So I’ve just got off work and I’m about to leave the building for the ten minute walk to the subway. One of my upper level English students sees that I’m planning to eat a pear on the way and she’s immediately concerned.

“You’re going to eat that outside?”

“Of course!”

“But it’s cold and windy! You can’t eat that outside!”

“Why not?” I know exactly what’s coming.

“You’ll get wind in your stomach!” The other students voice their agreement.

I know what she’s talking about because I’ve heard this before. Fear of getting cold “wind” in your “stomach” is considered at least as reasonable as covering your mouth when you cough to avoid spreading germs. But this time, instead of having the same old predictable conversation about how foreigners don’t know anything about getting “wind” in their “stomachs” or our “fire” going up and down, I decide to have fun with it.

“It’s no problem. Foreigners can’t get wind in their stomachs. Only Chinese people can get that disease. Getting wind in your stomach is a special disease only for Chinese people.”

She doesn’t believe me, and gives me an annoyed look to boot, like she’s not sure if I’m making fun of her/China/Chinese medicine or not. And I’m not, mostly; I’m just curious to see what will happen if I appeal to inherent biological differences between foreigners and Chinese (something that’s not uncommon for Chinese people to do in other situations) instead of chalking it up to cultural differences that affect how our respective societies understand health.

When Tianjiners wear face masks (口罩) in public it’s not because of air pollution or swine flu. These are cloth face masks, not medical face masks, and people wear them because it’s cold outside and they don’t want to get “wind” in their “stomachs” (受风 — to receive/suffer wind). I put quotes around those words because in Chinese medical theory they both carry important nuances and added dimensions that don’t correspond exactly with what we normally mean when when we say wind and stomach. (I borrowed this image from a Chinese website. It’s supposedly from Tianjin.)

For more about Chinese medicine:

• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Q&A with an American doctor who practices TCM

One of my friends in particular loves to practice his Chinglish on me. I in turn refuse to reply in English, opting instead to inflict him with my own Chinglish. For example, he just sent me this text:

Great! man I will going to the shan xi road on this Sunday. I’ll waiting for you at entrance. Time is 10:20am. Don’t be late,man! By the way! Don’t forget one thing. I needs give your lilian add hers cloths. Winter already was coming! I’m a superman. I can’t feel cold. Haha! How interesting! I said. All right then! Good night! Man Wish your baby has a sweet dream! See you soon!

I have no doubt that my Chinese sounds like this sometimes often. It always helps to keep a little perspective!

(P.S. – Friends don’t let friends use Grand Theft Auto to study English.)

Related Posts:

• Meet Liú Wěi – Coming of Age in a Changing China

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.

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

“That is SOOO so so so FAKE!” exclaims my 16-year-old English student from Beijing this morning when I show her the iconic China photo on the front page of today’s Vancouver Sun. She isn’t angry but she’s keyed up, the strength of her feelings quickly exceeding that of her English vocabulary. After insisting that the man never actually got run over and that he voluntarily put himself in harms way, she changes targets, “…was one of the student leader, and she SOOO so so so SO SUCKS!” I know which particular student leader she’s referring to and I’ve heard this character assassination before. So apparently she’s heard something about the event. This is one of the ESL students to whom I gave some Google and YouTube homework about this particular event a month ago.

Before I showed her the paper, I asked her, “Did you know that today is special? The whole world is thinking about China. All the major newspapers have stories about China. Do you know why?” She didn’t. Her guess: swine flu.

Today’s Vancouver Sun, which I’d nabbed from the staff room before my morning one-on-one tutoring session, carried two decent articles and some photos to mark this historic day. I was curious about how much or how little my student knew about the event, plus I wanted her to see some decent representative examples of how Canadians think and write about China.

I didn’t argue or push it with her, as I didn’t think that’d be appropriate. I guessed correctly that she’d be interested in how China is portrayed in the local papers and was curious about her reaction. After a bit we discussed another unrelated story illustrating interesting aspects of Canadian society and before calling it a day.

(P.S. – Comments are closed on this one. This topic is still officially taboo in China and I’m not here to be political, so I’m not gonna risk getting blocked over it.

P.P.S. – If you’re concerned that I was being unethical with this student, please see this clarification of what actually happened.)

Related Posts:

• Nothing to My Name / 一无所有

A rather Vancouver moment.

Today we took one of my Chinese students, a teenager from Beijing, to the Crystal Mall in Vancouver, B.C. for lunch and shopping. On the way home we were listening to Vancouver’s mostly-Chinese radio station, 96.1 FM, when a little English lesson segment came on introducing “The jig is up!” to the Chinese population of Vancouver. We listened to see how they’d translate it (完蛋了！), but I couldn’t help laughing and shaking my head when they gave the unfortunately appropriate example sentence: “The police found marijuana in his car. The jig is up!” At least Vancouver’s Chinese immigrant population is learning locally relevant English…

My Chinese students say the Crystal Mall is the current big Chinese hang-out (Chinatown is apparently for the older generation of Hong Kongers). If you combined a Tianjin supermarket with a Tianjin vegetable market, cleaned it up, made it a little less crowded, mixed in some 繁体字, and improved everyone’s English, you’d have the Crystal Mall. You can use Chinese in all the stores and they’ll hardly bat an eye.

We all had fun (Sara’s first time on the Skytrain), and it was good Chinese speaking time for us. I think we’ll do this again.

For this week’s language exchange, ‘Shine Far‘ suggested we go to the zoo. He doesn’t have an English name yet, nor have I decided how to do people’s names on the blog yet, so for now, he’s ‘Shine Far.’ We saw a watermelon-eating giant panda who appeared bored to tears, some red pandas climbing a tree, baby tigers taking baths and fighting pieces of meat, a python kill and eat a fuzzy black bunny (should’ve run for it, stupid bunny!), two cobras strike and hiss at each other, and lots of other stuff. The animals were cool, but the cages were depressing. We had fun practicing on Shine Far, and he on us.

Photos are here!

Afterward I stopped at the old guys corner to chat and unload some oral homework. There was a new old guy there, and after looking in my notebook and seeing my hàn zì, he ordered me to go buy calligraphy stuff and start practicing and said a whole bunch of stuff in really fast Tianjin-huà, which I think basically meant my writing is in need of some serious help.

We got paid over $100 US this afternoon to read 58 technical terms and definitions from an environmental science textbook into a microphone before taking a stroll around the beautiful campus and its lotus flower lake and eating a big dinner. That means over $100 and dinner for 70 minutes of speaking English and a few hours of Mandarin practice.

One of the local universities is using English textbooks in their post-graduate environmental studies program because, according to the people that hired us, that level of environmental science material has not yet been produced or translated into Chinese. This stuff is for the students who will become some of the engineers who have to tackle China’s environmental issues. We’re big fans of trees, swimmable rivers, and stars on cloudless nights – so all hail environmental studies! We’re also all for getting paid to read out loud, go to dinners, and practice Chinese on people. All in all, a highly productive afternoon!

Ominously enough, we’ve barely been able to make out the aforementioned TV Tower the last three days. But I suspect there may be some real actual fog mixed in this time, as it’s really stinkin’ humid right now.

Language exchange is common here. You meet with someone for a specified amount of time and spend half of it in their language in half of it in yours – that way each gets to practice a foreign language with a native speaker. We’ve been deliberately turning down these opportunities because speaking English half the time doesn’t compare to practicing on the old people in our neighbourhood who don’t care about English and couldn’t speak any even if they did. People who are only with you for your English don’t make the best Mandarin teachers.

And yet, today we had our first afternoon of language exchange session. How did this happen?

Step One – decide that you definitely do not want to do language exchanges, and make a habit of declining the inevitable offers.

Step Two – move into an apartment three floors above a family with a university student and a pushy, overbearing mother.

Step Three – get ambushed in the park/back yard by aforementioned pushy mother and her (embarrassed, apologetic) son/translator, whom she harasses in Mandarin throughout the conversation, alternating between “Use English! This is a good opportunity!” and “What did she say? Tell me in Chinese!” After half an hour of barely avoiding committing to the woman’s cleverly delivered request, use the “I have to talk to my husband about it first, and he’s busy losing a chess match to old men at the moment” maneuver.

Step Four – get ambushed three weeks later in your apartment by the son and his nice, friendly and probably-badgered father at 9pm as you were heading out for a walk with your friends who are moving to another city in the morning. After refusing to speak English for free several times a week at the father’s university classes (dirty trick!), agree to Sunday afternoon language exchange.

We chose to avoid language exchange because if you don’t need it, it’s not really worth it to spend half your time in English. But, we also chose to live in a regular Chinese neighbourhood on purpose, and if we want to be a part of this community, we can’t just blow people off. Well, we could, but in cases like this it probably wouldn’t be worth it. We don’t want to be English teachers, but we don’t mind being decent neighbours.

The son, “Shine Far” (if we translated his Chinese name… which we don’t), showed up today for our first session with a tea set as a gift from his family. He and I went for a walk to get my hair cut on the street corner a few blocks away, and it turns out he’s more comfortable using Chinese with us anyway. We set an alarm clock to go off when it’s time to switch languages, and it worked pretty good. I like him; he seems like a really nice guy, and grew up in this neighbourhood. I’m already glad we got sucked into this deal. Plus, he leaves for grad school in Beijing in a month, and we’re already working to pass him on to some American friends studying Chinese there (haha… foreigner 关系!).

During that English “Ask a 老外” Q&A session at Tianjin University last week, a student asked two questions together near the end of the session: “What did you say when you proposed to your wife?” – they liked that answer – and “What is the essence of love?” I knew immediately that my reply to the second question was going to be glaringly counter-cultural, possibly to the point of being absurd. But for some reason it felt good to swing hard anyway, with short, slow sentences that had a good chance of being understood. Maybe I needed to let off some culture stress steam, I don’t know. I told them, as best I can remember:

“Love is something you choose to do. It’s a choice you make. You choose to love. It doesn’t ‘just happen.’ You don’t ‘fall in love’ or ‘fall out of love.’ You make love.”

I opted not to expound on the various facets of truth connected to that last point, though I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t so much fun getting to preach innuendos to 200+ people on the far side of the world who probably wouldn’t/might not pick it up anyway. Pretty sure I did it with a straight face, too. Anyway, I then briefly talked about love being a decision to put another’s needs before your own, and not confusing love with the great feelings that are often associated with it.

The students reacted strongly as soon as I said “choose,” which I tried to say slow and loud, deliberately overemphasizing. We could see and hear their disagreement/disbelief/surprise throughout the room. We’d fielded questions on touchy, charged issues all night (Taiwan, Iraq War, Western criticisms of China), but this was the reply that got them going. A big chunk of it – I think – has to do with their general worldview heritage. Another big chunk has to do with prevailing perceptions of Westerners.

I asked my Mandarin teacher about their reaction today. She was hesitant to generalize (the teachers at our school have had to put up with more than their fair share of foreigner generalizations about Chinese people), but she said a few things. Fate is a prevalent belief. Many Chinese people think that Westerners don’t take love very seriously, like it’s just an emotion (I couldn’t disagree, even if the pirated movie market skews peoples’ perceptions of typical Western relationships… then again, Western entertainment media skews Westerners’ perceptions of Western relationships!). For the record, China doesn’t exactly have a rosy tract record of widespread marital bliss by comparison. Divorce is an epidemic on both sides of the Pacific. She also said they probably didn’t believe me. I told her that’s OK, a group of American university students probably wouldn’t believe me either.

The video in this post provides some nice anecdotes when the interviewer asks some Beijing young people about love, and they talk about fate. In general, by comparison, Westerners are typically more oriented toward agency, whereas East Asians more toward adaptability. That’s not to say that both these traits aren’t easily found in people on both sides of the world; it’s a contrast of relative emphases. To read a little bit more about the emphasis on fate in contrast to the West, see this post: Negotiating Life: Accept or Revolt?

ps – The photo is of a little Tianjin traffic tenderness (we could use more of that!) at the intersection near our school.
pps – I realize that I actually ended up describing love was a verb and a noun. But it’s really a verb. So I guess then you actually don’t “make” it. Shoot. Bad English teacher!