Why China’s census is doomed to failure
It’s nice to know that even native Chinese speakers can have issues with tones. Here’s a Chinese joke that’s simple enough for first-year language students to get (and good practice!), and demonstrates what can happen when you don’t get your tones right (via John at Sinosplice — see his blog post for the English translation).

人口普查员： “请问您家里是几口人？”
“是一口人。”
“十一口？”
“不是十一口，而是一口人。”
“二十一口？”
“不是二十一口，其实一口人。”
“七十一口？不会吧？”
“ 不是七十一口，就是一口人！”
“ 九十一口？”
“ 对，就是一口人。”

And remember, kids, some tones change when spoken in combination. In this case 一口 is pronounced “yì kǒu”, 几口 is pronounced “jí kǒu”, 不是 is pronounced “bú shì” and 不会 is “bú huì”.

Haha, I wonder how much China’s tonal languages will skew the census data.

We count!
The census people have made a few trips to our apartment already for preregistering and triple-checking and stuff like that. Day before yesterday they finally came with the actual questions, wanting to know our names, birth dates, purpose in China, amount of time in China, education level and nationalities. They were nice. Chinese folks, of course, get a different, longer set of questions. All the information we gave ‘they’ already have; I’m not sure why they don’t just go check at the visa records. Other people we know, however, are taking advantage of the census to get their second (and in one case, third) child registered without having to pay the fine.

Anyway, census signage has been up around town for a while now. Here’s the one in our neighbourhood:

“Each citizen is a part of the census”
每个公民都是人口普查一分子
měigè gōngmín dōu shì rénkǒu pǔchá yī fènzǐ

They have to emphasize that everyone counts because there are large segments of the population who are inclined to avoid being counted, especially technically-illegal migrant workers and their children, and people who have violated the One Child Policy by having more than one child. Apparently the government has said that there won’t be any negative consequences for these kinds of people — obviously they need to be counted for the government to have an accurate idea of the population — but people aren’t necessarily so trusting.

Didn’t set out to get punctured today. I successfully avoided acupuncture for three years in China, but I suppose it was just a matter of time before someone stuck me. Here’s how it happened.

I’m waiting outside the gym this morning with a small crowd of people. The worker has forgotten their key, and at this point they’re half an hour late opening up. A guy starts chatting with me to kill time. Turns out he’s a Chinese traditional medicine doctor from Korea. I mention that my back has been really messed up lately and that’s why I’ve skipped my last three workouts. So he grabs my wrist and feels my pulse, as traditional Chinese doctors always do. Then he does the same with my other hand.

Then he starts rummaging around in his gym bag, finally producing a zip-lock bag containing a very fancy flat metal case that looks like the kind of thing many East Asians like to keep their business cards in. I assume he’s going to give me his info so I can visit his clinic. But then he opens the case.

Hey, those aren’t business cards. What is that in there? They’re little packages of… needles? And he’s opening one. Am I gonna let some guy I just met at the gym stick needles in me? Huh, I guess so… After asking which side of my back is sore (left), he grabs my right hand and sticks two needles in my palm, one below my ring finger and one below my thumb. They hurt less than a shot, but the thumb needle gives me a weird feeling for a second, like I can feel the nerve twinge half-way up my forearm. He says my back is sore due to my lungs; apparently my breathing isn’t deep enough or something. (I decide not to bother telling him that shallow breathing is a survival technique practiced by many of us who spend daily time outside in Tianjin.)

He immediately wants to know if my back is still sore. Honesty it’s hard to say; I’d come to the gym that day because my back was feeling almost totally normal anyway after being extremely sore a week ago. I try to give him appreciative, positive feedback without actually lying. Then we stand around chatting for another 20 minutes, with needles in my hand. A Chinese lady sees what’s going on and tries to get him to give her some free treatment, too. It’s been an hour and the gym isn’t open yet. We both have to go. Back down on the first floor he pulls out the needles before we leave the building.

And that’s how I let a nice stranger stick needles in me in China.

I’ve had other, perhaps more exotic, adventures with what for locals are common health care practices. See the links below, or click here to browse all our Chinese medicine posts.

• Tianjin bathhouse guasha: OWW!!!
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Chinese Doctor Visit

Ladies and gentlemen… 看哪！

(Mouseover the underlined Chinese characters once the page has stopped loading.)

Now everywhere on the blog you see underlined Chinese characters, you can mouseover them and get these cool tooltips. No more squinting at tiny print in those annoyingly small yellow rectangles! This is possible thanks to a new, free WordPress plugin from John at Sinosplice.com and Andy at techni-orchid.com called Sinosplice Tooltips.

Since this is such a 超酷 plugin, I’m going to celebrate by sharing a bit from my daughter’s (extensive) collection of Chinese-edition Dr. Seuss:

忽然有这么一天，光肚史尼奇们正像往常一样在沙滩上呆着，无精打采地做着肚皮上冒出颗星的白日梦，一个陌生人驾驶着一辆奇怪的车呼啸而来。

Back-translated overly-literal English:

Suddenly one day, the Bare-Belly Sneetches just like the same as always are staying on the beach, depressingly making bellytop-emerge-a-star daydreams, a stranger driving a strange car whizzes up.

Original English:

Then ONE day, it seems…while the Plain-Belly Sneetches
Where moping and doping alone on the beaches,
Just sitting there wishing their bellies had stars…
A stranger zipped up in the strangest of cars!

On the 30th I had a free talk class of mostly college-age students from richer families. Since it was almost Halloween and a Party organ has listed the rise in superstition as one of seven symptoms of moral decay among government officials, I picked “superstitions” as the topic and asked the students to tell me about common Chinese superstitions. I was interested to see how they defined the term and what things they would consider “superstitious.” We also talked about why people do certain things, about how belief is only one of several reasons a person could have for their “superstitious” behaviours.

I asked about the stuff taxi drivers hang from their rear-view mirrors, and that led the students to produce, from around their necks and wrists, a surprising number of Buddhist trinkets. I see these things all the time, especially the round wood bead bracelets on men, but I was surprised at the number of Buddha (for the girls) and Guanyin (for the guys) necklaces. They said their parents buy them from monks in the temples — one girl said her mom paid 300元 for hers ($45!). The monks perform some sort spiritual service on behalf of the child, and there’s something about power being place in the object or released from the object — their English level wasn’t high enough for me to get the theological details out of them and I suspect they wouldn’t really know anyway. As visions of Martin Luther and medieval Catholic indulgences flitted through my mind, my students said: “But we’re not superstitious. We just have these for good luck. And protection.” I wish I’d had time to press them on that, but it was funny to see how they were serious; they didn’t seem to see any contradiction at all. Apparently we’re working with different definitions of “superstitious”!

“Superstition” is 迷信 (mouseover the Chinese!).
The Chinese term my students were translating as “protection” is 避邪 (“avoid evil”).

I’ve written several times about this kind of thing, including:

• ‘Tis the season for… RED PANTIES!
• Sending Winter Clothes to the Dead in Tianjin
• There’s hell to pay
• Chinese funeral next door