Pronounced: náná lóng
Means: (1) to fix a bike wheel by making it round/straight again.
(2) to “teach someone a lesson” or “fix somebody’s wagon” or “straighten somebody out” — it’s Tianjin trash talk before a fight: “Step outside and I’ll straighten your wheel!” “出去，我给你拿拿龙！”
(Click the image for source.)
See Chinese Openings, about one Chinese city’s official memorial to victims of the CR:
That’s a hopeful sign. I spent too long covering the bloody wars in the Balkans not to believe that history denied can devour you.
From Geremie R. Barmé, Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Professor of Chinese History, at The China Beat: China’s Promise
Last night, 7:23, according to the monitoring equipment installed in the U.S. embassy in Beijing:
What “500″ means:
150+ = “Unhealthy”, 200+ = “Very Unhealthy”, 300+ = “Hazardous”. So what are we supposed to call it when it maxes out the scale?
Of course, you might be wondering what the Ministry of Environmental Protection was reporting at the same time:
The Chinese version site had the same:
As we couldn’t see down the street today, I don’t wonder who’s numbers are more accurate. However, three things you need to know about comparing pollution numbers:
On days like this you can smell it as soon as you open the front door and see it just by looking across the street.
We first found these sites via MyHealth Beijing. Click the screen shots to view the source pages. See the links below for some pollution photos.
Related:
A fun, though admittedly overgeneralized, essay by a Chinese living in the U.S. that uses Chinese food to illustrate Chinese thinking: Learning about the Chinese Mind through Chinese Food
This would still be really funny even if it wasn’t actually being used for the Shanghai World Expo.
Pronounced: luǒ hūn
Literally: “naked marriage”
Means: Getting married without first owning a house and a car. For China’s emerging urban middle classrelatively privileged urbanites, this is a big deal. (See CCTV’s People have mixed attitudes to “naked” marriage).
Have you ever had parents, siblings, friends, etc. visit you in China after you’d been here a while, and it was their first time in China? Did you tell them anything beforehand? How did it go?
“Normal”
I had a weird experience this week while I was looking out the window. It was a typical busy street scene and I wasn’t really paying attention; mundane daily Tianjin’s increasingly soulless cityscape has long ceased interesting me. But then I suddenly realized my parents are coming — it’s their first trip to China. I looked out the window again and tried to identify all the things that would be new or different for them, the things I would have noticed during our first semester and maybe even photographed. I wasn’t sure I could remember them all, and it’s a strange feeling to suddenly realize your idea of normal is drastically changed.
Comfort Zone WMD
Had a similar experience again last night. I was going through photos that two of my photographically-gifted American friends took of our other friends’ wedding. They have a good eye for photos and had taken entertaining street shots around the church, which is in an older, not yet totally redeveloped neighbuorhood. But then right in with all the interesting photos was a shot of the women’s bathroom at the church. I thought, ‘what’s this doing in here?’ and completely failed to see the significance of the photo. No interesting angles, patterns, colours, people, activity, or funny signage. Just a quick shot of the can.
And then I realized why it caught their eye. And then I thought about my parents coming. And then I remembered the first time (and the second time) that I encountered this kind of old school Chinese bathroom and the unbidden incomprehension/shock/horror/so-bad-I-have-to-look-car-wreck-feeling that instantly raises your pulse. The communal, “privacy-what’s-that?” old school Chinese public washroom has got to be the most effective method ever devised for mortifying privacy-loving Westerners. It’s not like eating chicken feet or double-dipping your chopsticks in a communal plate or learning to use a squatty potty — those things merely stretch Westerners’ comfort zones, and stretching your comfort zone is a good thing. But a tiny room with an open, cramped row of squatty potties where people will be brushing past you or asking you what country you’re from while you’re in the middle of doing your business? That’s not “stretching” our comfort zones; it’s dropping a WMD on our comfort zones.
I’m not a big fan of these things and I don’t mind avoiding them, but it’s strange to realize I looked right at a comfort zone WMD and didn’t even notice.
(P.S. Mom and Dad — most bathrooms in Tianjin city aren’t like this; you won’t get stuck having to use one… probably. Just don’t be surprised when people don’t bother to close their stall door… assuming there’s a stall… with doors.)
(P.P.S. If you didn’t already know, the cross-cultural potty dispute goes both ways. A lot of Mainlanders feel that Western-style sit down toilets are a “comfort zone WMD” because even the idea of a sit down toilet is so appallingly unsanitary they can hardly believe we would even consider inventing sit down toilets. We have Chinese friends who refuse to use them, even in peoples’ homes.)
The daily raising and lowering of the flag at Tiananmen is a popular domestic tourist attraction, complete with goose-stepping: In China’s Tiananmen Square, patriotism snaps in the wind
A written exchange about the potential, or lack thereof, of Confucianism as the ideological foundation of a modern China: Exchanges: Reconciling Confucianism and Socialism?
We both write, but Jessica only writes when I bribe her. See all of her posts here.
Pronounced: guāzǐ liǎn
Means: Melon-seed Face. One of the ideal Chinese face shapes.
Albert at Laowai Chinese introduces two ideal and two undesirable Chinese face shapes: The Four Faces of Chinese People (women, really)
- 2012/03/22
Eating Bitterness: an intro to the unprecedented Chinese migrant worker phenomenon
If you're unfamiliar with the urban migrant phenomenon in China -- as in, the people who make the stuff you buy and their lives -- then China’s Urban Immigrants: A Diet of Bitterness is a fine overview with lots of links for further reading.
"Chinese metropolises are now home to an estimated 200 million rural-to-urban migrants . . . who occupy a precarious place in the urban hierarchy: while urbanites appreciate their labor, they are less enthusiastic about the migrants’ presence in their cities."
For more on this topic you can browse our Migrant Workers category, or if you like documentaries, see these reviews of two good documentaries on migrant workers:
- 2012/05/10
Chairman Mao enshrined -- literally
When one of my young, very privileged Party-family students passionately told me, "Chairman Mao is like a god to us!" I understood he meant it as a simile. And the god metaphor is common when discussing Mao and his Cultural Revolution personality cult. But as it turns out, in some incredible irony, some other Chinese mean it literally. I heard about this before, but this is the first time I've found pictures -- Mao actually enshrined in a local temple: Mao Temple in China – Chairman Mao Becomes Local God.
For more about Mao and the Mao Era, you can browse these topics:
- 2012/05/08
A deeper look into the dynamics of living with Chinese propaganda
Two insightful posts from Seeing Red in China, which is probably my current favourite China blog, about living in an aggressively and explicitly propagandized environment, and how Chinese try to deal with it. The propaganda still works, but in ways different than us foreigners probably tend to assume. Without further ado:
I tell [my daughter] that she must not be afraid to take a clear moral stand. “If you see someone is being bullied,” I said, “speak up for that person.” “Be the keeper of the good.” [But] Chinese parents would have to think twice, three times, or even lose sleep, if they are to instill these values in their children, because these qualities won’t serve them very well in the Chinese society.
We've written lots on propaganda, mostly the Chinese kind, including translations of the propaganda we've encounter in China. You can find it all in our Propaganda category.
- 2012/05/06
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