / yínhé guǎngchǎng) for the Closing Ceremonies. The Olympics was fun but finally over; maybe now China would started getting back to “normal.”

The crowd was larger than it was for the Olympic matches shown nightly on the big screen, but smaller and less keyed up than at the Opening Ceremony. We were a slightly bigger group of foreigners this time, plus we had Chinese flag, so we attracted more attention than last time. We didn’t take any of these photos. Click them to see them big size.

Getting famous
Local media was running around filming and interviewing people. I think our flag is what really drew them over. They asked Greg, the only blond one in our group, some standard questions about his impressions of China and Olympics. The thing is, he’s starting his first semester of Chinese next week and he’d only just arrived in town a few days ago for orientation. So he couldn’t do the interview in Chinese and hadn’t seen any of the Olympics. But that didn’t faze him (he’s a smooth cucumber); he gave them the stock answers to their stock questions (city’s beautiful, the people are wonderful, the Olympics impressive, etc.). The reporter either went away happy, or left asking himself a very important question (“Why do foreigners always feel they need to give us polite, stock answers?”) Before the Ceremony a handful of people came by to take our photo. Some had fancy cameras but they didn’t look like media types.

Afterward we all posed behind the flag for our own photos, and that’s when people really started taking pictures. Grandparents and parents would send their kids to run and pose with us and the flag. It was cute, funny, and friendly. People were nice about it. This few seconds of video shows Greg getting interviewed and gives you a sense of the crowd that night:

The Closing Ceremony… what was all that about?
When London started their 8 minutes with a video intro and we started pointing out all the cultural allusions, that’s when I suddenly realized I hadn’t understood anything from the preceding hour or so. Some of the satirical interpretations from the Chinese internet are pretty funny (see especially Wu Yan’s Why did I like the closing ceremony better?), but I have no idea what it was supposed to mean.

So I think this, along with our Olympics photo gallery, is finally the end of our Olympic stuff. It was fun and interesting, but it’ll be nice to talk about something else!

There are a lot of die hard soccer fans on the Mainland. And they are so disgusted with their national men’s team that they remixed the Olympic theme song and music video, “Beijing Welcomes You” (北京欢迎你) and created the merciless “National Soccer Team Welcomes You” (国足欢迎你) (music video with English subtitles). The Chinese subtitle version is full of embarrassing photos and video footage. The criticism got so bad that apparently the Chinese authorities are stepping in and demanding an end to verbal abuse.

Blogger at BlackandWhiteCat.org compares the original NYT review of the Olympics to its “translated” version in the Beijing Evening News line by line, exposing multiple changes that go way beyond mere translation.
 
So what did the foreigners think of it all? The “western media” are sometimes accused of prejudice against China, focusing too much on the negative and ignoring the positive. Not so Charles McGrath of the New York Times who had nothing bad at all to say about the Beijing Olympics. At least he didn’t have anything bad to say after the Beijing Evening News had got through translating and improving his work…

When it comes to relationships with Chinese, one of the biggest annoyances for Westerners is all the lying, evasion, indirectness, and general untrustworthiness of what is literally said. When it comes to relationships with foreigners, one of the biggest annoyances for Chinese is being accused of lying. I’ve written before on Chinese “lying” at the level of personal relationships, and now the academic group blog Frog In A Well takes a wider cultural and societal view of Chinese “lying” in light of the Olympics: Lies, Damn Lies, and Chinese “Lies That Bind”

Pronounced: bì mù shì
Means: Closing Ceremony

I wrote but didn’t post the rest of Chinese landlord series after Round 2 because it wasn’t that interesting until today. Rounds 3-5 below were written over the last few months. Round 5.5 happened today.

Chinese Landlords – Round five-and-a-half

After Round 5, the first thing we did was put the word out in our neighbourhood that we needed to move and were looking to rent an apartment, in the neighbourhood if at all possible. “Grandpa Liu,” our first floor neighbour who’s looked out for us in the past, just this afternoon called Jessica over for a hushed conversation outside our stairwell. Apparently he’s been waiting to bump into me for a couple days. Our neighbours rule.

Grandpa Liu: “I hear you guys are looking for an apartment.”
Jessica: “Yeah, the landlord said they want to move back into our apartment.”
Grandpa Liu: “Not necessarily.”
Jessica: “Oh yeah I know. Maybe it’s just an excuse” (to get us out).
Grandpa Liu: “No, it’s just that all the prices in this neighbourhood have gotten higher.”
Jessica: “Oh really?”
Grandpa Liu: “Yeah, and she’s too embarrassed to tell you that she’d like more rent.” (Especially after Rounds 1-5.)
Jessica: “I don’t know, she sounded pretty certain that she wants us out.”
Mr. Liu asks how much we’re paying for rent (1100元 = $168).
Grandpa Liu: “I think you should phone her and offer her another 200 ($30) or 300 kuai ($46). The cheapest you’re gonna get in this neighbourhood now is 1400 ($215) or 1500 ($230) for a two-bedroom.”
Jessica: “Oh, so that’s how it is…”
Grandpa Liu: “Well unless you want to move, you at least ought to give it a shot, because you probably won’t find a cheaper place and moving’s a lot of trouble. So give it a try!”
Jessica thanked him for his help and said she appreciated him telling us because we don’t always know how things work…
Jessica: “…because in America if the landlord says they want you out, they really want you out.”
Grandpa Liu: “Oh, not here. She’s just too embarrassed and can’t directly ask you. We Asians can’t be that direct. In this aspect we’re not so good.”

Chinese Landlords – Round 5

Welcome the Olympics, now get out!
A few days ago I come home from the library around 5:45, and Jessica has this look on her face like she has to tell me some news I’m really not going to like (did she drop the laptop? Lose something expensive?). I’m instantly bracing myself for the bad news. Turns out our Chinese landlord Auntie Wang had phoned around 3:30pm. She cheerfully informed Jessica the we have to move out. They’ll even buy out the rest of our contract if we can leave sooner than October 15.

We’re glad they’re willing to honour the contract, and that gives us plenty of time to look. Losing the apartment is definitely nothing to cry over, but we really want to stay in the neighbourhood. I’ve already asked around some neighbours and they have some places to show us. It complicated our plans slightly (we’re planning to spend Chinese New Years in Canada), but big deal.

Negotiating Rent in Chinglish – Rounds 3-4

Round 4
We now pay $15 dollars more per month than we did last year. It’s more or less fair; prices on everything are going up, especially housing. And they had to work for it, though, with repeat trips to fix things, multiple phone calls with repairmen, and several hours doing repairs himself. It took extra long because his wife, Auntie Wang, wouldn’t let him spend one kuai more than he absolutely needed to, and that meant fixing a lot of stuff the hard, slow way. The value of agreeing to pay after stuff gets fixed! Anyway, they’re done fixing, we paid, and I assume we’ll just leave one another alone until it’s time to pay again, or something major breaks. In the meantime, we just collect fixing fees from local repairman and save them for the next time we pay rent.

Round 3
Today the landlords came over. Everyone was happy and nice. They saw the problems in the apartment, agreed to fix most of them (more than we ever expected). We showed them the stuff we’ve fixed ourselves over the last year and told us to just keep doing that and they’ll pay us for it (way more convenient for us, more stuff gets fixed this way, and Jessica thinks it’s sexy when her husband fixes things). They asked if we wanted to pay now or later, and weren’t real pushy when we said we’d pay after the stuff was fixed.

Altogether the stuff they’ve already agreed to fix is a few hundred kuai – that means the extra we’re paying every month now will actually go into the apartment for the first few months.

“In my 20 years living in the US, one big cultural pity is that I rarely laugh at English jokes. I’m sure those of you “foreigners” who have moved to China have the same problem. A translated joke is often even worse – we’ll all be lost in translation. Nonetheless, lets try a few here.”

In translation: Over the weekend, I went back to the family home. I did not anticipate that the hometown folks would be so enthusiastic about the Olympics. The conversations with my peasant father and uncles inevitably drift to the Olympics …
 
So it would seem that the thinking of the home folks is still stuck in the pre-reform days. Please pardon me for thinking so and I have no prejudice. I am only citing the examples of my relatives — their views are very much dichotomized — things are either good or bad; it is either patriotic or not; one is either a winner or a loser …
 
They speak about Chairman Mao, Premier Zhou, Deng Xiaoping and the list of succeeding leaders, and their views never change. They begin with these views as the foundation, and they extend them to everything else including Liu Xiang, Lang Ping and the American women’s volleyball team.

Some of these are pretty sarcastic (in translation): “The scaffold for a firefighters’ drill set up center-stage was pretty interesting, with the firefighters whooshing down the lines and then crawling back up again. A victory for fire prevention education puts the whole country at ease.”
 
“I especially liked the frame that stood in the center… it conveys that Beijing has always been swiftly-developing city, always a giant construction site!”

Many believe it’s virtually impossible to “become Chinese” if you aren’t one already. This is frustrating for foreigners of other ethnicity who want to identify and for North Americans and Europeans with Chinese ethnicity who are unable to fully realize their roots. Thankfully, Canada has much lower standards (note: some mild language):

“Son! Tonight… we will become Canadians!”

You can read a short bit on how we understand “fitting in” in China here.