China Hope Live » Cultural perspectives

“You’d better put socks on that baby or else…”

Joel — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:30:13 +0000

“…she’ll get diarrhea.”

That’s right: diarrhea. :)

(This message brought to you this evening by our friendly Tianjin neighbourhood dumpling ladies and traditional Chinese medicine.)

More about free Chinese advice and ‘compliments’:

More about having a foreign baby in China:

More about Chinese medicine:

Worshiping your boss in a kiss-up/kick-down society

Joel — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:20:18 +0000

China is sometimes described as a “kiss-up/kick-down society”. Relationships are hierarchical whether you’re at work or not. People often shamelessly kiss-up to those above them (like bosses) while treating the people below them like their dirt. The disregard and lack of even basic consideration for those underneath is often shocking. There’s an idiom about being the “grandpa” and the “grandson” in a Chinese company, expressing how higher-ups have almost absolute power over their underlings. I’ve heard it said that the average Chinese office has more drama than Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

This month’s edition of Tianjin’s expat magazine has a great little anecdote that reflects this aspect of Chinese society. It’s from an article on how “to be a happy evergreen tree in working world” (obviously not written by a foreigner), where a senior manager gives advice to junior employees who complain that their bosses are “exploiting people and destroying work-life balance”:

Tip #3: Love your boss unconditionally
It doesn’t matter how you feel about your boss’s work ability or personality… In front of someone who has longer career life than you, all you need to do is to worship him and try to love him. Therefore you can feel what he feels; see what he sees from a higher level. Finally, you might be as successfully as he is. So why not?

One day I’m going to blog about our company’s annual banquet (年会), because it’s creepily like a church service for worshiping the boss. But I need this job, so that post will have to wait! :)

The Untranslatable (TCM translation fail)

Joel — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:04:31 +0000

So I unwisely agreed to “translate” an interview with a Chinese doctor for the magazine this month. Translating simple Chinese about normal everyday topics — fine, no problem, especially with dictionary tools and Chinese coworkers on hand. But a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine talking TCM-speak about how to stay healthy in the summer? Not a chance. Half of what he said doesn’t make one lick of sense in English and they weren’t paying me near enough to justify sweating too much over it anyway. But I want to share one section because it’s a great example of how translation involves much more than words and grammar; translation involves culture, and culturally-defined and culture-bound ideas.

No matter how skilled the linguist is (and I’m not claiming to be skilled or a linguist… or a translator, for that matter), some things simply will not make sense in another language; some things cannot be conveyed outside their native cultural-linguistic context. In order to make the translation have any actual meaning that approximates that of the original, you’d have write paragraphs for each sentence explaining the underlying philosophical assumptions and worldview differences. And even the long explanations still don’t make much sense because they’re talking outside of the worldview of the language that they’re written in.

Here’s part of what I translated:

On Summer Nights Avoid the Wind to Avoid the “Arrows”
Cool wind blowing on summer nights and feels really comfortable, making the night not as hard to bear. Thus, a lot of people sleep with the windows open, and even move their beds to the hallway where it’s drafty. A proverb says, “On summer nights avoid the wind to avoid the arrows”; pathogenic wind can cause many kinds of ailments. In the summer the body’s skin pores expand, and after we fall asleep our immune resistance drops. Additionally, in the latter half of the night the wind is colder, and at this time it’s extremely easy for the body to suffer an invasion of pathogenic wind. Getting wind can lead to a heat cold, facial paralysis, joint pain, sciatic nerve pain, shoulder inflammation, stomach pain, diarrhea, etc. Therefore one should enjoy the cool air in limited amounts and put a blanked over one’s abdomen before sleeping. It’s inadvisable to choose to stay in a drafty room, and one can’t just spread a summer sleeping mat and sleep on a cement floor.

Here’s the Chinese:

夏夜避风如避箭
夏天夜里刮着清爽的风，感觉非常舒适，夜晚也变得不那么难熬了。于是不少人都开窗睡觉，还有的把床搬到居室的过道风口处。俗话说“夏夜避风如避箭”，风邪能引起多种疾病。夏季人体皮肤汗孔张开，入睡后抵抗力下降，加之后半夜的风会更凉，人体此时极易遭受风邪的侵袭。受了风邪，可引发热伤风、面瘫、关节痛、坐骨神经痛、肩周炎、腹痛、腹泻等疾病。因此，纳凉应有节有度，睡前应用一条毛巾被盖好腹部，在室内不宜选择过堂风口之处，不能只铺一张凉席就睡在水泥地上。

“Wind” in Chinese medicine, for example, is very different from what we think of when we say wind in English. Wind (English) still counts as “wind” (TCM), but not vice versa. “Pathogenic wind” and capitalizing “Wind” are two attempts I’ve seen to indicate TCM’s Wind in English. That’s how it goes with much of TCM’s terminology. For example, here’s how the book for explaining TCM to Westerns puts it:

Obviously, the Blood of Chinese medical terminology is not the same as what the West calls blood. Although it is sometimes identifiable with the red fluid of biomedicine, its characteristics and functions are not so identifiable.
…
Blood moves primarily through the Blood Vessels, but also through the Meridians. Chinese medicine does not make a clear distinction between Blood Vessels and Meridians. The Chinese rarely concern themselves about precise inner physical locations — the Stomach Qi “goes upward,” or the Blood “circulates,” but it is seldom entirely clear what internal paths they travel or where, precisely, they go. The physical pathway is less important than the function. This tendency not to fix sites for things is contrary to the Western approach, but it is inevitable with Chinese medical theorizing, which emphasizes process over fixed entities.

We just now had a big discussion in the office with my Chinese coworkers trying to figure out how to translate what I’ve rendered “heat cold” (热伤风) — they looked up a bunch of dictionaries and discussed it and came back with nothing (in TCM, the name of the cold depends on how it is caused, so summer colds and winter colds are different). But reading this interview and hearing my coworkers explain how you get “heat colds” makes me realize that there’s a whole lot more to Chinese people’s apparent fear of good air conditioning than just wanting to save a few bucks.

The article assignment was to give foreigners tips from traditional Chinese medical theory on how to be healthy in the summer. How would you present stuff like the above paragraph to foreigners? What other concepts have you found that are really hard to convey in another language?

Other traditional Chinese medicine stuff:

Desperate Chinese Housewives

Joel — Sun, 30 May 2010 12:26:17 +0000

One of my students, mid-40′s, manager, mom to an elementary aged son, this week during class:

“I like watching Desperate Housewives. I used to think Americans are all selfish and don’t care about others. But now I think they do care about others because the wives in Desperate Housewives always help each other.”

“Really? But you know the stuff on T.V. isn’t always real.”

“Of course, but I think Desperate Housewives is like the real America. Americans are like this.”

The Giving Tree, according to Chinese EFL students

Joel — Tue, 18 May 2010 03:49:25 +0000

Long, long ago in course called Spiritual Development of Children, our prof criticized The Giving Tree for promoting unhealthy male-female relationships. The tree is female, and in relationship to the male just gives and gives and gives until she/it has nothing left to give but a stump for the old man to sit on, while the male just takes and takes and takes until he’s too old to take anything else. I can see her point, but hopefully having this book on our bookshelf when we were kids hasn’t turned me into calloused selfish misogynist. ;) As a kid I can remember thinking that the tree was really nice, though I wasn’t sure what kind of relationship it was supposed to represent. Anyway, one of our students did a presentation on The Giving Tree this week for an English competition, and I thought her interpretation of the story was interesting. (You can watch the story, read by author Shel Silverstein, here or below.)

My student didn’t know that it was a well-known English children’s book. The story, unattributed and in various forms with various titles, is apparently floating around the Chinese internet (she used this version, called “Boy and Tree Story”). In her English version for the performance, the boy sells the tree’s apples to buy toys, chops off the branches to build a house, chops down the trunk to build a boat so he can go sailing and relax, and finally as an old man returns to sit on the stump, where he smiles with tears in his eyes. She acted out the story with some classmates and then gave this speech:

This is a story of everyone. The tree likes our parents. When we were young, we loved to play with mom and dad…… When we grown up, we left them, we just came to them when we need something or when we are in trouble. No matter what, parents will always be there and give everything they could to make you happy. You may think the boy is cruel to the tree but that how all of us are treating our parents. Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who are in fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

I thought it was interesting that she saw it as representing child-parent relationships. It makes sense, but as a kid growing up with this book I’d never thought of the story in that way. Coincidentally, a different student in an unrelated class told me about “gnawing the old” (啃老), which, according to her, refers to the way adult children still depend on their parents. The image on the right is one that came up when I googled the Chinese term.

(P.S. — I don’t understand why Chinese EFL students insist on including platitudes or vaguely profound inspirational sayings in everything, but that last line of her speech is very typical. So was playing Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up.”) YouTube video below:

“So, how much did you donate?”

Joel — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:40:06 +0000

Donating money is a public thing in China — like a big group peer-pressure exercise. In your company, they might send an e-mail around listing everyone’s name and how much they donated. In neighbourhoods like ours, they’ll put up big posters by the main entrance with the names of residents who’ve donated and how much (and maybe whether or not they’re a Party member). Though there’s a common public standard for how much you should donate, you can’t donate too much or you’ll make other people look bad. For example, you wouldn’t want to publicly donate more than the company boss. Sometimes it goes beyond peer-pressure to coercion:

A few days ago a public servant friend said that, for the Wenchuan earthquake last time, at least the employees had been “mobilized” to donate; this time they simply had our salaries docked. The boss hypocritically notified everyone: Whoever doesn’t wish to donate, come talk to me in my office. Who dares to go to his office and say “I’m not willing to donate”? Unless one doesn’t wish to live! [from Yushu Earthquake Donation: Compassion or Tyranny?]

Our first encounter with this quirky (to us) practice of very public charity was after the Sichuan earthquake, when neighbours asked me point-blank home much we’d donated.

“For Qīnghǎi Yùshù Disaster Area Donation Name List”
为青海玉树灾区捐款名单
wèi qīnghǎi yùshù zāiqū juānkuǎn míngdān

This time we decided to donate through our neighbourhood committee rather than through our N.G.O. Although the money would be better accounted for with our NGO (there’s controversy over what happened to large amounts of the Sichuan earthquake donations – see here, here, here and here) and we have a closer personal connection to how it would be used, this time we wanted to try a more local approach and we were curious to see how it would go over. Plus it’d be kind of funny to see our names up on the poster by the front gate.

If you haven’t heard, there was another big earthquake in which thousands of people died, this time in Yùshù, Qīnghǎi (青海玉树). See these links for more photos and controversy:

Related stuff on the blog: