China keeps finding ways to piss me off (2)

I'm on my way home relatively early.  I figure I'll stop off at a 7/11 to get a couple of beers to accompany a DVD at home and a packet of croissants for breakfast tomorrow.   The store is taking a delivery.  There's a big wheelie-cage stacked with cartons of various products parked just inside the door..... completely blocking the entrance.   I stand in the entrance for a while.  I make friendly "so, what-the-f***, how long is this going to take, are you going to move this thing or what?" eye contact with the delivery guy.  And with the clerks behind the counter.  They nod and smile and do nothing.  A Chinese would-be customer arrives, and goes through the same rigmarole.  They nod and smile and do nothing.  Three or four minutes have elapsed.  The Chinese guy and I both shrug and leave.   The delivery trolley is bulky, to be sure, but there is room to move it into one of the aisles; or at least to shift it a little further away from the door and the cash-desk, so that it is not completely blocking entry to the store.    But NO - the shop is effectively closed down for 15 or 20 minutes because everyone is too lazy or stupid to move the trolley a matter of 8 or 10 inches to allow people to squeeze in past it.     You see this kind of mind-buggering thoughtlessness every day in China.  It never gets any easier to bear.

China keeps finding ways to piss me off (1)

I'm crossing the road on a pedestrian crossing.  No traffic light, but still a designated crossing place.   The guy driving towards me does not back off the gas at all.  He keeps on coming at a steady, too-fast speed - a good 35mph or so, I would guess.  If anything, he is possibly accelerating slightly as he nears me.   And he drives past all of about one foot behind me.   His judgement of his own speed, or mine, was not that precise.  He could not have known that I would not slow down, stumble, pause to tie a shoelace in the middle of the road, or suddenly step backwards for no reason at all (all things the typical Chinese pedestrian does fairly commonly).  And he would not have had the speed of reaction or the car control necessary to execute an emergency stop if I hadn't managed to get out of the way of his car.   Driving like that is reckless, stupid, and dramatically increases your chances of causing a serious, perhaps fatal accident.  And almost everyone in this country drives that way.

Flashback

While I was working in Canada at the back end of the '90s I developed the habit of writing a weekly e-mail 'bulletin' to friends back in the UK as a way of keeping in touch.  (Yes, we had real, one-to-one communication back in those days, rather than just broadcasting personal information into the void via Facebook or Twitter.)  I continued to do this intermittently over the next couple of years when I'd returned to the UK (since I'd made a lot of new friends in North America; and I was working such stupid hours - and for so little  money - that I wasn't even seeing very much of the people I knew in London).   When I moved to China, communication by telephone became nearly impossible (bothersomely expensive, even with IP cards; and that 8-hour time difference is a bitch to work around), so the bulletins once again became a regular and essential means of sharing news.   When I started out, I was keeping them down to 700 or 800 words each, but they slowly grew longer (typically 1,200 words, but sometimes 1,500 or even 2,000) and, I fear, began to tax the patience of my friends.  Well, no - people just stopped reading them.  So I moved on to blogging instead.   However, I just happened upon my batch of 'China Bulletins' while copying over some files from my old computer, and I thought I might start to share occasional snippets from them on here.   This is one of my very first ones, from the beginning of September 2002 (I titled it The Searchers).   *********************     The early days of life in a 'third world' country (a label no doubt outmoded and un-PC, and one which the Chinese would take umbrage at...... but if the shit fits.....) are a constant quest:  even buying toothpaste can be a gumption-testing challenge (although I must confess that life in this respect is far, far easier than it was when I last visited China: there is a huge hypermarket that sells almost everything only about a 10-minute walk away; and almost all the packaging has some English on it these days.... so routine shopping is still time-consuming, but a lot less of an ordeal than it might be).   I spent most of my first week trying to track down a bottle-opener (having unaccountably left my beloved Swiss Army penknife behind in England), an item which does not appear to be for sale in any shop, and which is hard to enquire about when you don't know the Chinese for it (and my Chinese colleagues seemed strangely reticent about telling me - oh, how they love to tease the foreign devils!).  I thought my mime was pretty unambiguous, but it tended to produce only laughter rather than assistance.  I eventually persuaded the manageress of our nearest mini-supermarket to give me hers (using my patented shrug-and-smile method of communication), but what I had taken to be an international-goodwill-gesture on her part appeared to result in a hefty 15yuan surcharge on my bill.  I am assured by tittering Chinese colleagues that this is far and away the most expensive bottle-opener in China, but I don't regard the expense as too unreasonable, and it is now my most prized possession: it has talismanic properties beyond its immediate practical use.   I am generally rather scornful of those who cling to their Western comforts (in Beijing these days you can live a fully Western lifestyle if you have enough money: it is, for example, possible to get a pizza delivery in exchange for one of your less important limbs; most of the other teachers here are pursuing this course to some extent, presumably at the expense of their life savings or their credit rating), but I decided that I would allow myself the indulgence of an occasional slice of toast.  I have located bread (now quite common, though not very good), margarine (butter also now quite common, but prohibitively expensive for regular consumption), strawberry jam (but, alas, no marmalade), and an electric toaster (an expensive Western import..... local consumer electrical goods are pretty cheap, but they haven't cottoned on to this one yet). Now, the one thing that continues to defeat me is a knife for spreading the jam'n'marge: still utterly unobtainable out here?!  I wish I had kept the Lufthansa cutlery from the flight out (surely the only airline in the world that is still providing large, sharp, metal knives with its dreadful inflight meals?).   I rediscovered the original Disappearing Restaurant that had been so sapping my confidence in ever being able to find my way around here, though I am still plagued by a nagging conviction that it is not quite where we had left it.  My latest bugbear as I struggle to master the amorphous local geography is the Disappearing Doughnut Shop.   At least these difficulties have provided plenty of ice-breaking activities for my class, as I set them to answer queries like: "Where can I get my hair cut?" (without being charged 50yuan and offered 'something for the weekend'); "Where can I go to the cinema?" (invariably provoking the incredulous response: "Why would you want to go to the cinema when you can watch VCDs at home??"); "Where can I buy English-language books and newspapers?"; etc., etc., etc.   Oh yes, it's a constant quest.

Haiku for the week

Seven years distilled Memories pinned like butterflies A life in boxes     Oh my god - the packing, the packing!

The 99 Steps

My projected date for moving out is now less than a week away, and I am suddenly starting to get a bit sentimental about the old place.  I am getting a bit teary each time I ascend or descend the 99-step staircase.  (I am going to miss this: it is, as I have commented before, an uncommonly nice stairwell.)   I wonder how many times I must have done this now.  Over nearly five-and-a-half years, it must be many thousands.  (Heck - when I was in serious training for the Great Wall Marathon three years ago, for a couple of months I was running up and down these stairs 20 or 30 times each day!)  I wonder how many more times I'll do it.  Only a dozen or so, I suppose.     I am reminded of the 33,333 Steps joke - the mother of all shaggy dog stories.  A guesthouse is improbably built at the top of a mountain, accessed by this huge flight of stairs with 33,333 steps.  The kitchen, however, is at the bottom of these steps, and there is no means of communication with the guests above.  So, the poor flunky responsible for room service has to rush up and down the 33,333 steps countless times each day.  It's more of a tongue-twister than a joke, really.  You spin it out for 10 minutes or so, with dozens of repetitions of the enormous number of steps - and the corny payoff is that you discover the poor chap has just done a spot poll as to whether cornflakes or rice crispies are the more popular breakfast food.  Very, very silly.  But it becomes a huge vogue for a while, around the end of Primary School.

Why vampires don't work (1)

Pondering the well-regarded Swedish vampire film Let The Right One In for my review of it a couple of weeks ago, I realised that it exemplified one of the key implausibilities in the vampire mythos.   However, I'll spare that observation for another few days, because it immediately led me to think of this supplementary quibble (a little play on words, too - if you'll indulge this pet vice of mine).   The answer to the question in the post title here is....   Because they have independent means.     They must do, obviously.  It's seldom discussed - but they live quite extravagant lifestyles: they have big houses, fancy clothes, they travel a lot; they often have paid servants looking after them.  OK, they don't have to pay for food, but.... pretty much everything else they have to provide for themselves just as we mortals do.  And it doesn't come cheap.   Some of them, of course, come from 'old money' (Dracula being the prime example; although I suppose most of Anne Rice's characters do too).  And I suppose they may often be able to appropriate the property of their victims.  And in the Hammer cycle of Dracula films, the Count quite often had admiring young upper-class mortal acolytes who could presumably subsidise his considerable expenses.   But the economics of being a vampire are usually left rather vague.  It would seem to be beneath most of them to rob mere mortals of their wealth (haughty bunch, vampires - even if they're not from the aristocracy).  Nor would they stoop to engaging in business, surely.  And they clearly don't have day jobs.   Where does all the money come from?  Did they invest in steel or oil or railroads in the mid-1800s and then sleep for a hundred years??     These are the kind of thoughts that I amuse myself with during bouts of insomnia...

Bloody Vikings!

As regular readers (well, regular commenters, anyway) will have noticed, I have started being inundated with spam in the last few weeks.  Indeed, it seems to have been getting exponentially worse over the last few days.   I have therefore been forced to engage the 'Word Verification' widget on the comment form to try to cut this out.  My apologies for the inconvenience.  Please don't let those few extra seconds of squinting and bafflement deter you from leaving a comment.     I wonder why on earth this has suddenly started happening now, after three years of happy and (almost) entirely spam-free blogging?  It would be nice to think that this was some sort of accolade, an unwelcome but nevertheless flattering by-product of higher traffic or page-ranking or somesuch.  But I fear it is in fact just one of those random acts of unkindness that the Universe tosses our way on occasion.   "Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam.  That's not go much spam in it."

A reminder of why we'd all really prefer to be on Linux

Even if occasionally it all goes horribly wrong....

Dust

Moving day looms, so I have been packing today.  All day.   Despite having had an ayi in every few months to give the place a thorough clean (which, in China, usually means wiping everything with a damp rag, but not actually dusting or polishing anything in the way we know in the West), and despite attempting to clean up myself (including dusting, and hoovering) every month or so.... well, I find now that there are bits here and there that we've both missed pretty consistently for the last five-and-a-half years.    Actually, in Beijing the air is so dusty (and the tap water too, come to that - I'm not convinced that the Chinese approach to cleaning actually makes things any cleaner at all) that the place gets pretty damned filthy within only a few days.  After a week or two, you don't notice it getting that much worse.  After a month or so, you're tempted to leave it for 3 months, or 6 months before you have a proper clean-up.   Yes, things get pretty disgusting, but... a sense of hopelessness takes hold in the face of the relentless griminess of the Beijing environment.  There doesn't seem to be anything you can do to hold back the tide, so why bother?   I was reminded by my exertions today (and by the coughing, sneezing, and itching which have inevitably attended them) that the great Quentin Crisp once said: "There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse."   I can't remember which of his books that's from, and I just spent 20 minutes on the Web searching for it without success.  Ah well.     I suppose that should really have been my 'Bon mot for the week', but I'd already posted something else.  I've never taken to housework, and so this aphorism of Crisp's has a strong appeal for me.  But I have a streak of cleanliness and orderliness in me that rebels against the idea.  And I've seen friends who've lived like this, never cleaning for months, weeks, years - and the squalor they create is unspeakable.  And it does appear to keep getting worse year by year...   There are dark corners in my apartment where the dust - more grit and sludge, really - is over a quarter of an inch thick.  Ugh!

Chinese plastic

Moving day looms, so I have been packing today.  All day.   This is a process which threatens to be long and painful.   It wouldn't be quite so bad if I weren't having to use Chinese made plastic crates.  As I've mentioned before on here, Chinese plastic appears to be made according to a special formula which renders it super-brittle.   I've had two of my crates break on me today as I tried to pick them up.  Not just break; SHATTER into ten or twelve fragments.     I often fret that this is emblematic of Chinese manufacturing industry in general.  It's not just that the Chinese are slapdash and inconsistent in their working practices; it's not just that they're unfamiliar with quality control procedures, or so relentlessly penny-pinching and corner-cutting that they always try to do something to the minimum acceptable standard.  No, many, many times they will actually contrive a really mind-blowingly crappy way of doing something; they'll produce something so completely bloody useless that it should have no value, find no market.  And yet it does.  The Chinese consumer seems to accept worthless, useless, possibly hazardous crap as the inevitable way-of-the-world and keeps shelling out his yuan for it because..... well, who knows why?  Because there's nothing else, I suppose.  (Unless there's some perverse streak in the Chinese psyche that actually desires crap, that is.  It may be so after all: maybe this stuff is cannily targeting its market.  It does seem as if it would take more effort to create products with such remarkably little utility than to just, you now, copy the way everyone else around the world makes something - like plastic: robust, durable, easy-to-clean plastic.)   It's one of the most mind-boggling things about this country.  And one of the most depressing.   [Anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating has never purchased a Chinese plastic washing-up bowl.]

Bon mot for the week

"It is important to be able to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."

Mahesh Prasad Varma [Maharishi Mahesh Yogi] (1918-2008)

Remembering

I was caught out this year by Armistice Day falling mid-week, and the Remembrance Sunday events all being scheduled for the preceding weekend.  I usually like to mark the occasion with an appropriate war poem.   Here we are, then - better late than never - one of my favourite pieces by Wilfred Owen.  (People generally only seem to know a few of his better known poems - Anthem For Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est, and perhaps Strange Meeting.  However, that's just scratching the surface.  There's tremendous variety in his poems of the war, and an impressively high quality through most of them.)     The Send-Off   Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way To the siding-shed, And lined the train with faces grimly gay. Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray As men's are, dead. Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp Stood staring hard, Sorry to miss them from the upland camp. Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp Winked to the guard. So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: We never heard to which front these were sent. Nor there if they yet mock what women meant Who gave them flowers. Shall they return to beatings of great bells In wild trainloads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, May creep back, silent, to village wells Up half-known roads.   Wilfred Owen  (1893-1918)

Shuffling through leaves

The viciously cold weather of the last few days, and the sharp breezes, have brought down most of the leaves from the trees - before they'd even had a chance to start turning colour   (Hmm.  Actually, most of the trees in Beijing never seem to change colour anyway.  The wrong sort of leaves, I suppose.)   There are few finer pleasures in life than scuffing your shoes through dense piles of dry, rustly leaves.   I wish it wasn't quite so bloody cold, though.  Winter has shown up a full month early this year.

List of the Month - I'm glad I don't work there any more

Given the rather patchy state of my personal economy at the moment, I should perhaps be avoiding confrontations with employers - even ones with whom I only work very occasionally, and from whom I seldom earn more than 1,000 or 2,000 rmb per month, and often nothing at all.   However, this employer has pissed me off so thoroughly that I am ecstatically relieved to have finally broken free of them.  My association with them goes back almost three years; and it has been misery all the way (nearly all of my 'I hate Work' rants have been about them).   So, by way of consolation and celebration, here are...         10 Reasons I'm Glad To Be Rid Of That Employer     1) The miserable rates of pay (Scarcely better than a bog-standard teaching rate, and less than half what I usually get for comparable presentation work.  Less than a quarter of what I sometimes get!  And the rates have been downgraded slightly in the past year or so - without anyone telling us.)   2)  Constantly being asked to do things at the last minute (This is China all over, of course; but these guys were particularly bad.  I hardly ever got more than a week's notice of an event; typically it was only two or three days' notice.  On at least a couple of occasions, they tried to get me to do something at less than 24 hours' notice - I said NO.)   3)  The amateurish PowerPoint materials they used to provide (Although provided by a British education company, the presentation slides were almost invariably very poorly designed and organised.  And I'd usually have to proofread them to weed out embarrassing glitches of spelling and grammar.  Embedded video and audio clips never, ever worked [and these were often intended to be the basis of activities taking up nearly half of the total presentation!].  Most of the time, I'd use the provided materials just as an outline structure, and improvise 70-80% of the presentation based on my own teaching resources and experiences.)   4)  The total lack of advance information about the events (They never provided a map of how to get to the venue.  Often they didn't provide the address.  Or they did so only in English, which is no help to a taxi driver.  Or they gave the wrong address.  Or the venue was changed at the very last minute.  Or...  Most of the rants I've written about my experiences working for these people have been about struggling to get to an appointment somewhere.  They'd never tell me anything about the partner schools hosting the events either.  Or the size or composition of the expected audience.  Or even, most of the time, the intended purpose of the event!!)   5)  The total lack of concern or awareness about IP (On a number of occasions, I arrived at a venue to discover that video cameras had been set up to film me.  On one occasion, the partner institution had hired a professional film crew for the afternoon, and insisted that this had been OK'ed by the Beijing office of my employer.  [My contact there promptly denied having done so to me; but I'm pretty sure she was lying.  She then lied to the host as well, saying that it was fine with her and it was just me being obstructive.]  I was also frequently asked - expected - to hand over the PowerPoint slides accompanying the presentation.  This stuff might be pretty poor quality, but it still belongs to the British education company employing me, and they have to try to protect its value by limiting its dissemination.  Their Chinese employees simply do not grasp this concept.  I would be willing to bet that they are pretty routinely giving away restricted materials and condoning the filming of complete presentations.  They are quite possibly taking backhanders for doing so as well [I'd almost feel better about it if they were; as I've said a number of times before, I prefer criminality to stupidity].  But I fear they just don't understand the principle at stake, or don't give a toss about it.)   6)  The total lack of concern or awareness about education (I recounted a week or so ago how one of their senior staff recently made a suggestion to me about marketing one of their exams which was staggeringly dim, ignorant, and unethical.  For me, it rather summed up my whole experience of working with them.  They haven't got the first idea what they're doing.)   7)  The preternaturally dim girl who was my main liaison there for the last year-and-a-half (I think, in fact - would like to think, anyway - that she was not nearly as thick as she appeared; but there was a sort of bovine impassivity about her that I found utterly infuriating at times.  Whenever I tried, politely and patiently, to explain why something wasn't right, she'd just nod and smile... and completely ignore me.  As with so many of the other problems I had with other members of the staff there, I suspect it wasn't really a case of her not knowing or not understanding; she just didn't care.)   8) Giving me inadequate or inappropriate materials (As if it wasn't bad enough that the materials were so poor anyway [see point 3) above], they'd often give me materials that just did not fit the audience or the event at all.  For one of the first jobs I did for them - a half-day teacher training seminar down in Shanghai - I found that the materials provided covered barely half of the allocated time, and I was expected to improvise a workshop on 'classroom activities for young learners' to fill the middle section of the morning.  Last month, I was given a rump of a presentation - at most 20 minutes, of introductory material only - for an event slated to last 3 hours, and was asked if I could "pad it out" on the hoof.  Really - I am not kidding.  The final straw came when they gave me a full-length 3-hr presentation [on Presentation Skills, as it happens] promoting one of their Business English exams.... and sent me to give a 1.5-hr class to a bunch of high school kids with it.  That leads me on to my next point....)   9)  Booking me for utterly inappropriate events (These presentations and seminars I was giving are offered free to the host venue on the basis that they are a promotional exercise for the education company and its exams.  The understanding is, therefore, that - with the exception of the teacher training events - these should be run as recruitment exercises for courses leading to one of the company's exams.  In fact, almost every single one of these events that I've done has been delivered to an audience of students already enrolled on a course.... although, in many cases, not a course leading to one of my employer's exams.  And, on a few occasions, I've actually had host institutions request that I excise all the promotional material about my employer from the presentation and just deliver the teaching content.  Yep, my employer's Chinese staff are basically just giving away FREE LESSONS to anyone who asks for them.  Again, one wonders if they're taking backhanders for this, or if they're just doing it because of the subservient Chinese attitude to doing business - that clients must always be sucked up to unquestioningly... even if they're not actually clients!  Either way, I don't suppose the UK head office would be too chuffed to learn about it.)   10)  The lying (The latest convoluted deceptions they've subjected me to about which pay scales are in force are, unfortunately, rather too typical of my interactions with them.  Whenever I confront them with a 'difficult' question or an uncomfortable truth, the response is always obfuscation, misdirection, and lies, lies, lies.)         Sorry, bit of a dull post for those not involved in the education business in China.  But it's good to vent sometimes.  Oh, boy, am I glad to be out of there!

Beastly numbers

I came upon an intriguing - but rather disturbing - fact in the article I just mentioned in that little rant on statistics a moment ago.   How many new jobs were created in China in the first half of this year?  6.66 million, according to the official government figures.   It's rather too suspiciously round a figure, isn't it?  Let's not get into all the 'Book of Revelations' imagery associated with it!   As I've observed before, one can't really trust any official statistics coming out of this country - partly because people will lie so freely to promote a desired image, and partly because statistical methodology is so slapdash.  (I rather suspect, also, that there may be a problem with the Chinese language itself - or at any rate with the culture of thought that has grown up here - that fosters an extreme conceptual woolliness, which often seems to swamp analytical thought or attention to detail.  People often just don't seem to notice that the statistics they're quoting are implausible, impossible, inconsistent, undefined, devoid of crucial context, meaningless.)    You see, they don't actually explain what that figure is.  How are 'new jobs' counted?  And are they counted in isolation (I rather think so!), or offset against the number of jobs lost?   Even if this really is the total of jobs added to the Chinese employment market, the surplus of newly created jobs over lost jobs.... well, it's still not very much, given the size of the country.  And given the fact that the 'official' figure for the annual increase in job-seekers (probably assessed very conservatively, if not wilfully misrepresented) is 20 million.   Any way you look at it, there are a lot of folks without jobs here at the moment.

War on Chinglish (12)

According to statistics....     This aggravating tic in Chinese writers of English is, I suppose, just one of the more common examples of the general tendency to inappropriately transfer over into English the Chinese language's predilection for beginning every sentence with an utterly redundant but context highlighting phrase or clause, sometimes called a 'topic clause'.  I assume this is deemed necessary in Chinese because the language is so replete with homophones that one's meaning often slides into ambiguity without such frequent heavy-handed 'signposting'.  In English, however, it's just clunky, inelegant, unnecessary.   Our example today typically manifests itself in academic or technical writing where the author wants to introduce objective data to support his argument, and will invariably say something like...   "According to statistics, 88.8% of Chinglishisms make Froog tear his hair out."   or...   "According to statistics, only 11.7% of central government spending this year has been applied to major infrastructure projects."     You see, those figures are statistics.  That is immediately obvious.  So, to introduce them with the word 'statistics' is entirely redundant.   One might also object that there is a rupture of logic here, since the statistic quoted is not "according to statistics": it is not derived from itself, but from some kind of survey or official report.  One might use this phrase to give the origin of the statistics (e.g. "According to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization, malaria infections increased by 8% worldwide last year."), but to say "According to statistics..." on its own is just ridiculous.   PLEASE stop doing it.     At least I got a new variation on this in the latest article I've been editing (much better than yesterday's):   "According to relevant statistics...."   Well, that's nice.  So much better than using the irrelevant ones, as so often happens with my Chinese authors.  Or the ones that are just completely made up.

Recently, on The Barstool

Continuing my occasional series of plugs for the brother blog....     I've already given this a brief shout out on here a couple of weeks ago, but I think it bears dropping on your living-room carpet once again, in the manner of an attention-seeking cat displaying a mangled mouse for your perusal.  I have recently committed to print for the first time ever, after long years of gestation, my important, possibly world-tilting theory (I expect to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Economics in 4 or 5 years) of the Beer Equivalence Index - a method of calculating the cost of living in terms of the number of beers you could buy instead of something.  Shortly afterwards, I produced an addendum on round-the-world Beer Equivalence, demonstrating how you can use the 'Beer Equivalence' concept not only as a method of price comparison within one country but also as a means of gauging the relative cost of living/quality of life between one country and another.  Then, last week I threw in the related but supplementary concept of the Beer Spread Index, which - rather in the manner of the Gini coefficient - provides insights into the state of development and the social cohesion of a country by measuring the breadth of the price gap between the cheapest and the most expensive available beers.     And then, just the other day, I penned - in conjunction, it must be said, with my dauntingly polymathic friend The Weeble - this piece entitled Shit happens, which encompasses reverence for the works of Mr K. Vonnegut, the occasional usefulness of the French language, and some gratuitous alliteration.  Also worth a look.

Plumbing the depths

Of naivety and ignorance in Chinese academe, that is.     I've been editing for the think-tank again.  All day.     The English, actually, wasn't all that bad for the most part (at least, until we got into the last quarter of the paper, where it is obligatory to mouth convoluted amalgams of meaningless CCP-speak platitudes, which seemingly cannot be rendered into English sentences of less than 50 or 60 words in length).  But the levels of scholarly acumen - and even basic general knowledge - were so dismal as to beggar belief.   Today's topic was international health policy - disease prevention and control as an aspect of 'non-traditional security'.  Hm, potentially quite interesting.  And a topic on which I am perhaps slightly better informed than the average man-in-the-street.  I would not, however, have expected to be better informed than the writers of a "leading academic paper" on the subject.  But then..... I can be bothered to use the Internet to check on stuff I'm not sure about.  It seems Chinese academics can't.     The authors of this paper early on made the astounding assertion that this was a field that had "scarcely been studied before".  Egad!  Well, I suppose it might be true in China, but in most of the rest of the world it's been a key focus of research for at least the past, what, 20, 30, 40 years?  I mean, what the hell else does the WHO and the CDC do?     That was a pretty strong indication of the sloppiness that was to follow.     Amongst the egregious factual errors I corrected (and correcting facts is not really part of my remit; I'm supposed to be just rendering the English more intelligible):   An outbreak of Oropouche fever in Belém, Brazil, in 1960 was said to have killed 11,000 people.  According to my researches, this disease is rarely fatal, and the 11,000 figure in this instance was the number of reported cases, not the number of fatalities.   The outbreak of plague in India in 1994 was twice placed in 1996 (despite the quoted source having '1994' in its title), although the location of the outbreak was elliptically referred to as "a city in India".  And the disease was called 'bubo'.   Malaria was said to be a viral disease.  No, it's caused by a single-celled organism, a protist.   Hepatitis was said to be caused by a bacterium.  No, the pathogenic forms of hepatitis are all caused by viruses.   Yellow fever and 'blood fever' were listed as examples of viruses that have crossed over from animals into humans.  'Blood fever', as far as I can discover, does not exist.  I assume they meant haemorrhagic fever - but that's a group of diseases categorised by the dominant symptom, not a single disease (Marburg fever - given later in this list, without any apparent awareness of the repetition involved - would have served as an example).  Yellow fever might have originated in other animals (well, I think all viruses do); but it's been in the human population, with humans virtually its only host species, for 500 or 600 years now, so it's not a very apposite example in the context of a discussion of newly emergent disease threats.   And, oh yes, China's handling of the SARS crisis was held up as a shining example of transparency and co-operation, giving blamelessly full reporting to the WHO and other international agencies and providing necessary information to its own populace.  Choke, splutter....   (I managed to excise that bit, not because it was objectionable nonsense, but on the [more tactful?] grounds that these sentences were so mangled in their English as to be almost irredeemable, and were embedded in the midst of a hugely long paragraph to which they had absolutely no relevance whatsoever.)   Also, the poor authors clearly had no idea of the distinction between 'security' and 'securitization' (and this is, arguably, an even more complex matter in international relations than it is in the world of finance), despite the fact that this was the crux of their thesis.   Oh yes, and they were rather confused by the fact that the foreign academic whose work they were principally ripping off had a double-barrelled surname.  They chose to separate the barrels, referring to him in all the footnotes (well, at least they were giving him citations) and the text as if he had a middle name ending in a hyphen, and then giving the bibliographical references under the last part of his surname only.  Whoops.     Hm, what else?  Well, there were scores of figures quoted (mostly monetary amounts: GDP, health spending, estimated economic losses from disease outbreaks) - with no indication of the relevant timeframes, and often with no currency specified (you can't really assume that it's US dollars - even if they say 'dollars'; and that was the most they ever said; quite often they didn't say anything at all - when they're talking about Hong Kong and Singapore).   They were rather light on citations.  And the citations they did have were almost entirely for secondary sources.  You know, when they're quoting WHO reports, it's really not that hard to go to their website and download the original documents - rather than citing a passing reference in an article in Science Now 4 years later.  And while a few heavyweight print publications like The Economist and The Washington Post might have sufficient respectability to be quoted as sources in an academic paper, I don't think Sina.com (China's leading web portal, but hardly an internationally respected news purveyor) or even CNN really quite cut it.  Honestly - there were a couple of citations from Sina!   Ah, but that's only my Pet Peeve No. 2 about this particular article.   Yes, really.  Are you ready for this?  Make sure you're sitting safely in a comfy chair and have removed all choking hazards from your mouth.     This article is taking AIDS as its main example of an emergent disease having a major impact on international security considerations. Fair enough.  But there isn't a single reference to a source later than about 2000.  Most of the citations, in fact, go back to the early or mid-90s.     We shouldn't judge too harshly.  It's probably another one of those areas of "cultural difference".  A society as ancient as China perhaps doesn't revere being up-to-date as highly as we do in the West.

Haiku for the week

The white world dazzles, And the city's clamour's stilled. Snow hush eases sleep.     Yes, the best thing about the snowfall in Beijing this week is the uncanny, unfamiliar quiet that attends on it.

IT Purgatory

My esteemed blog-friend JES has for the past week or two been suffering one of those ultimate computer nightmares where his attempt to upgrade to the latest version of Linux has unfathomably disabled his PC.  Fortunately, he is tech-savvy enough to bear these slings and arrows with a modicum of composure.  I think I would long since have taken a sledgehammer to the computer in question, and then perhaps gone up on the roof with a hunting rifle to start taking cathartic potshots at my neighbours.  He is a better man than I am.  But I hope he soon finds a resolution to his vexing issues.   My own inability to get Flash to run in Firefox rather pales into insignificance by comparison.  (Terrifying as it is to acknowledge it, you can get used to life without YouTube again.)   As does the latest glitch with Yahoo Mail wherein the 'Browse' button does not appear in the 'Attach Files' screen.  This seems like such a small compromise in function, yet its effects can be exasperating.   It has, for example, rather put the kibosh on my plans for another Photo Week series.  I can still manage to attach things to e-mails (yep, still posting to Blogger via e-mail...), but it takes a fair amount of floundering around to find out the exact location of a file and enter it manually in the 'select file' box.  And the address strings are often so cumbersome (Users/Froog/My Documents/My Pictures/For the blog/Llamas...) that I've taken to transferring files I want to attach on to my flash stick first (to reduce the addresses to something more manageable, like F://Two slightly distorted llamas.jpg).  I am rapidly losing patience with this workaround.   In fact, I find myself cleaning my rifle....   Yahoo, please get this sorted - QUICKLY.     It just so happens that a little earlier I posted a little piece called Shit happens over on The Barstool, which elaborates a whole new vocabulary for use in these situations.  Do check it out.   And good luck, JES.  I feel your pain.

Slip-slidin' away

Making my way to work through the snow early yesterday morning was a bit of an ordeal.  I knew there'd be chaos on the roads, so I thought I'd take the subway - but that left me with a mile or so to slither along slushy roads and uncleared sidewalks.   The trek, however, was made rather more tolerable by a surprising outbreak of courtesy and good humour among my fellow Beijingers.   I first noticed something was up on the subway: people on the platform were standing to the side of the doors, to let people out of the carriages first.  Almost unheard of!  Well, perhaps, I thought, this is a recently learned behaviour, and founded on self-preservation rather than good manners.  In the morning rush-hour, if you stand in the middle of the opening doors, you're likely to get bulldozed to the far side of the platform by the ruck of people exiting the train.  The trains going north on Line 13, though, weren't very busy; yet people on the platforms were standing to the side anyway. I fancied I even saw one or two of them making deferential eye-contact about it - and not with me, but with their fellow Chinese commuters!   Eye-contact!  Whatever next?  It was the same story out on the streets.  Where there was only a narrow path through the snow along the sidewalk (a "goatpath" produced by early morning pedestrians; there hadn't been any snow-clearing at all up in the Wudaokou area), people were actually stepping aside - putting one foot into the snow - to let others pass.  You may think that there was really no alternative, but I have often seen similar situations (minus the snow) where people would just blindly walk into each other, or get involved in an obstinate face-off where both were reluctant to yield priority.   And again, there was eye-contact between people passing like this.  Even the occasional smile.  And a couple of times I saw people put out a steadying hand when someone lost their balance on the glassy compacted snow - yes, some people were helping complete strangers to avoid a fall.  That just doesn't happen in this country; or only very, very rarely.   Perhaps I exaggerate the significance of a few, untypical instances.  Perhaps the only really unusual thing about yesterday morning was that people were actually looking where they were going, for once.  And perhaps, again, that is a necessary act of self-preservation: when things are so perilously slippery underfoot, you have to show more awareness of what's around you.  And if that means that you give a bit more attention to your fellow citizens, that is just a fortuitous by-product.   However, I really do think that there was some rarely-seen human warmth about interactions on the sidewalks yesterday morning.  Maybe it's a kind of camaraderie, born of shared suffering, shared challenge: we were all sharing the common difficulty of a long, cold, wet trudge to get to work or school, and circumstances like that perhaps engender a sympathy, and even on occasion a helpfulness, that is absent in more routine conditions.  Maybe, indeed, it's an emanation of the old communist spirit: most people here, most of the time, behave as though they wouldn't throw water on their neighbour's house if it were burning; but give them a community-threatening event like a flood or an earthquake and they all happily pitch in together to overcome the difficulty as quickly as possible, humming revolutionary songs the while.   I rather suspect it's mostly, in fact, down to an endorphin-rush.  However inconvenient the snow may be, everybody feels a little buzzed about it - especially with one of the first big falls of the season.  I think it was that childish snow-ecstasy that was breaking down people's barriers yesterday, making them behave more amiably and considerately towards each other.   The effect didn't last very long.  By the end of the day, Beijingers on their way home from work were as dour and solipsistically bloody-minded as ever.  And they were standing in the middle of the subway doors again.

Relief - or apprehension?

I was so dreading my landlord's reaction to news of my impending move that I'd put off telling him for a few days.   Perhaps I needn't have worried.   He has not complained.  He hasn't threatened me.  He has not demanded compensation or penalty for the premature termination of the lease (yet).  He has not demanded that I move out immediately (as he did when our rent renegotiation stalled three months ago).   He hasn't even objected that I have given him slightly less than the one month's notice I'm supposed to under the contract.   And he says I can have until the end of the month to move out.  (In fact, I'm only paid up until the 28th; and I'm planning to hand the keys back on the 29th.)     Who knows - perhaps I'll even get my deposit back from him?   Although, given his incessant money-grubbing over the past 5 years, it's difficult to be sanguine about this.  He tried to get me to pay for a replacement water heater, when the element in the - crappy - old one burnt out a few months after I'd moved in.  He tried to get me to pay for replacing the lock on the front door, when it seized up (this was a fault with the lock design; within the space of a few months, every apartment on my staircase had to have these locks replaced) - even though the cost was only about 50rmb.  This guy really is tight as the proverbial duck's ****. And I don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting their deposit back from a Beijing landlord.  But I'm damn well going to try!     I still can't quite believe that he's being so docile about things.   "It's quiet."  "Too quiet."

Daily Llama clique

They may look quaint and harmless, but they're fomenting terrorism and conspiring to "weaken China" - oh yes.  Beware.  One llama - bad.  Multiple llamas - insurrection!

Grey days

Winter should soon be here.   And winter is mostly quite a good season.  The cold can be a little sharp at times, but we get lots of vivid blue skies, dry air, and relatively low pollution.   At the moment, we're suffering a continuation of foggy, smoggy late October.  Today didn't really happen: the peak light levels were little better than you get in the last hour before dusk.   This is not good for the mental health.  I may need to get myself a UV lamp.

On the move

Finally, I have committed to a change of domicile.  At the end of this month, I will be moving into a new apartment.   It's hardly a big leap geographically (the new place is less than half a mile due south of my current location) or in terms of lifestyle (the standard of decoration and fittings is pretty much identical to my current place; it's just a bit smaller, and therefore cheaper).    Nevertheless, it will be quite an upheaval for me.  I've been in the same place for just over 5 years and 3 months now; and I've accumulated a lot of stuff in that time.  I figure the packing up is probably going to take up every spare minute of the next three weeks.   Phew!  That is the longest I've ever lived anywhere, by quite some margin (since the house I grew up in, anyway).  There haven't been too many places I have lasted even one full year in.   But that has been the problem, I think.  I've got stale about this place.  It bores me now.     And, lately, it's been making me ill.  The traffic noise on the 2nd Ringroad at night has become much worse since I've been living here, and is now impossible to sleep through without earplugs.  And now the annual curse of the clacking and creaking of the central heating pipes has started up again.  So, I'm not sleeping well at night.  And a never-ending round of renovations in the apartments downstairs means that it's tough to catch up on sleep during the day either.   The new place is, I hope, going to be much quieter.  If it is, I may spend my first two or three weeks there asleep.

These are not the pay scales you're looking for

I am still struggling to get any straight answers out of the dipshit employers who so incensed me 5 or 6 weeks back by oh, so casually underpaying me by about 30%.   One of the things that has been bugging me about them is they have been telling me for about a year now that a new pay scale was either due imminently or had just been introduced.  But they never actually notified me what this pay scale was.  And when I asked them to confirm what pay scales were in force, and to send me the up-to-date numbers, they ignored me.  Repeatedly.  Over the last several months.   When I got into a big dispute over my pay with them, I demanded some information about the pay scales rather more urgently - as you might expect.   And they finally sent me some new information.  Well, slightly different to that which I'd been given when I first started working for them nearly three years ago, anyway.  Unfortunately, they still didn't explain what exactly these figures represented, or when they had come into force.   Now, these figures - though slightly less (in one particular instance, significantly less) than the amounts I thought I had been due under my original agreement with them - did at least tally with the payment rates being used on the disputed payslip (it wasn't the rates themselves I had the main problem with; it was the fact that they had arbitrarily decided to reduce the number of payable hours on my claim form).    However, this "new" set of figures did also include a provision that presenters working for this company are supposed to be paid an additional "2 hours" whenever they deliver a seminar for the first time (an allowance for the additional preparation time needed, I suppose - eminently reasonable).  Only one of the events I'd done for them in the meltdown month had been entirely new material.  But still, an extra 2 hours' pay would console me somewhat for the 1.5 hours they had unjustly docked.  But, of course, they didn't pay me this extra allowance either.  And I am naturally curious as to when this provision was introduced, since, over the previous year or so, I've done 8 or 10 other seminars for them - which might all have been eligible for this extra allowance.   But, of course, I've never been paid this amount for any of the new seminars I've delivered.  And I don't suppose I ever will be.  Probably the other presenters who work there aren't getting this pay either.   I'd like to think that someone on the Chinese staff there is pocketing all this extra cash for themselves.  Really.  I find straightforward criminality far preferable to dumb stupidity and incompetence.  But I rather fear it's just the latter.   And do you know what's really bugging me now?  It's not the money.  Even 20 hours of pay witheld (at the miserly rates this outfit offers) is hardly a major sum.   No, it's the continued dithering.  The evasiveness.  The lying.     My contact there is now trying to tell me that this pay scale is not the current one, but an old one. (Not true.  At least, it is plainly different from the only "old" one I was ever familar with.  And it does appear to accord in every detail - but one! - with the amounts I was actually getting paid in recent months.)  I reiterate my exasperated questions: Why was I told this was the current pay scale?  What, in fact, is the current pay scale?  When did the changeover happen?   Of course, they don't provide the answers.  But I do get a doozy of an extra-special super-duper new lie on top of all the other bullshit they've already given me.  Now, they're telling me that the pay scale they've shown me does not apply to me, because actually they loved me so much that they put me on a 'premium' pay scale all of my own.  So, I was actually getting more than these published rates - and I should be grateful.   Er, NO, I wasn't getting paid at a higher rate.  And if there were two pay scales, I'd like to see them both, thank you.   And I'd like that information right away.  I have been asking for it rather urgently for four weeks now.     WHY?  Why are they behaving like this??  Do they think it's FUNNY??!!   Well, they're not going to be laughing for much longer.  They have messed with the wrong guy.

Bon mot for the week

"Ability is of little account without opportunity."

Napoléon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

Further reflections on a Classical education

Whereas most young boys dream of being train drivers (I did too, when I was very young; but the enchantment faded when I realised I'd missed the Age of Steam) or astronauts or footballers, for a while back in my early teens I had a pretty serious fixation on the idea of becoming a Classical scholar.  I think it was probably this poem that saved me from self-incarceration in an Ivory Tower.  Thank you, Mr Yeats.   [By the by, there's a 'Poetry Sunday' offering over on The Barstool today as well.]       The Scholars   Bald heads, forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter Beauty's ignorant ear.   All shuffle there, all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?   W.B. Yeats  (1865-1939)

Possible opening for a novel

I cheekily put the first of these paragraphs up on my Good Beginnings post at the start of this week, to see if anyone would play the "Can you guess what it is yet?" game.... but no-one noticed.   So, I thought I'd trot it out more prominently here, and see if it garners any reaction.   There's a curious story behind this, how it came to be written.  When I was working in Toronto a decade or so ago, The Globe & Mail ran a short story competition.  I produced this tale of a sniper, which I called Watching, with a view to entering, but..... well, I didn't.  I can't now recall if it was a crisis of confidence, or if I just missed the submission deadline.  I rather think it was a problem of length and/or content.  I think the word limit might have been something like 5,000 words, and I'd gone considerably over that, and didn't want to prune it back too much.  Also, I think the subject matter was supposed to be "reflective of Canadian life" or somesuch, and this story was pretty obviously set during the civil war in Yugoslavia (although I wanted to avoid specifically identifying the locale, to give it more the mood of a timeless fable); having the central characters emigrate to Canada after the war was a bit of an unsatisfactory ploy to try to meet this requirement.   Anyway, I rather liked it.  It was, I thought, one of the best things I'd written.  It was - is - in fact about the only substantial piece of fiction I've ever written (at least, since my school days).  It was also the first thing I'd written on a computer.  Ah, computers - bane of the modern world!  I tried to copy all of my personal files on to floppy disks when I left the job, but most of them got corrupted.  This story was a victim of the cyber-gremlins.  And I lost my one-and-only hard copy of it as well.  Vanished, as though it had never been.   However, I still retain a pretty vivid memory of it, and the other week I thought I'd try to recreate the opening of it.    I have been wondering if the idea is strong enough to expand into a novel.  My initial interest was in examining this perspective of someone who holds a god-like power of life and death over people - what does a sniper think about, crouched in his nest for hours at a time, waiting for the right moment to shoot, just watching people?  I was also fascinated with the possibility that in a civil conflict like this there might not always be rigid demarcations between the feuding communities, that people from either side might be able to mingle with their "enemy" and for much of the time conduct relations with them in a more or less normal way.  So, the narrative idea developed of an odd love story where the sniper becomes infatuated with a young girl he sees through his sights by day; and at night he starts crossing over into her community to try to meet her and develop a relationship with her.  Eventually he is successful in this; but as they become lovers, he is increasingly tormented by guilt about the people - her people - that he has killed, and by the fact that he must try to keep his role in the war a secret from her.         Already he had a reputation.  Even those unschooled in the finer points of his art would have realised that he was something out of the ordinary.  The people here, schooled by painful experience, were all now connoisseurs.  And they knew he was the best of the best.  There was something else, though, beyond his technical skills.  He excited a superstitious awe.  You needed exceptional eyesight to do what he did; but they were starting to say he had a 'second sight' as well, that he could see inside people's bodies, perhaps even look into their souls – and that was how he made his choices. In less than a week he had a reputation, and a nickname.  They were calling him The Angel.  Not an 'Angel of Death'.  That would have been too obvious; all snipers were that.  No, it was short for Angel of Mercy.  There might have been some irony in the naming, but there was also a gratitude.  People sensed something good in him, and they clung to it.  It wasn't the people he spared.  They could never know how many of them he'd watched through his telescopic sight, or what deliberations he'd gone through when he refrained from pulling the trigger.  It was the ones he'd killed, the pattern people thought they saw in this: only the old and the sick, as if he were trying to take as little life as possible. Most of his early victims, in fact, had not been especially old; yet none of them had had much longer to live.  This was how the belief grew that he had some uncanny insight.  People were soon convinced that he could see better than an X-ray, better than a doctor who would live and who would die – and he was just hurrying the process along, accelerating their end by a few years at most, sometimes only by a few months or a few weeks.  It could be seen as a kindness: he was sparing them their final suffering.  His victims were not all obviously frail, but, people said, he could always tell; he looked at the men and women in his sights and he knew which tumours were operable and which had run out of control; he knew which coughs were just a passing winter cold or a heavy smoking habit and which were signs of chronic emphysema or TB.  He knew, they said.  He always knew.

Haiku for the week

Bare details linger - Phone numbers and address books - Unhappy reminders.     I received some sad news this week about the sudden death of a young friend.  Her number, of course, is still recorded in my mobile phone.  It is very hard to delete it.

Whatever happened to the courtesans?

While scouring the Web for more information on the great "lion on the cheese grater" mystery, I turned up this interesting article on courtesans on Salon, and thought it worth sharing.   I'm still looking for my Aspasia.   (Or should that be Aphasia?)

Ah, he's back!

I have muttered on here numerous times before about how almost ALL the scripts I record for English listening exam practice in Chinese schools and colleges get endlessly recycled - but you probably thought I was exaggerating a bit.   But no.  Further striking proof yesterday.  The talented "Mr Green" made a reappearance - nearly two-and-a-half years after I first encountered him.  Yes, that's right - he's the next-door neighbour who knows how to clone monkeys. (Probably.  The kids aren't sure, but they decide to go and ask him.)

A tale of two exams

There are two leading examinations in 'business English' that non-native speakers may choose to take: BULATS (the Business Language Testing Service) and BEC (the Business English Certificates).  Both are administered in China by Cambridge ESOL Exams, a not-for-profit offshoot of the University of Cambridge which develops English language testing for non-native speakers, and for which I used to do a bit of work occasionally (I don't work there any more!).   I think BEC is the more recently developed of the two, and certainly only a fairly recent introduction into China; therefore BULATS has something of a head start on it.  Whilst there are a number of significant differences in the attributes and the format of the two exams, it is not readily apparent how a foreign student of English (or a company looking to assess the English abilities of its employees or its prospective hires) would be expected to choose between the two.    When you have two similar products directed towards essentially the same clientele, you need a differentiated marketing strategy.   Is there one for these two exams?  Not as far as I have ever been able to discover from Cambridge ESOL in Beijing.   Now, this may be the fault of the headquarters back in the UK.  I get the impression that a lot of time and effort and expertise is devoted to developing and administering the various exams, but much less to their marketing (academics all too often tend to disdain the 'commercial' aspects of such an operation).  Although its English for Speakers of Other Languages exams are world-leaders, Cambridge ESOL comes across as distinctly amateurish in much of what it does (much of the material they have provided to me to present in promotions and seminars, for example, has been abysmally poorly put together).   However, I fear there are special problems with Cambridge ESOL's operations here in China.  They seem to employ an exclusively Chinese staff - some of whom are indeed very bright and pleasant people.... but very naive about business.  Most of them wouldn't know a marketing plan if you slapped them around the face with it.  It is entirely possible that there is a joint marketing plan for these two exams (and accompanying promotional materials and presenter's briefing notes), but that the staff here are unaware of it.... or have forgotten about its existence.... or just fail to appreciate its importance.   One of the main reasons I've just broken off my working relationship with these people - after nearly three years - is that I had finally got fed up of continually being asked to go out and deliver "promotional" presentations.... without ever being told what exactly it was I supposed to be promoting, or how, or why.   At one of the very last events I did for them, I asked one of their more senior staff about this BEC/BULATS conundrum, and she simply did not understand the point of the question.  At first, she just gawped at me.  Then she unthinkingly rattled off the list of different features between the two exams.  "Yes, but how does that help us to choose which one we want to take?  What kind of people take BEC, and what kind of people prefer BULATS?"  More boggling.  Then she offered the relevant but not massively useful tidbit of information that BEC was mostly being taken by students still in college; the problem with this was that it was entirely circular reasoning - this is happening because the China office has chosen to market the exam primarily to students, but there's still no rationale as to why this is appropriate.  When I continued to press her for some compelling reason why this exam was better suited to college students, she offered - in all apparent seriousness - that it was not time-limited.   I was flabbergasted.  I was amazed to discover that that was the case.  But even if it is, it is not appropriate - it is not ethical - to market the exam on that basis.    Most ESOL exams are time-limited, I suppose, because principal stakeholders demand it.  With IELTS (the International English Language Testing System - the main English exam used to support applications for higher education study in English-speaking countries other than the USA), for example, the main 'consumers' of the test results are colleges and universities who know full well that such assessments of English level can become unreliable after just a few months (students may get much better or, more often, much worse) and are pretty well irrelevant after 2 or 3 years, at most.  The business community is perhaps less astute about this limitation of English languge testing, and has - thus far - failed to insist on a time limit for the validity of the BEC test.  But anyone with half a brain - anyone, certainly, who knows anything about language education - must realise that an English test result is worth nothing after a couple of years.   But not the people who work for Cambridge ESOL in China.  I don't know whether it's ignorance, obtuseness, naivety, or slovenliness - but they seem not to have a clue about either business or education.  And, worse, they seem not to care.

The dream returns to haunt me...

After a long period of having mislaid my phone number, my well-meaning but mostly incompetent tame letting agent has suddenly got back in touch with me.... and has shown me a nicely modernised siheyuan property in my neighbourhood that is - sort of, almost - within my price range.  As chance would have it, it's right next door to the Froogly dream house that was so tormenting my hopes back in June; so I had a look at that again as well.   I find I'm getting over my infatuation with that very big house (the L-shaped courtyard is massive, but the rooms - perhaps chiefly through unfavourable comparison with the yard outside - seem a bit dark and poky; and the dipshit landlord has still done nothing about tidying up or redecorating the place - the emptiness/tattiness factor is taking a good 25% off its rental value, as far as I'm concerned).  The smaller one in the adjacent hutong is very appealing (apart from some damp problems in the wall of the main bedroom), but, given the current torpid state of my employment, it would be a huge gamble for me to take on the extra rent.   Then again, perhaps I'm just being a wimp, and hunting for excuses not to move into a siheyuan just as winter descends on us (even with the new electric storage heaters recently installed in almost all the hutongs to replace the former coal-brick stoves, these places get extremely damp and chilly: and you almost invariably have to walk outside to move between certain of your rooms).   I have, however, found a rather enticing alternative to either of these 'fantasy homes': an apartment rather like my current one - a fair bit smaller (though I never use half of the space in my present pad anyway), but quite a bit airier (large, unobstructed windows in both the bedroom and the study), in a rather more interesting neighbourhood (inside the 2nd Ringroad rather than outside), very slightly cheaper (a major consideration in my times of penury), and - best of all - with a very pleasant landlord (a professional erhu player).   I am pretty thoroughly fed up with the place I am now.  I will probably be making the big decision within the next two or three days.  Fancy siheyuan beyond my means, or frugal but sunshiney regular apartment??  It's a tough one.  Wish me luck.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for October

Wow - October was something of a bumper month!  Hardly surprising, perhaps, given that ill-health and under-employment kept me at home for so much of it.     There were 52 posts and 17,000 words on Froogville.   There were 40 posts and very nearly 12,000 words on Barstool Blues.     And that's without attempting to tally up all the comments I wrote (on my own blogs and elsewhere).  I could have written a novel in that time!  Well, half a novel, anyway.   Let's hope I can cut back a bit from that output this month, since that would assuredly be a sign of much-improved financial and mental health.     However, glancing back over those 90 posts, I do feel it was a month of considerable quality as well as quantity.   My post on favourite openings of novels (reader contributions encouraged) seems likely to become a long-running 'collecting box' feature, and I must soon promote it to a spot in my sidebar.  I was also quite pleased with the piece on My philosophy of teaching and my recent Halloween collection of micro ghost stories.   Meanwhile on The Barstool, there were important posts about my theory of Beer Equivalence and the essential ingredients of a good sports bar (all sadly lacking in Beijing!).     Nothing interesting to report on the readership this time, I'm afraid.  Google Analytics is determinedly unforthcoming about the geographical origins of my visitors, and - usually much more fun and informative on this - Statcounter seems to be down at the moment.  If you are looking in from an exotic corner of the world, please leave me a comment to say hi.

War on Chinglish (11)

been and gone       It's a curious little quirk of English that we use the Present Perfect tense of 'be' rather 'go' to talk about whether we have ever had the experience of visiting a place.  Hence:   He has been to New York several times.   He has been to the opera twice this year.   We've haven't been to the seaside since we were children.     This enables us to create a useful distinction whereby the Present Perfect of 'go' is only used for trips which are still in progress.   He has been to the doctor's means he has finished his consultation and come back with his prescription for medicine.  He has gone to the doctor's means he is still absent from work, might still be sitting in the doctor's waiting room for his appointment.   He has been to Paris means he had a holiday or a business trip there once, some time in the past.  He has gone to Paris means he is there NOW (or is on his way there).      The Chinese usually seem to have a complete blindspot about this usage.  If they pick up on it at all, they tend to start thinking that 'be' can be used interchangeably with 'go'.     In the recording studio this morning we had an instance where somebody's absence from the office was explained with the phrase:  She's just been out for a little while.   That would have been fine, if this lady were now back; but the context made it fairly obvious that she was still supposed to be out of the office.  Clearly what was meant was She's just gone out for a little while.     It occurred to me (so conscientious am I in my efforts to avoid having to re-write anything) that the script as written could possibly have been interpreted to mean  She has only recently announced that she is a lesbian.   But I very much doubt if a Chinese educational publisher would be addressing topics like that....

Bon mot for the week

"They say there's a good book in everyone. Unfortunately, with most people, it's buried under the four or five really terrible ones that they have to write first."

Froog

Strange weather

Winter has shown up early this year.   It's been getting decidedly chilly at night for the past week or so, but Friday marked a dramatic ramping down in the temperature.  In fact, there was a point around 7 in the evening, in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, when the temperature must have plummeted a good 10 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit in the space of just a few minutes, taking it down to not much above freezing: my breath was steaming fiercely as I scurried through the downpour towards my evening's entertainment.   Last night, more of the same: bitterly cold, and starting to spot with rain as I arrive at a gig around 10pm.  Shortly afterwards, the tentative rain became a downpour.  And then, at the Halloween witching hour, the rain became SNOW.   By the time I went home at 2am or so this morning, the snow had turned to sleet and then to rain, and it didn't seem likely that any of it would still be around this morning.  At some point overnight, though, it had turned back to snow once more, and it was coming down heavily when I woke this morning.  The sky looked absolutely full of it, and it didn't start to let up until around lunchtime.   SNOW, on - or slightly before - the 1st November?!  Unheard of!   Well, not quite.  I remember back in '03 we had a very heavy fall, quite out of the blue, on the 4th or 5th November.  Then, as now, the trees were still in full leaf, and were bowed and shattered in their thousands by the great weight of snow.  There's going to be lots of clearing up for the city authorities to do tomorrow.   It's all melting again now, but I have a feeling there's going to be quite a bit more of it this season.       Did anyone see a Snow-Mao today?

Halloween punnery

Just to bring yesterday's collection of micro ghost stories up to a Baker's Dozen, here's a final little spooky frippery for All Hallow's Eve....     He haunts the back benches and the lobby bars: an old ghost Tory.

Film List - golden oldies

A very simple list this month (because I'm feeling lazy):       My Latest Purchases From The Best DVD Shop In Beijing (the one next to the Central Academy of Drama)     The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1933)   The Temptress (Dir. Fred Niblo, 1926)  -  Garbo!   The Killers (Dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946)   The Fall of the Roman Empire (Dir. Anthony Mann, 1964)   New Orleans (Dir. Arthur Lubin, 1947)   The Thin Man (Dir. W.S. van Dyke, 1934)   Knights of the Round Table (Dir. Richard Thorpe, 1953)   Anastasia (Dir. Anatole Litvak, 1956)   Lola Montes (Dir. Max Ophuls, 1955)   Nanook of the North (Dir. Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)   Random Harvest (Dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1942)   My Darling Clementine (Dir. John Ford, 1946)  -  the best Western ever.

Up yer bum!

Oh dear.  I've been at it again.  A couple of months ago, I got dragged into a long comment-thread exchange here, on Stuart's Found In China blog; and this week I've found myself doing it again, here.  My recurring antagonist is a young man who calls himself 'Pffefer'.  He's a lot sharper and more coherent than your typical fenqing, at least when he keeps off the trucker's pills; however, from time to time, he can get quite offensive, and I had to issue him a bit of a warning this week.  Knowing something of my Classical education, he quipped back that perhaps I would start insulting him in Greek.   Well, yes indeed.   A favourite term that came to mind at once was the verb rhaphanidoô (I'm pretty sure there's also a form rhaphanizo, although I can't seem to find that online).  Unfortunately, none of the dictionaries I've looked at seem to support Greek characters.   It's derived from rhaphanis, a type of radish, and the venerable Liddell & Scott Greek Lexicon famously defined it as to thrust a radish up the fundament.  Which was no use at all to a 13-year-old schoolboy: what the heck was the fundament??  The distinguished scholars were, of course, coyly avoiding the use of the word anus.    Yes, this word means to ravish with a radish!    But not in a good way.  Oh no.  Apparently, this was a particularly nasty punishment often visited upon adulterers and other chaps who had offended the master of the house in some way.   The exact mechanics of this, though, were never - as far as I was ever able to discover - elaborated on anywhere in the surviving Classical canon (it's the sort of the word you're only likely to find in the bawdy comedies of Aristophanes, and he's not a great one for explaining his references - "lion on the cheese-grater", anyone?); and so this was a question which excited much speculation during my years of studying Ancient Greek.   The first suggestion one usually encounters is that this type of radish was rather large, and thus its insertion was inevitably painful. This is at first quite a surprising idea to us Brits, who only know the small, round purplish red variety - which are of the size and shape of things that people do quite often put up their bottoms for pleasure. It's quite an eye-opener for the naive teenager to discover that other members of the radish family can grow much larger.  I don't know if anyone's done any investigation into what kinds of vegetable they were growing in Attica at that time.   Then, of course, one adds in the fact that the radish is usually quite a piquant vegetable, that perhaps it is its heat that is the main source of anal discomfort.  But the larger radishes are mostly very mild, aren't they?  And you wouldn't expect any of the spiciness to seep out unless it had been peeled - did they peel before thrusting?   The ultimate, and most convincing (most alarming!), conjecture is that one made cross-cuts in the end of the vegetable, so that when introduced to a moist environment it would soon fan out into a floret - making it difficult or impossible to remove again.  Ouch!     So, Mr Pffefer, please stay on your best behaviour, or I may have to come after you with a peeled radish.

12 spooky vignettes

Belfast-based author Stuart Neville has been running a contest this month, challenging his readers to produce some ghostly micro-fiction for Halloween, via Twitter.  Apparently this means that you're limited to 124 characters (including punctuation and spaces).  I suppose I should have given this a shout-out earlier, sorry; but the submission deadline is midnight GMT on the 31st October, so there's still plenty of time for you to have a go, if you feel so inclined.  Follow the link above for full details.   Although I was intrigued by the format, I disapprove of Twitter rather violently.  Blog-buddy JES very kindly forwarded forwarded a couple of my efforts (the first two below) via his own Twitter account, but I didn't want to bother him any further.  However, at the start of the month, I found myself knocking out one or two of these a day, in idle moments.  As with haiku, once you get the knack of the format, they're relatively easy.   So, here are 12 micro ghost stories, to get you in the mood for Halloween.  (I'm not a big fan of the holiday myself, but I don't begrudge others their goosebumpy pleasures.)   [Stuart's debut thriller has recently been published, as The Twelve in the UK, and the rather more self-explanatory The Ghosts of Belfast in the US: an extremely well-written but disturbing tale of an ex-IRA man haunted by the spectres of those he has killed - see JES's review here.]       What drew him to that dreary graveyard day after day, he never knew until at last he found the stone with his name on it.   The perfect man, she thought. He walked her home. They kissed by moonlight. And then he showed her the spot where he died.   He couldn't help himself.  Every day he drove down that street, the little girl always waiting to run out in front of him.   I watch myself across the street, under the lamp-post: the man who looks like me, my mirror-self escaped, following me.   Suddenly, the hitch-hiker has vanished, yet the seat beside me is wet with rain.   She stalked him in life, and now too in death, his jilted mistress. Suicide did not end her obsession.   The barman's in a mood: ignores us regulars, chats only to these new guys, says things haven't been the same since the fire.   It puzzles him. He buried his wife in the basement last year, but she still sits there on the sofa every night watching TV.    Vengeance is what he wants.  Though the men who killed him are themselves long dead, he still thirsts for vengeance.   Each dawn I see him, the sentry standing down, lighting a cigarette – just as he did a week ago, when the sniper saw him.   We stopped using the departure lounge at Gate 22 after the crash yesterday; but when I walked past just now, it was full.    'One careful owner' the salesman said. He didn't tell me she gassed herself in this car. Now she bitches at my driving.

24 - a superstition

I don't ride in lifts (elevators, if you prefer) very often, in China or anywhere else.   But there's one office building I've been visiting regularly of late where the lift always bamboozles me a bit.  As I'm looking up the columns of buttons to find my floor - just at the point where my floor is - the odd and even buttons suddenly swap sides.  I've been heading up to the 26th floor in this place fairly regularly for a year or so now, but it still trips me up every time.  And I suppose I must have had similar moments in other Chinese lifts over the years.   The problem, you see, is Chinese numerology.  4 is held to be a very unlucky number, because 四 (si meaning 4) is a homonym for 死 (si meaning 'death').  Well, a near homonym, anyway; I believe the tones are different (but don't get me started on the tones in Chinese!!).  And 24 is especially unlucky, because the 2 is supposed to represent 'quick' or 'easy' (and I really have no idea how that works, since the character for this, 易, is in fact yi, a [near] homonym for 1, not 2!  Help, anyone?).  Conversely 28 is one of the luckiest of numbers, since 八 (ba meaning 8) is associated with good fortune (although I don't know that there's any pun or homonym going on with that; why is 8 lucky?  Help anyone?).    So, Chinese buildings commonly omit a 24th floor, because the Chinese - still an extremely superstitious bunch - wouldn't want to rent any space on it.  (Should we try pointing out to them that the floor labelled 25 is in fact the 24th floor??)     I know this perfectly well, but it still befuddles me on occasion, whenever I'm travelling up to the 20-somethingth floor.   Do buildings in America and/or Europe omit a 13th floor?  I've never really looked out for this.  I travel in lifts even more seldom in those countries.

Haiku for the week

Grey chill enters bones Another absentee sky October Friday     Usually, we get an upturn in the weather around now, a little burst of 'Indian summer' in the first week or so of November.  I can't wait.  The back end of October is always the shittiest period of the year here.

Let The Right One In

It's been a while since I added a film review on here, but I've been staying in a lot lately (for a variety of reasons - mostly not good: poverty, illness) and so finally working through a great stack of DVD purchases I made earlier in the year.   Last year's Swedish vampire drama, Let The Right One In, was certainly one of the most stylish and haunting things I've watched in quite a long time.  It - more or less - won me over, despite my strong scepticism about the genre.  The recent upsurge of vampire-mania leaves me baffled: Anne Rice I didn't get; Buffy was at least mildly amusing, but it never hooked me; Twilight?  Twaddle!    I am appalled to discover that on IMDB, Let The Right One In is currently ranked in their Top 250.  This can only be because it is a relatively recent release and it is a vampire film.  It is a pretty good film, yes; a film that transcends the vampire genre; but it is not a great film, and nowhere near being one of the best films of all time in any genre.  IMDB voters are - as so often - just being silly.  It might, however, just possibly be - as many of the press reviews appear to have been saying - the best vampire film ever.   It would be hard to comment on how it transcends the usual vampire fare without describing quite a bit of what happens in the story, so if you haven't seen it yet and don't like SPOILERS, stop here.     The story appears to have a contemporary setting, in a small town in northern Sweden, in the depths of winter.  This is a smart twist for a vampire film straight away: the night lasts 16 or more hours a day, so the period of the vampire's inactivity is going to be much shorter.  The next, and even smarter innovation is that it is grounded in a familiar everyday story: the vampire thread adds texture, drama, but the prime focus is on the loneliness of young Oskar, an awkward 12-year-old who is bullied by his classmates and neglected by his divorced parents.  Oskar gains in self-confidence and self-assertiveness after he finds a new friend outside of school - potentially also a first girlfriend, and ultimately a protector.  So, it's a simple coming-of-age story, a socially isolated child learning to fight back against bullies.  It just so happens that the catalyst for this transformation, his beautiful new next-door neighbour Elli who he meets on the climbing frame outside their apartment block every night.... is a blood-feeding monster with supernatural powers.  Well, you can't have everything.   The film is beautifully photographed - with most of the action happening at night, lit by harsh streetlights reflected from the snow.  And there's an unhurried, elegiac rhythm to it as well: this is a film that's not afraid to take its time (almost certainly the first key aspect of it to be ditched from the forthcoming American remake).  Occasionally, perhaps, it is just a little too ponderous; but overall, this tempo seemed appropriate to the bleak environment and the empty lives portrayed.   I did have a few other misgivings.  I didn't find Oskar's character very satisfyingly fleshed out: he's a cherubic but saturnine enigma who hardly says two words in the entire film, other than to Elli.  The scenes with his parents, in particular, seem rather too spare, tacked on in a perfunctory kind of way.  And the coda baffles: we see Oskar on a train - going where, signifying what?  It is an irritating non-event, particularly after the stunning finale which precedes it.  (I don't want to put in too many SPOILERS here, but that final scene is destined to be known as something of a classic, and I think I will say a little more about it in a comment below).  There are also a couple of scenes in which it is suggested that Elli - ostensibly a 12-year-old like Oskar, although she might "have been that age for a very long time" - can transform herself into a 30-year-old woman; this doesn't really seem to add anything to the story but perplexity.   Vampire fans, apparently, particularly approve of the faithful inclusion of most of the elements of traditional vampire lore: resting during the day, extreme sensitivity to light, and - as referred to in the title - being unable to enter a home without permission (although I'm not sure what the origin of that one is; I don't think I'd ever heard of it until Buffy; it wasn't in Dracula).   I particularly liked one great shock moment: the exterior scene at the hospital. Not shock as in a moment of horror, but a really well-staged surprise - all the more impressive in that you are absolutely expecting what happens to happen, but it still takes you by surprise.   It's a simple, well-made film, with many layers to it.  It's a particularly - perhaps uniquely - affecting study of the vampire myth: we pity Elli because she is a vulnerable little child, but there's no diminishing the horror of what she is, and it is this shocking contrast at the centre of the film that makes it so morally ambiguous, so troubling, so compelling.  I just wish I could have cared a little bit more about Oskar.

Don't say I didn't warn you

My blog-friend Tony, of the eternally diverting Other Men's Flowers, yesterday forwarded me a link for the latest James Fallows article in The Atlantic, on the alarming topic of environmental health problems in China (Mr Fallows has but recently returned to the States after a long posting in China, and has been wondering how many years he might have knocked off his lifespan).   This is a recurring concern of mine, since I tend to suffer almost continual respiratory illnesses throughout the autumn and winter months (and other, weirder, more alarming ailments from time to time), and four people within my sphere of acquaintance have died of cancer within the last couple of years (quite young people, who were otherwise in good health). Fallows tries to be as bullish as he can about the prospects for recovery or survival if you limit your exposure to China - but the underlying message is pretty bleak: if you spend a long number of years here, it's probably going to kill you much sooner than if you'd stayed back home; and it definitely isn't a good place to bring up children.   However, perhaps the most alarming statistic in the whole article was this: the number one cause of death among foreign Embassy staff in Beijing is road traffic accidents.   Yes, you read that right.  They're usually on fairly short rotations, you see, only out here for two or three years, not long enough to develop any of those threatened chronic health problems; but there is no getting away from the short-sightedness, incompetence, and sheer homicidal agression of Chinese drivers.   I touched on this problem in one of my very first posts (although at that time I wasn't disclosing the fact that I was in China), and many more times subsequently (try searching the site for terms like 'accidents', 'drivers', 'road traffic', and 'wrong way'.... or indeed 'homicidal').   The official figure for 'road deaths' in China is over 100,000 per year (or it was, the last time I looked; probably much higher now that the number of cars on the roads has again doubled in just a few years); that is, or was, more than 5 times the worldwide average for deaths per number of vehicles.  And that figure is, almost certainly, grossly under-reported.   I know from bitter experience (I worked at the Beijing Bureau of Statistics for a while) how vague, unreliable, or simply fabricated most such figures coming out of China are.  The chaps at the Bureau mostly had no concern about methodology whatsoever: they were utterly incurious as to how the raw data they received had been compiled or what it could truly be said to represent.  They just did their number-crunching on it, and collated it into reports, as they were required to do, without ever raising a question about any of it.    You see, I wouldn't be at all surprised if 'road deaths' in the statistics compiled in China is a completely undefined term.  I wouldn't be surprised if it only includes people who die in vehicles, not pedestrians killed by vehicles.  I wouldn't be surprised if it excludes bicycles (and even motor scooters and electric bicycles).  And even if it is just people killed in vehicles, I'd bet it's still a gross under-estimate.  A lot of road traffic fatalities never get logged at all: out in the country, bodies of victims just get tossed in a ditch, and later recorded as 'cause of death: unknown' by local police; here in the cities, hospitals - I'm told - are actually discouraged from being too fastidious in their record-keeping about this kind of thing.   I should think that deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents must be well over 1 million per year in China: it is carnage out there.  (And, since healthcare in general and emergency response in particular is still so poor here, a very high percentage of injuries end up being fatal.)   Just about every foreigner I know who's lived here more than a few years has witnessed a fatality on the road; most have been involved in some sort of accident; one nearly lost a leg after being hit by a truck.  I myself have seen at least three fatalities on the streets of Beijing - all people who'd been knocked off bicycles (nobody wears helmets).   Be careful when you're crossing the road here.  Very, very careful indeed.     [That very first post on the dreadful driving standards in this country was part of a series of oblique commentaries on China which I tagged as 'Where in the world am I?'.  I discontinued this when I 'came out' about living in China, but I still think this was one of the strongest strands I've written on the blog, and I do commend you to go back and check out more of these posts.]

Return of the Daily Llama

Well, we haven't had one for quite a while now - largely because of my Internet/blog access problems and the difficulties I've been having in conducting picture searches or uploading photos.  This snoozy fellow comes from my old library of llama pics; I hope I haven't used him before.

Mac attack

This morning I happened to read a news item online about Iceland's economic crisis forcing McDonald's out of the country (hurrah!).   This reminded me of the 'Big Mac Index' sometimes used as a lighthearted way of comparing the cost of living in countries around the world.  I gather the idea was originally started, and is still continued annually, by the financial institution UBS; but in the past decade or so, The Economist's version has probably become more widely known.  I'm not sure where to get hold of a full version of the UBS country list (not on their website, as far as I can discover), and The Economist's is only available to subscribers (although the latest list appears to have been pirated - or perhaps reprinted with permission? - by the Oanda exchange rates website here).   Also, at present, this related index on how long it takes to earn a Big Mac in different countries is available free on The Economist website (although the stats come, in fact, from UBS).   There's a little interesting background on the UBS and Economist indices on Wikipedia, and a good article explaining their significance can be found here.     I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that here in China we still enjoy (hardly the right word) one of the world's cheapest (exchange-rate adjusted) Big Macs.  When there was a big spate of McDonald's openings shortly after I arrived here 5 or 6 years ago, I think the Big Mac was originally priced at around 18 rmb; but that proved too much for the local market, and the price was soon slashed back to 10.50 rmb.  In the last year or so, it's crept up again by small increments, and it's now about 12 or 12.50 rmb.  Not much over USD 1.50!  Of course, you might not get quite the same experience for your money here, whatever the Franchise Lords back in Illinois protest: the quality of the meat here is quite atrocious (yes, even worse than in the US), and the service is often extremely slow.   Not that I really wanted to talk about hamburgers anyway.  No, this was all just preamble - to introduce a post I just wrote over on parallel blog Barstool Blues describing my similar (but far more useful) idea for the Beer Equivalence Index.

Beijing Noise Pollution Blues (3)

When I get back from the bar, I discover that there are a couple of workmen busy replacing the big plastic characters on the sign above the entrance to the big government building opposite my apartment block.   It is 12.30 at night and freezing cold.  And they are working 25ft up without safety harnesses.  I feel for them.   But they are working with electric drills.   What was that about a law against noisy working late at night???     Luckily, these drills aren't very loud.  And they're out the back of my apartment, the side that's well insulated from noise.  There are lots of other people in this neighbourhood it is going to bug the crap out of.   I mean, really, because it's a government building you can't replace the sign during the hours of daylight??     Yes, sorry.  I am going through one of my occasional periods of low tolerance for the eccentricities of this country.

Beijing Noise Pollution Blues (2)

I am under noise attack by day as well.   For the last several weeks there have been renovation works going on in my building.   They have at least been observing the not-working-unsocial-hours regulations.  But between about 7 or 8am and 7 or 8pm there has been a more or less continuous thump and clatter of dropped building materials and chipped off tiles, and the intermittent but persistent brrr-brrr-brrr of drills.   At first, I think, it was a unit on one of the lower floors being converted into new office space.  Then it was an apartment one or two floors below me being extensively re-fitted.  (Are the workmen just hanging around the building, hoping to find new commissions every few weeks?)   Now (I judge from all the dust and debris on the steps) they're doing something down in the basement.  Funny - the drills still sound as if they are directly below my bed and study.   Lie-ins are near impossible.  Working productively at the computer is difficult, with this din - albeit a fairly muted din - almost constantly going on in the background, thrumming through the floor below my work desk, vibrating through my skull.   The drill is the worst thing.  It's one of those terrible SLOW drills.  Slow, and getting slower as it bites into something - horribly reminiscent of the dentist's instruments of torture.  And it's just a few seconds at a time; then a pause; then a repeat; then a pause....  It's like a constant stream of surreptitious farts reverberating through my apartment.

Beijing Noise Pollution Blues (1)

The whole block (well, since we're talking short hutong blocks here, probably two or three blocks) at the north-east end of Jiugulou Dajie has been razed.  Yes, they took my hairdresser's, dammit.  And much else besides.   And now, of course, we're running up against some kind of deadline - after a shutdown for the dratted National Holiday - and they need to keep the rubble clearing going on throughout the night.  Mechanical diggers, bulldozers, and tipper trucks rumbling away.... 24/7, I shouldn't wonder.   Now, this is a fairly densely populated residential area.  And isn't there supposed to be some law about not conducting noisy operations between 10pm and 7am???   Yes.  But if you got a permit for a development as big as this, you don't need to worry about the laws.     Fortunately for me this is just far enough away (about half a mile) that it shouldn't really be a bother.  Although it is a very still night....   Earplugs again tonight, I think.  Just to be on the safe side.

The weekly bon mot

"I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each preserves the solitude of the other."

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

A Classical Sunday

I had long thought this poem to be lost to me.  It had been introduced to me by my charmingly quirky mentor on my teacher training course at Durham twenty years ago, and I had used it myself subsequently a number of times in my teaching.  But then.... well, my last paper copy of it got lost in one of my numerous transfers of dwelling, and, in the days before computers and the Internet, that was it.  I'm not sure that this was ever published.  And, after the advent of the Internet era, I had tried repeatedly to dig it up online, but had always come up blank.  Then along came my endlessly resourceful blog-buddy JES to make me feel dumb and inadequate by rooting it out it for me fairly promptly.  As with the other long-lost poem he found for me, Edwin Muir's Suburban Dream, conventional thanks are entirely inadequate, but duly rendered anyway.   My teaching tie-in to this, since it is an irreverent, post-modern subversion of a well-known Greek myth, was often to begin with looking at the most basic story archetypes - The Quest and so on: the hero has a mission, the hero has special attributes or items to help him, he has monsters to defeat, and a girl is part of his reward.   During that first year of teaching I happened upon a particularly nice example of the way we have all internalized these simple story structures we learn in earliest childhood from myths and fairytales, and understand them better than we often consciously realise.  I think in fact this wonderful moment occurred in a marking exercise that had been artfully devised by my ever-playful mentor.  We were learning how to teach Latin to middle school pupils using a series of books called the Cambridge Latin Course, which had an ongoing narrative about a young Roman called Quintus who was driven from his home in Pompeii by the great volcanic eruption in 79AD, and subsequently wandered around the rest of the far-flung Roman Empire having various adventures.  In the second or third book in the series he was in Roman Britain and found himself at the court of a British king (the name escapes me; unimportant).  Courtiers aiming to assassinate the king introduced a performing bear which, goaded or released from its chains, ran amok in the royal dining hall.  Quintus was promptest to respond, picking up a nearby spear and running the poor bear through with it as it advanced on the king - thus ensuring that the rest of his stay in Britain would be very pleasant, I daresay.   Our mentor had given us an example of a simple comprehension test that could be set on this Latin passage (a nice alternative to just plodding through it, translating sentence by sentence around the class), and provided samples of genuine student responses to the questions set.   One of the questions was, unsurprisingly, why did Quintus kill the bear?  The expected answer was something like 'to save the king's life' or 'because the bear was dangerous'.   One student had written "because he's the hero".   Brilliant!  I wanted to give him an extra mark.   Anyway, the poem (thanks again, JES)....       Andromeda   One can get used to anything; the cave Was dark, smelt bad, and twice a day the wave Slopped on the floor; however much she swept, Sand, bladderwrack and dead sea-urchins crept Over the stones. The monster did not care, But crouched preoccupied before the door, Fretted at unsuccessful business deals, Went out to fish and came back late for meals. And when at last the heaven-sprung hero came, Wing-heeled and gorgon-shielded, thirsty for fame, Red-hot with bravery, he found her sitting Upon a damp stone, busy with her knitting. The monster lay asleep, and dinner stood To simmer by a fire of smouldering wood. The sword seemed pointless, something was amiss. She stirred the pot. He had not come for this. He was too late. The voyage had been too long. The gorgon shield turned no ill thing to stone. The gold helm hardly dazzled her at all. She hung the iron ladle on the wall, Stood up and faced him. Was the moment come? But when the monster shivered in the gloom She bent and spread a cloth over its coiled Green limbs. The hero's attitude was spoiled. Had he looked close enough he might have seen A thin dry shudder where her heart had been, But saw no thundering wrong to fight about, Clattered his golden armour and went out; Finding her patient unrebellious shape No pretext for a plain heroic rape. The tide was rising, and she turned once more To sweep the dark sea from the door.   Graham Hough

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Zhou Xun

I haven't yet included a Chinese or Asian lady amongst my 'fantasy league' of ideal women, and I am occasionally accused of perhaps having some sort of racist bias against them.  Indeed not!  I don't have the exaggerated weakness for Asian ladies that many Western males in the Orient manifest, but I certainly appreciate the charms of the most charming of them.   And I really don't think they come any more charming than the elfin actress, Zhou Xun.  Although she hasn't quite yet achieved the international profile of Gong Li or Zhang Ziyi, I think she's been in more and better films than either of them in this decade, which makes her probably the premier female Chinese film star of the moment (at least, within China).  There may be prettier starlets out there, but Ms Zhou just has that indefinable something that completely wins you over - a certain perkiness, a suggestion of humour or intelligence; I'm not quite sure what it is, but WOW.  I rather fear that none of the still photographs I've been able to dig up really capture this radiant vivacity of hers - but you'll just have to make do, and take my word for it (if you haven't yet seen and adored her in any of her films, that is).   She's an extremely good actress too.  I was first smitten with her in her two big breakthrough roles (gosh, getting on for 10 years ago now) in Suzhou Creek and Balzac and The Little Seamstress.  Lately she's been on my mind because she's starring in a new wartime spy thriller called The Message, said to be rather good, and heavily advertised on the TV screens in the subway carriages over the past month or so.  In this she wears a qipao.  If I could find a really good picture of Zhou Xun in a qipao, I'd be in a happy daze for the rest of the week. This isn't really a very good one, but it will have to do for now.   She is tiny, though.  Very nearly a full foot shorter than me.  So, I fear it would never work.  This is really my main problem with the ladies of the Orient, their diminutive stature.  If the lovely Zhou Xun were just 4 or 5 inches taller, she'd be my perfect woman.

The wall of silence (AGAIN)

In one of my early posts on here, I bewailed the infuriating local proclivity for breaking off all contact rather than delivering 'bad news'.   I don't say it's a uniquely Chinese - or Asian - vice; but I fear it is especially common here.   And this week, I'm suffering another big dose of it.  There are five people to whom I sent important e-mails at the start of this week.  Five people from whom I really require a prompt response.  Five Chinese women: all very well educated; all in middle management roles; all with good enough English that you wouldn't think anxieties about expressing themselves clearly in an e-mail would delay or prevent their replying.   But, after four days, I hadn't had a reply from one of them.   One did at least respond fairly promptly when I started following up by text message.  She claimed my e-mail had been eaten by her spam filter (which, I suppose, is plausible; although this hadn't been a problem with any of the other e-mails we've exchanged over the past month), and then sent me the reply I'd been waiting for yesterday evening.  Not too bad.  Though I'm very sceptical about that 'lost e-mail' excuse: I suspect she was just slapdash in working through her Inbox.   Two of the others - both very important, since one involves a payment that is due to me, and the other involves a negotiation on a new training contract - are still failing to respond even to SMS.  This probably betokens bad news.  But not nearly as bad as provoking me into going round to their offices in person and tearing them a new arsehole each....   The other two, I find, I don't have mobile phone numbers for; so I'll just have to try calling them at the office on Monday.   WHY?  Why are people so crap like this?  Why are they so lazy, so inept, so rude?   Oh, I know what it's like to be inundated with e-mails, and to find it difficult to keep track of which ones need a reply, which can be read without replying, and which can just be deleted or ignored.  But you have to be disciplined and thorough and conscientious.  However many e-mails you receive each day - whether it's 50 or 500 - you have to devise a system for dealing with them effectively.   If it's a personal e-mail (rather than a group mailing), and it's asking for action or information from you (rather than just providing you with information), then it requires a reply.  And if you don't have time to reply in detail, or you won't be able to give a substantive response for a certain period of time, you still need to acknowledge the receipt of the message immediately, and give some idea of the timeframe for providing a full response.   Acknowledging an e-mail - "Thanks.  I'll try to get back to you by the end of the week." - takes a matter of a few seconds.  It's really not hard at all - even for people who are very shaky in their written English.   Acknowledging e-mails is especially important these days, when overactive spam filters - and other Internet glitches (here in China, the rampant Net censorship adds to the occasional unreliability of e-mail transmission) - do gobble up such a lot of correspondence.   Acknowledging e-mails promptly and consistently will save business relationships from going sour.   And it will also save a lot of time - because some people, not everyone, maybe, but some people (like me, of course), if they don't receive an acknowledgement of an important e-mail, will follow up every two or three days until the end of time.... and you really don't want your Inbox getting filled up with that kind of bad karma, do you?   So, pretty please with sugar on top, answer your f***ing e-mail, will you?

Bastards!

After two or three weeks of reasonably ready Internet access via Tor, I find myself being comprehensively blocked again today.   Is there some special reason why they're tightening the clampdown again?  (Obama's upcoming visit, maybe??)  Or are the Kafka Boys just twiddling the knobs for fun?     Well, I'm long overdue to sign up for a VPN, anyway.

The weekly haiku

Everywhere building, and half-dug holes not filled in: hazards in the dark.     The twice-yearly spasm of hutong renovation is once again in full swing.  And once again, much of the work seems to have been begun and then abandoned half-done.  The lanes in my neighbourhood are nearly all impassable, and there's sand everywhere (getting airborne, getting in the lungs).  What gives with this??

Another traffic report - the blog stats for September

Catching up on housekeeping....

Here, a little later than usual, are the output figures for September.

On Froogville last month there were 35 posts and around 12,000 words.

On Barstool Blues there were 31 posts and nearly 7,000 words.