Just the facts, ma'am

There was a great, though disturbing, story over on the Chinageeks blog a week or so ago about the artist Ai Weiwei's campaign to compile a comprehensive list of the schoolchildren victims of last year's Wenchuan earthquake, and the obstruction which this venture is encountering from local and national government.

It includes an hilarious transcript of a telephone conversation between one of his researchers and a battily paranoid local government official, which concludes:

"This isn't a matter of 'speaking harshly', it's a matter of facts."

"You're talking about facts? I immediately suspect you're a female secret agent for the Americans."

You couldn't make it up! Could you? No, I don't think so.

See also Chinageeks' translation of an online article by Hu Yong on the importance of commemorating individual victims rather than impersonal numbers - he's speaking initially of the Nanjing massacre, but moves on to the Wenchuan earthquake. He couldn't, of course, extend his argument to the June 4th 'crackdown'. We can only hope that the government here will one day have the courage to do so.

Another gem from the studio

Last week I had to keep a straight face (and an even voice) while recording this dialogue:

"You have long hair, don't you?"

"Yes. I have three hairs."

I cannot even begin to hypothesise an explanation for this one.

[Hmmm - Homer S famously has three hairs; but in this picture I notice he has only two. Rats! Can't be bothered to dig out another one just now. Google Image searches are being heavily interfered with at the moment. It's hard to see how dear old Homer might subvert the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, but..... they're taking no chances this year!]

Sunday in the country

A couple of pictures from my weekend away in Huairou.

Unfortunately, the air quality was almost as bad as it has been in Beijing over the past few days (a shroud of humidity trapping tons of dust in the air, at times cutting visibility down to only a few hundred yards); and the hillsides were so crowded with blossom that it was difficult to get a clear view of anything as I hiked up this gorge - other than a formless sea of white and pink flowers. Stunning to experience live; but it doesn't make for good photographs.

A bon mot for the week

"Everybody wants to build but nobody wants to do maintenance."

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Mr Vonnegut was, I'm sure, thinking of the human condition in general, and perhaps more particularly of American foibles. But it seems to me that this one could be seen as especially appropriate to the Chinese today. There can be few other countries in the world where such a profusion of gleaming newness is but a mask for a morass of instant decay.

Things in bloom

The dramatic change of the seasons here in Beijing seems to call for some Housman. This is an especially appropriate selection for me at this moment, since I have just returned from a weekend away in the countryside, staying with my friend DD in her "hovel" in Huairou County. We opened the front gate upon arrival and were greeted by the gorgeous spectacle of the pear tree in her courtyard in full flower and thrumming with bees.

I have taken the liberty of altering the figures to fit my own condition; AEH, of course, imagined writing this as a young man of twenty.

"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now..."
(A Shropshire Lad, No. 2)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Forty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs two score,
It only leaves me thirty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Thirty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Housman (1859-1936)

List of the Month - the ming pian game again

I have once again been pondering the question of what I should put on my (now long overdue) next batch of business cards.

Here, then, are........

12 More Things I Might Have Printed On My Business Cards

Froog

A legend in his own Inbox

Froog

Hammer of the fenqing

Froog

Blogging in the wilderness

Froog

Single and desperate

Froog

Part-time curmudgeon

Froog

In China too long

Froog

Instant epigrams

Froog

Your place or mine?

Froog

When does the hurting stop?

Froog

Spleen & bile

Froog

Poet, lover, lush

Froog

People know me

The Reader

I just treated myself to a couple of big batches of (yes, of course, pirated) DVD purchases to see me through a planned month (or two) of liver recovery and careful spending. It included most of the winners and contenders in the recent Academy Awards, and a fair range of other stuff too.

Unfortunately, I decided to kick off with The Reader. (Well, no, I decided to kick off with the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, but that is just so awful it doesn't even merit comment. I feel soiled. I feel obliged to rush out immediately and buy the original version by way of karmic recompense.)

What a steaming pile! Prettily photographed and well-acted, yes, but what on earth is the point of it? I will follow the conventional etiquette of issuing a SPOILER alert, although I don't think there is very much in this film to spoil.

I suspect the source novel by Bernhard Schlink may be much better. There is often this problem in adapting very 'literary' novels for the screen. It's not to say that David Hare did a bad job of the screenplay as such; just that the contrivances of the plot are rather more rudely exposed on screen. In a novel, we can suspend disbelief rather further, particularly if we're being carried along by the ideas, and by the quality of the writing. Well, it's not really 'disbelief' that needs to be suspended as such, since this is not a wholly implausible story, though a somewhat improbable one; rather, it's a suspension of the demands we more usually make upon a narrative - focus, pacing, characterization, unity, that kind of thing. Writers today take far more liberties with this kind of thing, and we often allow them to get away with it, if their writing has other compensatory qualities. I rather think Schlink's novel may be such a book.

The Reader is not one story, but three: it's an erotic memoir of first love, a courtroom drama about a war crimes trial, and a prison story about a convict learning to read and write while behind bars. Each of these three elements is fine as far as it goes, but they don't blend convincingly together. (And, OK, yes, the main segment about the initial love story does make for somewhat uncomfortable viewing: David Kross's character, though he looks older, is supposed to be still only 15, but having a torrid sexual affair with a woman more than 20 years older than him. The only occasion on which any reference is made to any possible impropriety in this is when an innkeeper who's just served the couple lunch mistakes the woman for his mother. But for that one brief moment of discomfort, the arrangement is treated as perfectly normal, it is not questioned at all.)

The Holocaust theme seems to be grafted on rather arbitrarily to heighten interest; but that section of the film is dealt with somewhat perfunctorily. And the key plot device here is, well, yes, wildly implausible. Young Michael's subsequent visit to a concentration camp (which he is able to tour entirely alone; and without registering any reaction whatsoever) had me in tears, as any close-up contact with the Holocaust will do; but that left me feeling manipulated. The scene didn't seem to serve any purpose other than to inject some emotional impact that the rest of the story lacked.

The most frustrating thing about this story is the utter lack of any characterization: we never get to know the two main characters or understand their motivations; thus we never get to care about them. You can't expect people to sit through a 2-hour film with such a complete absence of emotional engagement with the protagonists.

I couldn't help recalling that when Kate Winslet made a very funny, self-mocking cameo appearance a few years ago in Ricky Gervais' Extras series, she joked that Holocaust roles were Oscar gold; that shaft of satire has proved prophetic for her (although I suppose this role was at least untypical to the extent that she was a guard rather than a victim). Yep, she was ticking all the 'Oscar' boxes with this one: willing to be naked, willing to be 'old' (lots of make-up in the later scenes), and willing to play a mentally compromised character (highly neurotic, and perhaps somewhat educationally subnormal - not going "full retard", but going plenty far enough in the context of, oh my god, a Holocaust movie!). It was a performance of some range and subtlety, but I've preferred her in many other things. I imagine it was the sense of 'worthiness' attaching to the project rather than the performance itself which won over the Academy voters here.

The one thing that almost redeemed this leaden fable about the power of love and reading was the final scene between Ralph Fiennes (the lover, in middle age) and Lena Olin (the camp survivor). Everything in the film up to that point had been trite and unsubstantial, I found; but that scene (I could well imagine it being David Hare's own invention, inserted as a kind of protest against the dross he'd been having to deal with in the rest of the film) was unexpected and electrifying: the victim refusing to be conciliatory, refusing to give any easy absolution, challenging Fiennes (and his former lover) as to what on earth they thought to achieve by approaching her in this way - it seemed almost to represent the everyman response of the poor viewer, mystified as to what had been the intended point of the whole story.

I'd watch that scene again. I'd almost recommend buying the film just to watch that scene; but I don't suppose it would have the same impact unless you'd first been baffled, bored, irritated and appalled by the 115 minutes that precede it.

Dao-le!

I had a cabbie the other day with the impressively aged registration number 0347**(yes, it's about time I tried to revive interest in my 'Search for Beijing's longest-serving cabbie' feature). He told me he'd been in the job for 21 years. (Unfortunately, he seemed to be one of those drivers who've been hopelessly outgrown by this crazy city: completely bewildered by the strange new metropolis that has sprung up in that time, and unsure of his geography outside of a few well-travelled districts. The garish novelty of the Haoyun Jie bar strip was completely unknown to him, and even 3rd Ringroad landmarks like the Hilton, Kunlun, and Kempinski Hotels seemed to evoke little recognition.)

The most memorable oddity of this cab ride, though, was the fact that the chap had chosen to insert his registration card into its dashboard display upside down. I'm always a bit suspicious when the card isn't easily visible (dirty display pocket, excessively sun-faded print, card missing from pocket altogether, or being substituted by an illegible photocopy - I've had all of these more than once), but after a little theatrical neck-craning I satisfied myself that my driver was indeed the same guy pictured on the card, the one with the veteran registration number.

Why had he done this, I wonder? He was plainly used to being asked about it, and seemed to find it amusing in some obscure way; but he didn't offer any explanation, and my Chinese was too limited to probe for one.

I wondered if he was repeating the visual 'pun' invariably used at Chinese New Year with the posters or paper cutouts of the character fu (good fortune) - 福 - pasted on people's front doors upside down: 倒 (upside down) and 到 (arrive) are, as well as being almost identical in written form, perfect homophones (dao, with the 4th [falling] tone]); and thus, putting your 福 on the door the wrong way up is considered to express the auspicious thought "good fortune is here!"

As it happens, 到 (with the addition of the intensive particle 了 to indicate a completed action: dao-le) is also what you tell your taxi driver when you see your destination going past.

I wonder if my long-serving but not especially knowledgeable cabbie thought this was a witty way of announcing to his passengers "Wang [not his actual name] is here for you!" Maybe so.

Postscript: My curmudgeonly erstwhile drinking companion, Big Frank, had very little patience with Beijing's cab drivers. But then, we all got into more trouble with taxis in our early days, because we didn't know our way around either. And I think there was a spotty patch in the early Noughties where the Supervision Bureau didn't seem to be doing anything effective to vet the standard of newly recruited drivers. The situation seems very much better to me now. Anyway, Big Frank used to joke sourly that the Beijing taxi drivers' test to qualify for their licence should be nicknamed not The Knowledge (as the London cabbie's notoriously demanding exam is known) but The Ignorance; anyone, he suggested, who was foolhardy enough to admit some slight familiarity with The Forbidden City or Wangfujing Street or the Kempinski Hotel - or any other significant landmark - would be immediately disqualified. Honestly, 4 or 5 years ago, that idea didn't seem so far-fetched.

Haiku of the week (month, year?)

Beijing's curse returns:
Lungs, throat, eyes all filled with dust;
Coughing all the time.

The belated return of the warm weather this week has been a decidedly mixed blessing. It's only rained twice in the last six months or more, so the whole of Beijing - the whole of north China - is a vast dustbowl; and now that dust is getting airborne.

I have been so bloody ill this past week or so, and I'm really starting to worry whether it's viable to stay in this country.

A fine image

Another piece I warmed to on first dipping into my The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 anthology last Friday was the micro-story Accident (bizarrely, annoyingly, this is uncredited - so I assume it must be the work of the collection's editor, Dave Eggers).

I was touched by this concluding metaphor:

The driver knows your name and you know his, and you almost killed him and because you got so close and didn't, you want to fall on him, weeping, because you are so lonely, and all contact is contact, and all contact makes us so grateful we want to cry and dance and cry and cry. In a moment of clarity you finally understand why boxers, who want so badly to hurt each other, can rest their heads on the shoulder of their opponent, can lean against one another like tired lovers, so thankful for a moment of rest.

China snapshot

Beneath one of the road bridges over the canal alongside Beijing's North 2nd Ringroad, half a mile or so away from where I live, as I walked home on this bright warm afternoon, I came upon a young man doing foghorn impressions with his baritone sax.

Impressively resonant in that narrow, shaded space; and charmingly surreal, too; but musical - not really.

Who on earth is Katrina Grinsley?

And where on earth?

And should I perhaps seek her out and propose to her??

Sorry, rambling there.

I have been visiting the site of my new blog-friend JES quite a bit recently. And he has a particularly sophisticated word-verification anti-spam gizmo on his comment form called ReCaptcha. This gizmo gives you not just a single nonsense word to fill in to try to convince Mr S's website that you are not a spambot, but a pair of words (or sometimes a word and a number). And, of late, it has been throwing up such oddly memorable and seemingly significant combinations that I am beginning to develop a paranoia that this isn't the work of a mere randomising program at all, but that the dastardly Mr S is controlling the display directly himself, slyly choosing resonant phrases that will tease and torment his poor readers.

I mean, where else can such a haunting North Country femme fatale as Ms Grinsley have sprung from?? The ReCaptcha device (at least, back in the days when it was being apparently random) has very seldom offered up a proper name. In fact, it seldom produces even one half of its word pair with an initial capital, let alone both of them.

So, it was certainly a bizarre statistical freak to be confronted with Katrina Grinsley.

Either that, or Mr S is matchmaking for me??

More chuckles in the studio

One of the greatest trials of my (well-paid but painful) work behind the microphone creating English listening practice tapes for Chinese high school students is the recurring ineptitude of the educational publishers we work for.

This is especially conspicuous in their constant inability - or even desire - to attempt to ascribe appropriate English names to the characters in these dialogues.

The Chinese people, almost every single man, woman, and child among them, are completely incapable (because - for so long now - their senior educators and publishers have had no concern for trying to produce accurate and helpful English-language teaching materials) of: a) distinguishing between personal names and surnames; b) distinguishing between female names and male names; c) distinguishing between real names and risible names; and d) using names in appropriate combination with titles.

In my first recording session today, almost every single dialogue had inappropriately allotted character names like Jane, Janice and Eva to the male voice (me!). OK, that was probably a different kind of error: the editors being so stupid or lazy that they had inverted the gender assignations throughout - the parts labelled 'man' should all have been 'woman' and vice versa.

No, a better example came up this afternoon when...... the suspicious death of a 'Dr Jack' was to be investigated by a detective called 'Officer Windy'.

How we laughed! How we cried!

Spring at last?

I'm still not 100% convinced.

Yes, the daytime weather started perking up at the weekend, and has been decidedly warm for the past couple of days, but..... still the breeze is quite brisk, and there's a lingering nip in the air that we don't usually feel in April. Things are cooling off pretty quickly after dark, and even I am not hardy enough to venture out at night in shirtsleeves alone.

Usually when Spring arrives here, it arrives so emphatically that you know, you just know that there aren't now going to be any more of those shitty cold spells. And the trees and bushes know it too, because they put forth their blossoms abundantly, unanimously, simultaneously.

This year, there still seems to be something a bit tentative about the blossom response. Some trees began coming into bloom on Sunday and are already now starting to look a bit threadbare, after taking quite a buffeting from the wind. A few others still seem to be holding back. And some appear to have started to blossom, and then retracted again, as if suspicious that Winter maybe still has one more dirty trick up its sleeve this year.

Spring only lasts 8 or 10 days in Beijing, and I had been starting to fret that I might miss most of it if I didn't have any time to get out and about before the weekend. But I think (I hope) the still slightly equivocal warm weather may stagger the Spring a little more than usual this year, may prolong our cherry-blossom season into next week.

If it does, I may even take a few pictures for you.

Filling the vicuna lacuna (another not-the Daily Llama)

Moonie was remarking last week on the absence of vicunas in the 'Daily Llama' series so far. Her whims direct our lives.

[Via The Coloring Spot]

The weekly bon mot

"Preparation is half the battle. Unfortunately, the other half is still fighting."

Froog

Dedicated to....

I suppose this is perhaps Cummings's best-known poem. When I was a schoolboy, I used to think he was 'my secret'. Well, no-one read poetry as a teenager anyway; but even those who did found Cummings too weird, too difficult. I was flattered by the delusion that only I got him. But then Woody Allen had Michael Caine use this poem to woo Barbara Hershey in Hannah and her Sisters, and for a few years suddenly everybody loved Cummings. I need hardly say that I was rather out of gruntle at this state of affairs.

Anyway, I got over my pique at Woody Allen. And the phase of Cummings being universally popular faded a bit. Once more he feels like a hidden pleasure, a poet cherished only by select initiates (yes, there may be several hundreds of millions of us, but we are still 'select', dammit!).

And this poem came to mind this week because I am - for the first time in a long time - giddily in love again. And the young lady who has inspired this feeling does have the most exquisite hands.

somewhere i have never travelled

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands


E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)

[By the way, I've now updated my last 'Poetry Sunday' post on Baudelaire's Albatross, identifying the English translator (thanks, JES), adding the original French text of the poem, and providing a source link with a number of other English versions.]

Inspiration

Last night I hung out with my old flame, The Poet. As part of her birthday present to me (six months late, but that's The Poet for you) she gave me The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 anthology. Dipping in at random, the first piece I came across was this - Manifesto, by George Saunders, from Slate magazine, celebrating the rise of the movement People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction (PRKA).

Saunders closes by saying:

To those who would oppose us, I would simply say: We are many. We are worldwide. We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail.

Join us.

Resistance is futile.

This cheered me up tremendously. And I'm in a really obstinate depression at the moment. Do follow the link to read the whole piece (especially if you're a fenqing or a fenwai).

A different kind of fantasy

I think I'll take a rest from my 'Fantasy Girlfriends' series.

Just for a month or so.

It is difficult at the moment for me to wax lyrical on the unattainable screen sirens of yesteryear (and so on). I cannot conjure the necessary levels of obsession when I am fixated on a real-world romantic interest.

Yes, I now have a real 'fantasy girlfriend'! Which is to say that I have a potential girlfriend that I fantasise about converting into an actual girlfriend.

Probably no good will come of it; but at the moment I can't think of much else. She is practically-perfect-in-every-way, and even Emma Peel suddenly seems a rather poor substitute.

Hoax?

I suppose I'm a bit late with this, but I've never been much of a fan of those April 1st shenanigans.

I can't now recall where I found this (though I suspect it was on FrostFireZoo [now, sadly, defunct]). However, there is a nice roundup of this and other 'winged cat' stories on Jessica Palmer's Bioephemera blog (and one of her commenters put me on to the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists - which is not as much fun as it sounds, but interestingly weird, at least). More also here and here, for the obsessively curious.

Olympic leftovers (3)

During the Olympic summer last year I commented a number of times on the "x-ray" scanners that had been introduced at all the subway stations (commenting mostly on what a complete waste of time they were!).

I had expected that they would be de-commissioned, sold off within a few weeks of the end of the Paralympics (well, in a sensible world, they would have been hired rather than bought; but I'm sure several people received generous hong bao [the little red envelopes in which the Chinese traditionally hand over gifts of cash] in return for authorising this massive purchasing programme). And, for a little while, it did appear as if this were going to happen. Most of the extra security staff who'd been filling the subway ticket halls during the Olympics disappeared; without the throngs of 'guards' hustling people towards them, the scanners were effectively falling into disuse; sometimes the scanners themselves were now left unmanned; several were mothballed, draped in foil-covered blankets; in a few places, I think, they'd actually been removed.

But then.... the blankets came off, the machines were put back into use, more security staff appeared again (not as many as last summer, but many more than last autumn) to operate them, and to bring them to passengers' attention (many of them are sited in really stupid positions, not on a convenient path through the station, and sometimes not even readily visible).

Is there some new terrorist threat the authorities are seeking to respond to here?

No, I think not. It's just another phoney job creation scheme, another sign of 'meltdown' desperation.

The weekly haiku

Painful contraction
After the heart swelled so full;
All seems emptiness.

New Picks of the Month

From the Froogville archives this month, I choose this very early post (from October 2006) on an inspired piece of Indian English which has become a kind of motto for me: Sporadic advance of relevance.

And on The Barstool, I nominate this April '07 meditation on the important art of Wingmanship.

I also once again commend to you my recent Barstool posts on The 'Dead Pool' (predict which Beijing bar you think is going to go out of business next) and Beijing's Best Restaurants.

And I further point out that the Possible Band Names thread is still open for business (even though it hasn't seen any new comments for a couple of months now - even from band-naming phenomenon, Gary). Please go and add some new contributions.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for March

Oh dear. Yet another too-much-time-on-my-hands month!

On Froogville, there were 67 posts (though 20 of those were my largely wordless 'Photography Week' series) and around 19,000 words. (Also, probably the busiest-ever month for comments, with almost 200. However, there were special reasons for that - see below.)

On Barstool Blues, there were 41 posts and just over 14,000 words.

Yes, it was a frenetic month on Froogville - and all because of one frivolous post about the young nationalist berserkers of China's online forums, the amusing little beasties that we know as the fenqing. First, my blog-pal Jeremiah mentioned it on his Granite Studio blog; then, The Peking Duck, probably the mostly widely read of the laowai China blogs, recommended it. And then, a week later, the illustrious Andrew Sullivan featured it on his blog at The Atlantic. And now, I have just discovered - thanks to the wonders of Google Analytics, which I have only just begun to play with - that I was also featured (translated into Chinese!) in this forum in the fenqing rumpus room that is Anti-CNN (hence a lot of angry Chinese stopping by lately).

What does all this do to one's traffic? Well, this (according to Statcounter):

More than 600 'unique visitors' in 3 days, following Richard's shout-out on The Duck.

But hey, look, I got very nearly that many in the space of just a few hours after Andrew Sullivan quoted me!

Most of those are going to be one-time-only visitors, I suppose; but.... this final graphic does suggest that, since this flurry of excitement in the middle of last month, the average daily number of my readers has remained higher than before - nearly twice as high, in fact. And I note that, whereas I used to have only a handful of regular readers in the States, and none in China (the 3 or 4 friends that I know follow the blogs here probably all use proxies, and thus don't "show up" as China-based), I now have 30-40 daily visits from the States and 20 from China.

Because of 'The Spike', the number of visits to Froogville last month was very nearly 3,000. I wonder what April's total will be?

The Barstool is still pottering on as before, at around 1,000 visits per month. I wonder what I can do to generate more controversy on there??

Oh, before I go..... I would also like to draw your attention to two recent features that I've linked to in my sidebars: Froog's Beijing Restaurant Guide and Froog's Beijing Bar 'Dead Pool' (predict the next bar to go out of business!). Please go and take a look, and contribute your thoughts.

War on Chinglish (6)

Will they never learn?

My new Chinese commenter 'Kirby' seems to be quite a fan of this series. A little while ago, in a comment on the last of these posts, I was prompted to write this to him, and I think it bears repeating in a post of its own:

Second language mistakes distinctive of people with a particular first language are a common problem with all language-combinations, but I do think that Chinese mistakes in English seem to be particularly numerous and particularly obtrusive.

It's not just down to the very different structures of the languages (what linguists call 'first language interference'), I think, but also the poor quality of teaching and of educational publishing in China for so many years. The refusal (even today!) to consult native speakers in preparing teaching materials is continuing to entrench these sorts of mistakes in China's English-speaking culture.

Furthermore, I think there's a problem with reading English here. My Chinese students never read enough. When they do read, they read far too slowly (because they're worried about trying to identify every single word, rather than using guessing strategies, and/or being satisfied with understanding only the gist), which obstructs overall comprehension (and hence, enjoyment; and hence, motivation for further reading).

And I think they're not usually very self-aware in their reading: they don't "notice" and remember new structures, idioms, collocations, etc. (I suspect it's because the Chinese teaching style seems to emphasise almost exclusively 'active learning' via the rote memorization of lists, rather than the 'passive learning' of acquiring more language through repeated exposure to it.)

If the Chinese read more English, and read in a more attentive way, they would surely start to notice that many of the phrases in this 'War on Chinglish' series of mine either NEVER occur in native-speaker English, or occur only very rarely, or are written slightly differently, or are used in a rather different way, etc. But NO - once these errors have been learned from a Chinese textbook or a Chinese teacher, they are never corrected.