I can only imagine what these guys must think sometimes.

We’ve been getting eaten alive by mosquitoes the last couple nights. Yesterday I noticed in the neighbourhood by the JHF office, which is also close to the canal, that everyone has big strings of garlic hanging in their windows. I wondered if it was to keep the mosquitoes away. Since I was heading home, I could ask the bike repairing–xiàng qí playing–bái jiǔ drinking–oral homework answering–lǎo wài mocking old men on the corner about it.

On the way in I stopped, said hi. There were about 8 of them sitting around watching one of them work, but not too hard. A toddler was playing with the xiàng qí pieces; I thought maybe I’d found an opponent that was in my own league. I asked them a question, which properly translated to English would sound something like this, not that I was aware at the time:

“Excuse me, can I ask a question? I see some people in their window have lots of curry. Why they have curry in the window?”

8 of them look up with various degrees of amusement and confusion on their faces. The 9th one, the real bike repair man, didn’t stop working; I think he’s given up trying to communicate until I finish the next text book.

“They have really long things of curry in the window. Really long. Many curry. In the window. Because have mosquitoes?”

At this point some of them nudge my xiàng qí opponent – who is also one of the oldest and most patient of the group – and he comes up to find out what I want as their elected emissary. We “talk,” and he figures out that I’m asking how to get rid of the mosquitoes and gives me the name of some sort of cheap electrical device you can put in your bedroom.

“So, this electric thing is better than curry?”

He assures me that this is way better than curry; I don’t need curry.

I say thanks and pedal off to the bike bunker. There’s a nagging ping in the black hole of my mind, as if I should be having doubts about something. Inside the bike bunker where they give you your ticket they have the same strings of garlic hanging. I ask what they’re called. “Suàn,” the lady says. ‘Well I know it’s garlic,’ I think, ‘I want to know what the mosquito-repellent strings are called.’ Wait. Garlic is suàn. If garlic is suàn, then why was I saying gā lí? Gā lí is curry! I ask her why everyone has garlic. She says it’s in season.

My ego crawls home, determined to spend even more time in the textbooks.
咖喱和蒜，不一样。

Come, share our ignorance.

Why was there no water in our apartment today? I’ll tell you:

tōng zhī

zǐ jīn nán lǐ (our apt. complex) [X] [X] give? water [X] dào [X] [X] [X] [X] [X] enter? [X] arrive? [X] internet??! [X] head [X] [X], [X] dìng [X] 2007-5-22 [X] 8 [X] [X] [X] 18 [X] [X] water [X] [X], [X] water [X] [X] ________. xiàn tōng zhī [X] [X] [X] first? [X] [X] [X] use water, [X] [X] residence middle? [X] person, yǐ [X] [X] [X] dào [X] [X] and [X] water xiàn elephant??! de [X] shēng.

Thank-you [X] zuò

huà [X] give water [X] [X] have [X] gōng [X]

That’s what the notice in the photo looks like to us.
If you can find meaning in our “translation,” then you would understand why there was no water in the apartment when we woke up this morning. Well, this particular notice has our address on it and says water a bunch of times… we’re assuming it’s the one. We found it around noon among the several pasted on our gate as we hauled our unshowered selves to class. We circled all the characters we recognize. Do NOT be fooled: there are way more words in English than characters in Chinese, but most Chinese words are combinations of two or three characters and context matters bigtime. Just because you can “read” most or all the characters in a sentence is no guarantee that you’ll have any clue what it’s about.

There are always signs like this posted around, telling us something we might want to know, and we can’t read any of them. So we just ignore them. But this morning, upon discovering our sans agua status, I looked out the window and saw workers digging holes beside the manholes outside our gate and the next gate over. That was our tip to go look at the notices. Not that they help much at this point. Ah well. The illiterate life!

I biked around Tianjin for about 6 hours with some fellow foreigners today. One of them had been on a bike tour of the city before, and she led us to a lot of interesting places. Tianjin has some important modern history, particularly as it involved Western powers. My favourites were the former residence of Eric Liddell (the Chariots of Fire guy), and a public park where on Saturdays with good weather a couple hundred parents post their child’s stats on papers hung on lines between branches and shop around for potential spouses-in-law. There was also an old abandoned church building with a very old woman outside making bricks (we guess). We didn’t get much information from her, but she says the church was in use in the 1960′s.

Eric Liddell’s house
If you’ve seen Chariots of Fire, then you know that Eric Liddell was the Olympic athlete from Scotland who gave up competing in his best event (100m) at the Paris Games in 1924 because the heats were held on a Sunday, which was his Sabbath. What the movie doesn’t tell you is that he was born in Tianjin, returned to Tianjin four years after breaking the world record to win gold (400m) and bronze (200m) in Paris, and died in a Japanese concentration camp after they took over the station where he was working among the poor. His story is worth a quick read, and a recent biography has been published about him in advance of the Beijing Olympics (you can read the forward here, provided by a site commemorating those who experienced the Weihsien Concentration Camp). Like many historical sites in Tianjin, this one is locked up and left to rot. There’s even some company’s giant (disused) neon advertising sign running down the front of the house. Still, for some reason visiting historical places like this matters to me. I’m not sure why.

Marriage Market
This was amazing. We stopped at a park for lunch. There were crowds all over the park looking at pieces of paper hung from lines on trees, or on people’s bike baskets. The four of us went over to see what was up, and it turns out that each piece of paper was basically a description of an unmarried person’s health, education, etc. The place was crawling with parents and grandparents looking to find their child a spouse. The girls I was with have much better Chinese (one has three years of fulltime study), and a friendly crowd quickly formed when they started talking and asking questions. Someone asked me something about me looking for a wife, and I said (in Mandarin), “No, I still have a wife,” emphasis on the still. I meant to say, “I already have a wife,” but oh well! After a bit we excused ourselves to go have lunch in the shade under a tree, and had an interesting discussion trying to imagine how we’d feel if our parents tried that (I was the only married one of the bunch).

We saw a lot of other stuff – the old drum tower in the centre of the city, former foreign concession areas (each with their own distinct architecture), a bunch of old men in speedos swimming in the river, among other things. Speedo picture by request. Click here to see more photos from today.

Weekend Slogan #6
The workers who’ve lived in the big green tent below our window are finished installing some new water pipes, so our water pressure is increased slightly, their tent is packed up, and there are at least three new red banners outside our gate. Here’s one:

迎奥运讲文明，树新风，让您满意在供水！
yíng ào yùn jiǎng wén míng, shù xīn fēng, ràng nín mǎn yì zài gòng shuǐ!

“Welcome the Olympic Games, pay attention to good behaviour, build a new atmosphere, be satisfied with the water (that the government gave you)!”

My teacher says the part about the government is implied, and the “good behaviour” part means no spitting or littering, etc.

Unfortunately, the work crew who posted these new banners (and their tent) was replaced by another one the next morning, which probably means weeks or months more construction under our window. But who knows, maybe we’ll get enough water pressure to make the gas water heater work!

Tourist + Moron = Touron

Ok, this isn’t really a Chinese word, but it’s worth meditating on… deeply meditating on. All of us. Together.

And while you’re at it, you can check out this site:
Where Am I Wearing? (a guy travels to the countries that make his/our clothes.)

In class today we were having a practice dialogue, and I told my teacher that I ate Hong Kong for breakfast. I meant to say banana. It was one of those classes, where you get your 香蕉 mixed up with your 香港.

And the other day I was “talking” to an older guy on the bus, as is our custom, asking him where he was going and where he was from (Hebei) – basically trying to make a conversation by patching together different phrases from our lessons.

I thought I’d told him I was going to school (学校 – xué xiào), which is on Zǐ Jīn Shān Lù (紫金山路 – the street name). He seemed a little puzzled, and when the bus came near the water park (several stops before mine), he started trying to tell me I needed to get off. He eventually got off himself and was replaced by an older lady with white hair (there are a lot of older people in Tianjin).

How bad is my accent: I tried to say “xué xiào” and he heard “shuǐ shàng” (shuǐ shàng gōng yuán = 水上公园 = water park). The bus was noisy. That must be it.

————

Still stalling on picking a Chinese name. But we managed, with our Chinglish powers combined, to hunt down an apartment and arrange the meeting to negotiate with the landlord. We called in reinforcements for the negotiations on Sunday night, and it all went great. We move in to a hopefully more permanent place this weekend!

We are overdue to have Chinese names. But for Westerners, choosing a good Chinese name is harder than you might think. One American that my teacher knows picked her own name, choosing the characters in part based on what looked nice. She didn’t know it, but her named ended up meaning “insecticide.”

People have to call you something, and the average person on the street in China is going to have serious trouble hearing, pronouncing, and remembering most English names (and vice versa in North America).

Chinese given-names also carry relatively more meaning than English names do. Many Chinese are very careful about what name they choose for their children, sometimes even paying professionals to pick the best sounding and most auspicious name. It’s a popular belief that a name can affect a person’s destiny and success.

When Mainland Chinese choose English names, it’s often based entirely on meaning. For example, a friend of ours is teaching several hundred students at a local university. In her classes she has students named: “Star,” “Moon,” “Taste,” “Apple,” “Banana”… and every English teacher here has lists like this. In Taiwan they seemed to do much better with their English names, though we did get a “Grack” and a “Neo.” Often the English teacher gets to give the students their English names. Peter Hessler, author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, used names of his family members and stereotypically African American names like “Shaniqua” to name his students. Other teachers name their students after characters from their favourite TV show (like Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, and George). Sometimes boys accidentally pick girls’ names. In Texas we knew a girl from Macao who changed her English name from Sam to Cinderella when she found out Sam was a boy’s name. “Cinderella” went on to become the first international student (and probably the first non-sorority president) to win Homecoming Queen. We were proud.

So, choosing a Chinese name… How do you avoid getting the Chinese equivalent of Taste, Kramer, or Grack when you are new to the language and it would take decades to learn and feel all the possible meanings associated with potential names?

You could get a Chinese name from your Mandarin teacher. They often give names, sometimes simply assigning the transliteration of the student’s English name on the first day of class. Neither of us want that; transliterated names sound funny to native Mandarin speakers, and the first character of mine is also apparently shared by George Bush. You could also ask (and trust) a really close Chinese friend who knows you well to give you a good one. Jessica I think will go this route. I’m going a third route: pick some ideas/themes that you like, decide if you care more about meaning or phonetic closeness to your English name, and ask a bunch of Chinese friends to suggest some names with explanations. I sent the e-mail out Sunday and suggestions are coming in. I’ll post them when most or everyone has replied.

For two years now, I’ve been trying and failing to say “toilet” in Chinese. I was so bad at pronouncing “toilet” that people couldn’t even guess what I was saying. And “toilet” is an important word to know; I’ve had the “I really gotta go and this convenience store clerk can’t figure out what I’m asking about”-experience one too many times!

“Toilet” in Mandarin is 厕所 (click for dictionary), pronounced cè suǒ (click each word for audio). I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what my problem was. I was sure it was the beginning sound, which is represented by a “c” (click for audio) in pinyin (? in bopomofo, I think). I just found out in class that actually, it was the “e” sound (ㄜ in bopomofo, I think). It’s one of the sounds that native English speakers typically mangle because we don’t usually hear any significant difference between it and one of our short vowel sounds (short u). Plus, it’s really like two sounds pressed together; your teeth and tongue (apparently) change position slightly as you say it (the audio I’ve linked to doesn’t demonstrate this very well).

Long story short, for two years I’ve been not making a sound that I couldn’t hear anyway, even when people said it to me, and that’s why it took me two years to learn how to ask for a toilet in Mandarin. And, of course, it turns out that it’s more common to use either of two other phrases for bathroom that are easier to pronounce anyway.

I’m noticing something: just because you can do something in a classroom, like understand sentences and speak sentences in return, doesn’t mean you can do it in a loud, crowded market. In the classroom there’s no pressure, the teacher pronounces everything clearly, and you have all the time you need to think of a reply. In the market, the more you look like you don’t know, the higher the price you might pay. Plus it’s noisy, the accents are thick (and fast! Geez, people!), and people can be in a hurry. I’m pretty sure the several bagfulls of fruits and veggies I just brought home should have cost less than the $4.50 Canadian that I paid for them, but I was pretty much at the mercy of the market ladies, and I’m pretty sure they knew it. Not that I blame them. It is kind of comical, and if I was them, I’d probably be charging a Nairobi-sized foreigner tax!

Next time I might stake out the stalls I want to buy from and wait for someone to buy what I want and see what they pay. Problem is, at this stage in our language study I have to translate it all in my head while doing the math, filtering out the words I don’t know, while remembering what the thing I want is called, how to put all the words and tones together, nevermind remembering all the counting words and pronunciation rules for how to shape all these sounds that I want to come out of my mouth.

Really, you can’t think about all that stuff or you’ll never speak. At this stage of language learning — just beyond single nouns and numbers and finger pointing but still having to translate everything in your head on the fly — you just have to give them what you’ve got, assume their laughter is good natured, and enjoy the real life practice where messing up has virtually no real consequences. Anyway, back to the books and the mp3s; we have to buy more rice tomorrow!

Speaking of foreign gong shows, this is funny story from a foreigner in Shanghai, written to his cousin about learning and working in Chinese in the 1860′s. From one of our China history texts:

“Most foreigners who come to China have the notion that in a year they will master the language. They get a teacher and pound away vigorously for a week or perhaps a month and then give up in disgust.”

Accordingly, they made ludicrous mistakes which negated all their endeavors. He told his cousin of hearing a foreign speaker in Shanghai trying to tell his Chinese audience that ‘Jesus is here also’; the speaker, mudding his tones and aspirates, succeeded only in assuring the puzzled listeners that ‘Jesus is inside shaving his head.’

“If I could have it my way, not a single foreigner should say one word in public teaching till he had lived with the people and studied the local dialect of his area at least five years, and passed an examination. Just imagine the ridicule which such people bring…” [Edited slightly]

No doubt we’ll amass many of our own such episodes… I think we probably already have a good start with the marijuana , the question about the monk, and whatever else people are too polite to tell us about. Our sessions with the tutor are supposed to start next week; that will make it a little nuts since our grad classes start at the same time and the ESL semester is in the start-up-chaos phase, but it will be sooo worth it!

Today we had swearing, drugs, people that can’t keep their pants zipped, a monk driving a Lexus, and a cat who… ‘went swimming.’

Disclaimer: the Chinese grammar in this post is atrocious, and at this point there’s nothing we can do about.

Nose sh*t & the hazards of language learning
After spending the morning passing out ads for PEI, during which a dog ran up and pee’d on my bag of fliers, we hung out with the college-age group all afternoon. At one point we were talking about names for pets, and one of our good friends (whom we’re not naming) mentioned that in college her friend’s dog was named “Booger” in Chinese. Jessica asked how to say it, of course (can’t pass up a learning opportunity like that!), and our friend answered, “鼻屎.” She knew that we knew 鼻 (nose), so in a very matter-of-fact kind of way, she added, “屎 means sh*t.” Jessica, caught slightly off guard, gave a quizzical look.

Our friend repeated with extra clarity: “Sh*t.”

“So it means, ‘Nose sh*t’?” Jessica was beginning to laugh.

“Yes. Nose sh*t.”

Jessica started laughing so hard she almost knocked an old lady off the sidewalk who happened to be passing by.

Now, you have to understand, this particular friend is a leader in the young people’s group, a choir member, a prayer warrior, enthusiastic core member of the congregation… the kind of girl who ditched her boyfriend of 5 years when it became obvious that he was not interested in considering her beliefs. She knew what the word meant, but had no idea what she was saying. She felt a little embarrassed when we explained the various English terms for poop and their shades of meaning, so we haven’t named her here. But next time we’ll talk about meaning and context and everyone will have a good laugh.

It’s a great example of how you can “know” the meaning of a word, but not really understand it. Until you feel it like the natives feel it, you don’t really understand it. Roll that into your exegesis papers and smoke it!

Imported drugs, and more hazards of language learning
And speaking of smoking, we also learned another fine “Why tones are important” lesson at dinner tonight. We ate at a Malaysian food place, and the word used for that particular style of food was dà mǎ. So after the meal, I wanted to say, “Dà mǎ food is very good!” (“大馬吃是很好”.) What I actually said was, “大麻吃是很好” – the 2nd character is different, but I was unaware. The guy I was saying this to, whom we had just met this evening, looked at me blankly while our other friend across the table started laughing.

They explained that “Dà mǎ” (ma with 3rd tone) is the name for the food, and “Dà má” (ma with 2nd tone) means marijuana. I had said, “Marijuana eat is very good!”

“So then,” I asked, “jǐng chá lái shuō nǐ yǒu dà má mā? hé wǒ shuō dà má chī shì hěn hǎo!” [Police come say, you have marijuana? And I say, marijuana eat is very good!]

We all laughed pretty hard. (See that kids? You don’t need to actually take the drugs to have a good time.)

What to do when someone is standing in front of a group speaking, and their fly is wide open.
We went along with about 11 others from the young people’s group to visit an elderly couple in a nursing home this afternoon. We were seated in the lounge waiting for the couple to arrive when a girl in her late 20′s stood up in front of all of us to talk about what we’d do with the couple (sing and stuff). Her fly was 100% unzipped and it was impossible to not notice. She was the only one who didn’t know.

These are situations to which we pay exceptional amounts of attention. What will people do? How and who will react? How will the problem be neutralized? We’ve heard so much about “high-context culture” and “saving face” that we expect different rules to apply in situations like the one this afternoon.

One of the guys in the group stood up and walked to Zhi-ling who was sitting closest to the speaker and whispered to her. Then Zhi-ling whispered to the speaker, who laughed sheepishly, turned around, and promptly… neutralized the problem. Everyone had a quick chuckle of acknowledgment and then we went on. We’ve got plenty of questions about it for Zhi-ling that we’ll ask later. But just in case you wondering, that’s how a group of 20-somethings handled a friend’s public embarrassment in Taiwan.

And, we saw a female Buddhist monk get into a shiny new Lexus and drive off. I’m not sure what to make of that, but something’s going on.

ps – as as I’m typing this, the cat just fell in the toilet. I’m not sure what to make of that either. And this morning she actually flushed it all on her own. What a day!…