Yet another not-the Daily Llama

Aw, cute.

But not a llama. No, this little fella is another vicuňa. The last one was too sketchy for some people....

Oddly familiar

Here's another "favourite" script from my recording work, one that exemplifies a different variety of the Chinese ineptitude (or the ineptitude of China's educational publishing houses, at any rate) in dealing with English names.

In one well-worn scenario (I must have recorded this many dozens of times now, with only the smallest of variations), a cub reporter is approaching a small-town college professor for an interview. Something like this....

"Excuse me, Professor Brown. Could you spare me a few minutes of your time to answer some questions? My name's Helen Keller."

"Helen Keller? That name sounds familiar."

[I can't help thinking that this sounds like a sarcastic interpolation from myself or one of my fellow voice-workers, transcribed - unwittingly? - into later versions of the dialogue.]

"Yes. I write a column on the environment for the local paper."

"Ah, of course. Helen Keller! Nice to meet you."

[I am not making this up.]

A bon mot double-header

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he once vowed to make it."

J.M. Barrie (1860-1937)

"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

E.M. Forster (1878-1970)

China and me (memories of my first encounter)

I have just passed the 15th anniversary of my first visit to China. I can't now recall the exact date. I flew into Hong Kong some time in the second half of March, but Qing Ming - the big annual grave-sweeping festival - caught me out by falling fairly early that year: all travel to the mainland was booked solid, and I found myself trapped in Hong Kong for 10 or 12 days, waiting to sort out a flight to Wuhan. When I did finally arrange that ticket, it was for a ridiculously early flight out of Shenzhen (now, of course, a bustling metropolis, but at that time still largely under construction; no kidding - my taxi ride to the airport from the small downtown area was 40 or 50 minutes of passing nothing but building sites), so I had to take the train over the border the day before and find a cheap hotel to spend the night. That episode is best glossed over: Shenzhen was a nightmare. I date the beginning of my experience of China proper from my touching down at Hankou airport (the runway only a rough concrete strip surrounded by grass; the terminal building a simple hangar; baggage claim a hurly-burly free-for-all as we snatched our possessions directly off the back of the tractor). It's a pity I don't remember exactly when that was; the beginning of April, I guess.

It was an unimaginably different world here back then. About 18 months ago, I revisited Hankou for the first time since '94 and barely recognised the place: an entirely new city has sprung up there. The new airport is gleaming and modern, no longer just a shack in a field. There are no more steam trains (passenger trains had already moved over to diesel, but steam was still being used for some freight until about 10 years ago, I think); and train tracks no longer wind through ramshackle neighbourhoods, taking you by surprise as they emerge from between houses and run straight down the middle of the street for a while. There no longer seems to be any of the drab, grey one- and two-storey housing that used to be everywhere there; it's all apartment blocks now.

It was still "a country of bicycles" back then. There were hardly any private cars, other than for a few party bigwigs; and only a handful of taxis, compared to today. The main passenger service was provided by motorised rickshaws - small motortrikes with crudely improvised bench seats and canopies (made of the then ubiquitous red, white and blue striped plastic sheeting which used to adorn every shop-front and building site; these days, it only seems to be used for laundry bags) fastened above the rear wheels. Very unstable. I had one particularly hairy experience as our driver dodged crazily through back alleys littered with building materials, seeking out the most improbable shortcuts as he made a heroic but rather too careless-of-danger attempt to get us to the Wuchang Stadium in time for a football match; at one point he clipped a pile of sand with one of his rear wheels and we got a good 25° or 30°of tilt on for what seemed like several seconds. I'm sure the only reason we didn't flip over on to our side was that I was 1.5 times as tall and twice as heavy as the Chinese friend who was sharing the seat with me, and so was able to provide saving counterbalance. Yes, sometimes your beergut may save your life - really.

There were some guys offering a passenger service on small two-wheeled motorcycles too, for one person, riding pillion; I didn't have that much of a deathwish. These machines were something of a novelty back then, and most people didn't seem to have much idea how to ride them. Accidents were commonplace. And both the bikes and the one-size-fits-all 'passenger helmet' offered were way too small for me.

So, the adoption of new forms of transport had begun, but it hadn't got very far by that point. Apart from the buses, there were some mini-vans and the occasional Liberty truck - but, basically, hardly any motorised traffic at all. Just thousands and thousands of bicycles, human rivers of them, 8 or 10 abreast on each side of the road. Even Beijing, I heard (though I didn't get the chance to visit the capital on that trip), was much the same in those days - eerily quiet compared to the constant rumble of traffic we endure today.

The commercial revolution hadn't yet really taken off. There were no major brands or national chains. A lot of restaurants and shops still bore old-style Communist designations like No. 23 Workers' Canteen (a particularly good spot for re gan mian) and No. 1 Department Store. Almost every house was attempting to run some sort of business out of its front room, but often with no sort of sign out front; and often those businesses would wither and disappear within weeks (in the neighbourhood where I was staying, I saw a number of these enterprises abruptly abandoned in favour of trying something else, just in the couple of months or so I was there). Our favourite eating spot in the 'hood was a family home that we knew simply as "The Fat Lady's", our affectionate nickname for the cheery and well-fed woman who owned it and did most of the cooking (I think she was actually called Mrs Wu). A little further down the street, another house opened itself up as a baijiu store; the guy had a selection of 8 or 10 huge 'Ali Baba' earthenware jars in a tiny, unlit room opening on to the street. You'd bring along your own container - usually a small plastic jerrycan - and he'd painstakingly fill it up for you with a ladle. I think the price was only about 10 kuai for 2 or 3 litres, even of "the good stuff". And the boss was quite happy to give us free tastings (perhaps only because we were foreigners, and foreigners were still a glamorous rarity in those days), even though we'd abuse this facility at least a couple of times a week: only a couple of sips each time from a porcelain thimble-cup, but still quite enough to get you lightly oiled, when you're sampling 5 or 6 liquors in quick succession, and on an empty stomach.

Exposure to cultural influences from outside China was still very limited. At the gate of the university where I was staying, there was a music shop (at that time, only cassette tapes were available; but within a year or so, I think, there would be a big influx of cheap CDs - quality-control rejects or deleted stock that had been 'clipped' to try to render them unusable - that would make a lot of Western popular music available here for the first time). The music they would blare out of their speakers every day seemed to progress chronologically, as if they were attempting to provide a potted history of Western music to passers-by (or perhaps this was simply the order in which the owners themselves happened to be discovering it?): at first it was all Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry (no Elvis, I don't think); but after a few weeks, they moved on to The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and a little later again to The Rolling Stones and The Who; towards the end of my time there, glam rock started to make an appearance - and I found myself regretting that I couldn't stay just a bit longer, to see if they would embrace punk next.

In theory, foreign currency was not convertible. You were expected to buy this weird intermediary currency - the FEC (Foreign Exchange Certificate) - which could only be spent in a handful of designated hotels and restaurants and at the special 'Friendship Stores'. This system was in the process of being phased out, as China lobbied for acceptance into the WTO, but was still nominally in place during that first visit of mine. In practice, of course, almost everyone was happy to get their hands on your pounds or dollars, and 'illegal' street-corner moneychanging was a daily event. (Hmm, perhaps that's one thing that hasn't changed so much: bank commissions are so high, so few branches actually stock much if any foreign currency, and there are so many piddling bureaucratic restrictions on how much money you can change, that just about every foreigner I know - including several who run 'legitimate' businesses here - still routinely uses backstreet moneychangers, because there's no real alternative.)

You didn't encounter much English back then. There was one stock phrase, "Hello! How are you?" (invariably enunciated in such improbably plummy tones that I always expected someone to follow up with "More tea, vicar?" or "Anyone for tennis?" ; I couldn't help but think that some listening practice tape they'd all been exposed to must have been culled from the sitcoms of Penelope Keith) which almost everyone seemed to know, and which would follow you down the street everywhere you went. Apart from this, just about no-one you'd meet on the street spoke a word of it. (However, I was touring around a lot, visiting universities and teacher training colleges, so I'd meet a lot of students, academics, and government officials who did speak some English.) There was no English or pinyin on road signs or food packaging, and only a very little on shop signs or advertisements - very different from today! The sense of being surrounded everywhere by Chinese writing - screaming incomprehensibly at you - was rather oppressive. But it did create an incentive, an imperative to learn the Chinese language that is lacking today; then, it was necessary for survival; today it's purely elective. Within just a few weeks, I developed a pretty fair listening ability, could speak a few dozen words quite effectively, and could even read quite a few of the most important characters (distinguishing 男, male, and 女, female, was the first essential, since toilets were never labelled in any other way back then). Most Chinese cities today are a bilingual environment, in both speech and writing; in these circumstances, it is much harder to learn Chinese, and much easier to get by without it - my Chinese has withered with each year I've spent in Beijing.

The country was on a cusp back then - poised between the possibility of breathtaking transformation or stagnation and collapse. Since the events of '89, China had suffered international isolation and the consequent stalling of its economic reform programme; and although Deng Xiaoping had tried to get things moving forward again with his famous 'Southern Tour' the year before, it was unclear whether his initiatives were yet having any effect - at least, outside of Shenzhen and the Pearl River delta. A German journalist I was hanging out with a lot was extremely alarmed about the country's prospects. Local government employees in Wuhan, he told me, were owed some months of back pay, and were threatening strike action. Many of the local utilities had broken down: refuse collections had been suspended some time ago, and people were dropping their rubbish down manholes. (Under-street explosions from accumulating methane were becoming commonplace; I witnessed one at extremely close quarters. Interestingly, many of the Chinese passengers who scattered from the bus we were on at the time seemed at first to think that we were under attack from the police or the army - such were the anxieties of those times.) Power cuts of an hour or two were an almost daily event; most of the larger shops and restaurants left candles out on counters and tables, ready to be lit whenever required. There was no street-lighting, other than on a handful of main thoroughfares; and, in the dark, missing manhole covers were a major hazard - I nearly stumbled into oblivion two or three times. Above all, the country was conspicuously dirt poor: even the major cities still felt like 'the Third World'. In short, China early in 1994 appeared to be coming apart at the seams. But it didn't. Somehow, that crisis was weathered, the reforms began to take hold, and the national economy would sustain double-digit growth for a dozen or so years.

I am glad to have seen the country at that crucial stage in its development; rather sorry not to have seen it also a decade or so earlier, when the legacy of the Mao years had scarcely been shrugged off; and yes, I confess, I am perversely disappointed that the China experience today is not so intense, so raw, so challenging. I was surprised to find how massively Beijing had changed by the beginning of the Noughties, even before the huge drive to rebuild the city ahead of the Olympics: the capital, and almost all of the country's cities and larger towns, now feel very modern, very 'Westernized' (KFC and Starbucks spread like Giant Hogweed). China is still very different from Europe or North America; but it's no longer so utterly alien as it was 10 or 15 years ago; and I do kind of miss that.

I had the time of my life on that first trip - travelling, mostly alone, on buses, boats and trains, all around the central provinces of Hubei, Hunan, and Szechuan - and I completely fell in love with this strange and crazy country. As soon as I got back to England at the end of the year, I began to look for ways to come back here. My German journalist friend had dreams of setting up an international school in Wuhan, but they never came to fruition; some contacts I'd made in universities and in the Ministry of Education had promised to help me find a job, but those promises proved empty; in desperation, I tried applying to VSO (the British equivalent of the Peace Corps, which was at that time providing most of the few hundreds of foreign English teachers in the country; very different from the situation today, where there are tens of thousands of them, mostly recruited directly by private schools and colleges), but even they turned me down (I think they took my eagerness to return to China as a sign of mental instability!).

So.... I got sidetracked doing other things for 7 years, and when I finally came back here, the China I knew had all but disappeared. But it's still wonderful, in constantly new, constantly changing ways: it's mad and huge and friendly and frustrating and baffling and endlessly vibrant. It's hard for me now to imagine anywhere else I'd rather live.

More snapshots from the countryside

I am much given to still life and abstraction....

War on Chinglish (7)

Could you tell me about it in details?

No, I couldn't.

In English we use the plural, details, in phrases like Give me the details. We can also use an adjectival form, detailed, in phrases like I look forward to receiving more detailed information from you.

But in detail is a set phrase, and it is ALWAYS singular. As with so many of these Chinglish eccentricities, this wouldn't be at all a difficult usage to recognise, remember, and assimilate if people here actually bothered to read very much authentic English (rather than the Chinglish drivel that most of the domestic educational publishers churn out), and read more attentively, more actively.

And, once again, I am fairly certain - because of its astonishing ubiquity - that this error has been propagated by a bad high school textbook.

I wish I could describe the history of this aberration in more detail for you, but I haven't yet been able to identify the book or books in question.

The weekly haiku

Memories of her blur;
all lost women become one
in the confused heart.

Apologies for obscurity

A couple of times recently I have used especially arcane references as post titles over on my companion blog, Barstool Blues.

The first, It is true that I do not, I was confident that at least my ridiculously well-read drinking buddy The Weeble would get. It is an archaic turn of phrase much favoured by legendary Irish hero Finn MacCool, as he appears in Flann O'Brien's dementedly brilliant comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds. This character has a poetical bent, and coins a number of brilliant metaphors to brag of his resilience in facing trouble: I particularly cherish I am a hound for thornypaws and I am a tree for windsiege. A great book.

Then, last week, in advertising my evolving plan to conduct an epic bar crawl in Beijing shortly, I proclaimed I have in mind a business. This comes from a programme for the opera Carmen, in a deliriously bad English translation supposedly produced by the Paris Opera many years ago - reprinted by John Julius Norwich in the first of his Christmas Crackers anthologies - which begins "Carmen is a cigar-makeress in a tabago factory" and degenerates from there.

The summary of Act Two is as follows:

Enter Escamilio, a balls-fighter. Enter two smuglers (Duet: 'We have in mind a business') but Carmen refuses to penetrate because Don José has liberated from prison. He just now arrives (Aria: 'Slop, here who comes!') but hear are the bugles singing his retreat. Don José will leave and draws his sword. Called by Carmen shrieks the two smuglers interfere with her, but Don José is bound to dessert, he will follow into them.

And, of course, in the last Act the toreadors enter to the rousing song "All hail the balls of a toreador!" Priceless stuff.

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.]