Pronounced: měilì dòngrén
Literally: beautiful “frozen” person
Means: a beautiful Chinese woman who wears too few clothes in the winter because she doesn’t want to look fat. Northern Chinese usually wear two or three pairs of pants in the winter, with the extra pants underneath being really thick cotton. These super-thick long-johns make everyone look padded, but that’s how people stay warm.

美丽冻人 is a play off of the more standard term 美丽动人 (pronounced the same)，which describes a woman whose beauty is stunning or “moving” to behold. “Moving” and “frozen” are both pronounced “dòng.”

Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, plastic-y Christmas junk, and wanton consumerism? Can’t get enough. But Baby Jesus? Silent Night? In Tianjin? Good luck.

We just got back from the annual NGO Christmas party. Christmas songs and the Christmas Story were conspicuously absent, unlike years past. This year in Tianjin, if foreigners and locals get together and sing Christmas songs or read the Christmas story at a non-preapproved venue and time, the sky will fall down. Actually getting preapproval would cause the canals to rise up and the garbage mountain to be cast into the artificial TV tower lake, so you can appreciate why preapproval is more of a theoretical possibility than an actual observed phenomenon.

Actually, that’s not exactly how the people of consequence explained it. But instead of getting into it and explaining it all here, I’ll just say that things are noticeably tighter in post-Olympic Tianjin, especially around Christmas. Since we’re the well-behaved kind of foreigners, our Tianjin Christmas is just that much less Christmas-y.

We still had a good time; our friends who were organizing it did a great job, especially with having to scrambled to redo the program at the last minute.

Tomorrow night me and a buddy are hitting the local bath house… Merry Christmas to us! Hopefully fun stories will be forthcoming.

(PS – Comments are closed on this post.)

Someone entered us in the 2008 China Blog Awards. Voting ends on the 31st and the holidays are coming, so now’s about the last change to give us a boost! Please go here and click the little plus (+) sign.

And if you really like clicking plus signs and are feeling particularly magnanimous, you can also vote for these nice people with good China blogs:

• Xinjiang: Far West China
• Frog in a Well wasn’t entered, but they’re good, too.

Greg has some helpful posts about cultural differences he’s been bumping into lately:
- Cultural Differences, Part 3: Hospitality
- Cultural Differences, Part 2: Sympathy
They’re also a good example of why having a Chinese teacher at the ready is so handy!

From the Guardian: How China bought its graduates’ loyalty

The lesson in class this week is about China’s population issues, 马寅初, and the One Child Policy. Many times I’ve heard a Chinese person say:

“中国人太多了！”
Zhōngguórén tài duō le
(There are too many Chinese!)

We told our teacher it kind of makes us uncomfortable when we hear Chinese people say that — first that they would imply that some people are superfluous, and second that they’d have such a negative attitude toward their own race! Sometimes when people say this to me, I object and say things like, “China has a lot of people” or “China’s population is too big” because those phrases feel different from just saying “there are too many Chinese” (so we ought to just get rid of some??). Our teacher listened, and then smiled when she wrote on the board:

“中国，人太多了”
Zhōngguó, rén tài duō le
(In China, there are too/so many people.)

She explained that people were probably meaning the second sentence, but of course when speaking fast (and being heard by a language student) it sounds like they’re saying there are just too many Chinese. It’s one thing to say a county is overpopulated, it’s another thing to say there are too many of a particular race and imply that we’d all be better off if some people hadn’t been born.

Another friend disagrees and says that when Chinese people say this, they really do mean that there are too many Chinese. However both the friend and my teacher thought that the comma makes a difference.

These two signs promoting the One Child Policy and raising daughters are from Happy Forest village:

The one on the left says:

“[...], the One Child Policy depends on everyone”
婚育新风进历家，计划生育靠大家
hūnyù xīn fēng jìn lì jiā, jìhuàshēngyù kào dàjiā

And the one on the right says:

“Establish civilized marriage, nurture a new atmosphere;
Walk the Use-science-and-technology-to-get-rich road”
树文明婚育新风，走科技致富之路
shù wénmíng hūn, yù xīn fēng;
zǒu kējì zhìfù zhī lù

(PS – may not be the best translations in the world!)

Pronounced: jìhuà shēngyù zhèngcè
Literally: planned childbirth policy
Means: the One Child Policy

We went out to the ring road looking for an alleged antique market. If you aren’t with someone who can read Chinese and has an idea of where it is, you won’t find it. It’s a leaky warehouse lined end-to-end with old junk. A single aisle runs down the middle, both sides opening up to different vendors’ junk piles every couple meters. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. It was almost totally deserted when we walked in (it was xiūxi time （休息）, the Chinese siesta). At first glance it looked just like a bunch of old furniture, doors, and paneling, but we uncovered more than a few treasures and oddities tucked away in various corners, shelves, and cabinets.

“Antique” here mostly means “20th century,” even though the shop keepers will tell you otherwise. But things in China “get old fast.” Plus China had a rather interesting 20th century, and the junk piles reflect this.

The shop keepers, who were low-key but friendly (maybe we’d woken them up?), quoted us foreigner prices so we didn’t buy anything, though an old cricket cage, a vintage Mao button, and some old wood-and-bone majiang sets especially caught my eye. For foreigners with a little money to throw around, an interest in modern Chinese history, a non-fear of dirt, or maybe if you just have an artsy streak, this place is worth a visit. I won’t even attempt to catalogue all the interesting stuff we saw, but here are a few photos:

Chinese medicine cabinet:

Litter for carrying brides:

Lunch boxes:

Don’t know what you call this:

There was a surprising amount of old foreign stuff, like a hand-cranked generator and a trombone.

The 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to the bunch of self-interested professional butt-kissers (aka kiss-ups, brown-nosers, toadies, boot-lickers, 马屁精) for their eye-roll inducing paranoia, beyond-ridiculous intolerance, and gutlessly-executed last-minute squashing of totally innocuous Christmas activities joyfully performed (or in this case, not performed) by some of the most pitiable members of Chinese society.

I can’t provide details because this is Tianjin, and they-who-must-not-be-named, and the broken systems they perpetuate, are just that grinchy. Suffice to say that if they were trying to make a bad impression, encourage foreigners to “look down on China,” embarrass a bunch of locals in front of their foreign friends and co-workers and break a bunch of kids’ hearts, then they’re doing a fantastically effective good job.

(PS – I realize, of course, that giving foreigners a good impression is far, far down their personal priority lists. But anyway, now I feel better. ;) )

(PPS – The feelings expressed above don’t reflect our long-term, regular attitude toward these kinds of situations and the people who do them. But occasionally feeling this way is an unavoidable part of living here.)

(PPPS – Comments are closed on this post.)

Shower (洗澡 / xǐ zǎo) is my current favourite Chinese movie. It’s a funny but sad story about an old bathhouse owner, his two sons, and their bathhouse patrons that plays out amidst the rapid changes and upheaval of contemporary urban China. It’s a personal, family-and-neighbourhood-level look at the way life in China is changing in drastic ways.

The movie is full of fun characters and their mundane problems: the old men and their cricket-fighting squabbles, the middle-aged husband using the bathhouse to hide from his wife, the wannabe primadonna with debilitating stage fright who uses the public shower as his personal practice room…

The bathhouse in the movie looks like a slightly fancier version of the one I visited in Tianjin’s Nanshi hutongs, which has since been bulldozed.

My only (very picky) squabble with this movie is that it seems to unnecessarily over-romanticize the way of life that’s rapidly disappearing from China’s major urban centres. Some scenes, like the evening neighbourhood park scenes, are just a little too colourful, tidy, and well-mannered compared to what I’ve seen here. If the director had allowed a few more ragged edges, it would feel just that much more authentic.

There’s plenty of dialogue that intermediate language students could pick up no problem, and the accents aren’t too thick.

Aside from the occasional mooning (mostly old-man butts) and some offensive language during a humourous yelling match between a married couple, this movie is pretty much family-safe.