Finally! I just discovered a great site by a family doctor in Beijing (close enough!) with all the info you need — like what to do — about the appalling infuriating horrifying confounding oppressive chewable inexcusable damnable lethal ghastly hideous depressing atrocious illiberal obscene foul nose-burning abominable face-coating heinous lì hai monstrous odious execrable unholy [they-don't-make-strong-enough-negative-descriptors] air pollution. For example:

• How Bad Is It, Really?
• Why you should Close Your Windows at Night
• About air purifiers
• Pollution slideshow
• Using the Beijing Air Quality Index (AQI) (why “200″ is 4x worse than “100″)

Call me a pampered whiny rich foreigner if you want, I don’t care; I want to liiiiiive!

And please, by all means, you’re welcome to add adjectives to my list (but keep it PG!). Sometimes it just feels good to vent to get it off your chest, especially since you can’t vent to get it out of your chest.

I’ll add a photo later if I can bring myself to take one (through tears, no doubt).

Other posts about Tianjin’s indecent pollution:

• Behold the power of China’s weather gods!
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Chewing Tianjin’s Air
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

From the WSJ: “The recent book “Ants Tribe” (蚁族, yizu in Mandarin) about the life of some young people who flock to Beijing after leaving university, depicts the graduates, like ants, as smart but insignificant as individuals, drawing strength from living together in communities.”

Ever wondered about those moody regulations that sometimes matter, sometimes don’t, and other times just want to sound like they matter? Everything from traffic enforcement to visa requirements can shift, depending on regular ‘weather’ cycles.

What a half-hour’s bike ride during Friday morning rush hour can get you in Tianjin:

• People who stared at me: 4
• People who took no notice of me: hundreds
• Red lights: 8/11 (meaning I had to stop for 3)
• Buses I wanted to curse at: all of them, but 4 especially noxious ones in particular
• Groups of migrant construction workers protesting their late wages: 1
• Cars on fire: 1
• Buildings I should be able to see but can’t because of the air pollution: dozens? scores? hundreds?
• Years shaved off my life due to the air pollution: incalculable

Five days a week I bike half an hour one way to work; so 13.2 kilometers total there and back according to google maps. The numbers above are only for the morning commute to work. There really was a car on fire this morning.

Pronounced: gān mā / gān diē
Literally: dry mom / dry dad
Means: godmother / godfather; ‘adoptive’ mother (figuratively). What one of our Chinese friends called our friend Natalie in reference to our daughter (Natalie is the one who invented “派口”).

I like that Chinese people sometimes choose unusual English names or transliterate their names into English (when they can), not because we get to laugh at the occasionally odd results (though that is fun), but because a good Chinglish name often contains some self-expression while still being workable in English (Apple, Moon, Star, Rainbow, etc.); in perhaps an indirect or vague sort of way it expresses part of them and the fact that they’re Chinese and Chinese people do names differently than we do. Why shouldn’t they carve out their own space in the English name landscape? Of course other names, while nice in Chinese, are simply no good in English (Drizzle, Ripple); they’re too strange or silly to actually function as truly usable English names. I’ll let you decide for yourselves which of my current students’ names below have real potential. They’re listed in the order they came to mind:

• AK (yes, like the gun, she picked it on purpose because she likes guns.)
• Falcon (formerly Eagle: he had an annoying coworker named after some other kind of bird in Chinese, Sparrow I think, so for his English name he chose a bird that eats his coworker’s kind of bird.)
• Gaga
• Florra (She wanted to be different, but a bunch of other Chinese women who also wanted to be different already had the idea of using the Spanish word for flower, so she added an r.)
• Enya
• Eack (was supposed to be “Ike”, but somehow he spelled it wrong).
• Kobe
• Bryant
• Carter (we knew a “Spippen” in Taibei).
• Ray (don’t know why she picked this).
• Cherry
• Candy
• Duke
• Evian
• Edword (because he likes words).
• Win (I forget why she said she picked this)
• Queena
• Long (going for “dragon” (龙)? I don’t know.)
• Sharpay
• Coco

(This is exactly why it took me several months before finally settling on a Chinese name.)

Related Posts:

• Choosing a Chinese name – part 5
• Choosing a Chinese name – part 4
• Dragging this out…
• Chinese name suggestions
• Choosing Chinese Names: more dangerous than you think

One of my bathhouse buddies got engaged the day before his birthday, which happens to be Halloween. So for his birthday/engagement party/Halloween we carved Chinese love pumpkins! (and one apple):

The 双喜/喜子 (“double happiness”) one took forEVer. If you’re really sharp, you’ll notice where we messed it up (see real examples here). Since they just got engaged I thought it’d be nice to give them a Chinese love pumpkin, even if I left out a couple strokes. Someone else carved the smaller pumpkin, which says “爱” (love). These little Chinese pumpkins are so hard they’d bounce, not splat. When you flick them with your finger they go “tok tok tok.”

And for the record, Halloween is not All Saints’ Day, no matter what all my students’ Chinese-English dictionaries say (some online ones make this mistake, too). Halloween is the night before All Saints’ Day: 万圣节前夕 wànshèngjié qiánxī (“All Saints’ Day Eve”). So annoying. And if you’re curious, Jack-o-lantern in Chinese is “pumpkin lantern”: 南瓜灯 nánguā dēng.

P.S. – About the title: that’s “Chinese love-pumpkins” as in a kind of pumpkin (adj. n.), not “Chinese love pumpkins” meaning what Chinese people love (subj. v. obj.). I’m not so sure they feel one way or the other about pumpkins…

Pronounced: nán guā dēng
Literally: pumpkin lantern
Means: Jack-o-lantern