One piece of good news

Just over a year on from his release from detention, my artist friend Wu Yuren is finally a "free" man again. Well, as free as anyone can be in China.

For the past year he's been in this odd limbo status, on indefinite, unexplained "parole" (despite there never having been a conviction or sentencing in his abandoned trial), his movements supervised and restricted by the police, his passport confiscated.

Now, it seems, the charges against him have been quietly dropped, and yesterday he finally got his passport back - so he'll be able to go and visit his wife and daughter in Canada whenever he wants to.

The state security apparatus has more important matters to concern itself with at the moment, I suppose.

Of course, there's always the possibility that he could be spirited away a second time, if he attracts the attention of the authorities again, if he's deemed to have 'stepped out of line' somehow. That's the awful thing about living in a police state: arbitrary detentions may not happen so very often, but the knowledge that they can happen - to anyone, at any time - oppresses the soul.

Still, it's a small piece of good news - the only one I've heard from this country in quite some time.

Dear Blogger

Your new menus and 'Compose' screen layout look just HORRIBLE.

Why move all the buttons over to the side, when we've been used to them being at the bottom for 6 years?? WHY???

The new homepage screen is IDIOTIC too. How is it better to have to hunt around in a sub-menu under a not-terribly-obvious-what-it-is picture tab, instead of just having all the options you might want to access clearly labelled WITH A WORD each?

Are you trying to create a blogging platform for people who are ILLITERATE??

These changes aren't just unnecessary, pointless, and irritating - they are actually CHANGES FOR THE WORSE. It is BEYOND STUPID.

I think I am going to migrate to Wordpress unless you allow us to revert to the old-style user interface.

Haiku for the week

Twilight at noontime,

The soul drowning in darkness.

Endless days of grey.

Well, we had a couple of weeks of blissfully perfect weather, but over the last few days it has all turned to shit again: overcast sky and air thick with dust; light levels minimal, visibility down to a few hundred yards.

And no let-up in sight. The forecast seems to be much the same for days to come. It's somewhere beyond depressing.

I recall it was like this for most of June last year. This could be a good time to get the hell out of this doomed, toxic country.

Illegal Alien

Like many foreigners in China, I obtained my visa through less than wholly honest or legitimate means. I don’t, strictly speaking, work for the company which sponsors my visa. And I certainly don’t have any expertise in architecture or urban planning, as my work permit suggests. In fact, I’ve never met anyone who works for the company or visited its offices. I’m not completely confident that my nominal employer even exists. I imagine that it is just a paper entity, a convenient fiction created solely for the purpose of securing a quota of ‘foreign expert’ work permits which can then be sold on for a handsome sum to thwarted visa-seekers like myself.

I wish it were otherwise. Honesty and respect for the law are important values for me. I don’t like being forced to compromise those ideals. I don’t like having to resort to such petty subterfuges. I don’t like how precarious it makes my tenure in China seem, living with the knowledge that the government has a reasonable excuse for throwing me out of the country at a moment’s notice whenever it pleases.

Above all, I don’t like the ever escalating ‘arrangement fees’ that my visa agent charges for concocting the phony paperwork to support my annual reapplication to the Entry & Exit Department of the Public Security Bureau and to the web of "relevant" Ministries. The cost of obtaining a prized ‘Z’ – the year-long working visa – nearly doubled in the last few months before the Olympics were held here, and never again fell back to the pleasantly inexpensive pre-2008 levels; instead, the price has continued to ramp up steadily ever since, another 500 rmb or 1,000 rmb each year.

The cost of a ‘Z’ visa seems to be cannily tied to that of the ‘F’, or ‘business visa’; and the cost of one those usually involves substantial incidental extras which make it a little difficult to quantify. The ‘F’ visa, always somewhat tricky to apply for because of the opaque and constantly shifting regulations governing it, has, since 2008, become impossible to obtain within China; and there have been recurring rumours that it is to be abolished altogether. The Chinese government has intermittently tried to force people to return to their native country in order to renew an ‘F’ visa; but most of the time it is OK just to hop over the border for a day or so, and then hop straight back. The regular ‘visa run’ has become a central element of the expat lifestyle here, almost, indeed, a kind of initiation rite. For residents in north China, a quick trip into Outer Mongolia is a thrifty but unexciting option. Those in the south of the country may be more enthusiastic about having a pretext for a short holiday in Vietnam or Thailand. For most China expats, though, the default destination for obtaining a hassle-free ‘F’ visa is Hong Kong.

No matter how crazy and xenophobic and exclusionary the visa policy may get on the mainland, in Hong Kong it’s always business as usual. The Special Administrative Region enjoys the marvellous dualism of being both ‘part of China’ and ‘outside of China’; it counts as “overseas” for the purposes of making a visa application for entry to the Chinese mainland, and the visa office down there is famously easy-going about issuing ‘F’ visas. It’s usually such a comparative doddle to get visas in Hong Kong, you feel they might as well give them away free along with the tourist maps provided to guests in the cheap hotels of Chungking Mansions.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy. There’s still an arrangement charge, over and above the official fee payable to the government. And then there’s the cost of a long weekend in Hong Kong, and travel there and back. Having to do that twice a year (sometimes four times a year, since the 6-month ‘F’ visa is occasionally hard to come by and people have to settle for a 3-month version) gets pretty expensive. It’s usually rather more than the cost of getting a ‘Z’ in the mainland, in fact; but never that much more. 

 It’s always been a very fine calculation for me: would the enjoyment of a little spree in Hong Kong offset the additional expense? Yes, it certainly would. After all, I might go to Hong Kong once or twice a year to visit friends anyway. The ‘F’ visa has its disadvantages, though: you’re not supposed to work, you can’t pay tax, and it’s difficult or impossible to convert to any other sort of visa without leaving the country again. I’ve always preferred the greater flexibility and stability the ‘Z’ visa provides, and the veneer of respectability too – that cachet of being designated as a ‘foreign expert’, even if this exalted status has been procured in a slightly underhand manner.

Well, it seems I won’t have to continue with these gripes and grumbles and agonising deliberations over how to get my visa any longer. The agent-arranged ‘Z’ visa just went the way of the dodo. I had queried the possible implications of last year’s new social security law with my visa agent just after it came into effect in October. “No problem at all,” she assured me. “Everyone will just ignore this. It won’t cause any trouble for you. You can get your visa from the same company next year.” I suspected she was lying to me, or deceiving herself. The requirement for companies both to pay employer’s contributions to the various social security funds on behalf of foreign workers (equivalent to around 47% of salary in Beijing) and to collect their employee contributions (22.5% of salary) obviously had the potential to become a major bureaucratic headache, and was certainly going to be a cause of some concern to my “employer”. Even if supervision and enforcement would to be patchy in the early years of the new scheme, the constant possibility of a random inspection of social security records was likely to be enough to scare many such ‘front companies’ out of the visa selling business.

This is what I was saying six or seven months ago, and it has come to pass. My visa agent has almost been put out of business. My “employer”, and all of the other tame visa vendors she had relied on for a supply of working visas, have withdrawn from the game. There are just a few such companies trying to persist in the ruse; but this now requires a visa applicant to go through the rigmarole of registering in the Chinese social security system (I think this is just a case of the companies being careful, rather than government enforcement being that thorough). Moreover, we would now have to pay both the employer’s and the employee’s social security contributions on a plausible minimum salary (likely to amount to at least 15,000 RMB a year). And the sudden demand-supply imbalance is enabling the few surviving ‘fixers’ to vastly inflate their basic ‘arrangement fees’. The cost of a ‘Z’ visa just went up three- or fourfold, almost overnight.

It’s not the abrupt demise of the phony visa that alarms me. It’s the fact that this has almost certainly been an inept, inadvertent, unforeseen side-effect of the introduction of the new social security regime, and one whose consequences could be far-reaching, even disastrous. A large percentage of foreigners in China obtain their visas in this way. We are forced to. Many Chinese employers – and even some smaller foreign companies – could in theory obtain work permits and visas legitimately but find the procedure to be too much hassle and decline to do so, leaving their foreign employees to make their own arrangements. The British Council, which administers the enormously popular IELTS English exam in China, is unable to provide visas for its several hundred examiners. Some of them have teaching jobs which give them legitimate visas, but a great many of them survive mostly on the IELTS work and have to rely on ‘fixers’ to procure visas for them. The British Council, perpetually struggling to keep up with the exceptional demand for the IELTS test in China, could soon be facing a serious shortfall in examiners, as dozens of them may be forced to quit the country in the next few months.

For freelancers like myself, visa ‘fixers’ are the only option. Our status is not recognised by the Chinese government: there is no legitimate avenue by which we can obtain a visa. I have lived in China for 10 years now. I have worked for a number of state-owned enterprises. I have paid my taxes (or at least, my employers have all claimed that they paid taxes for me, and I trusted them!). I’ve never been in any trouble with the law. I could provide testimonials from distinguished academics or high-ranking local government officials that I’ve worked with. I manifestly have the qualifications and experience to support myself by honest and useful labour. And the savings I have deposited in the Bank of China could support me reasonably comfortably for a year or so without my needing to work at all. Why have I always been forced to pretend to work for someone else in order to get a visa? Why must I now masquerade as a “visiting businessman” on an ‘F’ visa, and pretend not to work at all? WHY?

It is the ‘Chinese way of doing things’: for years it has generated a thriving black market in visa facilitation, which was openly connived at – cooperated with, profited from – by the authorities. Now, that system has been torpedoed. I don’t mourn the loss of a corrupt and leaky ship; I just wish they’d provided some lifeboats.

By the way, this is a longer version of something I worked up a couple of weeks ago for one of the expat magazines here. Unfortunately, the expected "cooperation" with that employer unravelled rather spectactularly - after I'd submitted this piece as a sample of my work, for possible inclusion in next month's edition of one of their titles. I have reminded them that they do not have my permission to publish it, but I half suspect they will anyway. If anyway notices some version of this piece cropping up elsewhere on the Internet, please let me know... and I shall prepare to unleash the wrath of my formidable legal team!

The TV Listings (11)

Time for another roundup of my video postings, this time from the last quarter of 2011.

The Comedy/Movie Channel

Not the Chinese national anthem - for China's National Day on October 1st, I post an amusing parody of March of the Volunteers (by a YouTuber called ThDubya, who has a raft of spoof national anthems).

Crimewave - two great clips from Sam Raimi's underrated homage to slapstick comedy, as I enrol its lovely leading lady, Sheree J. Wilson, as one of my 'Fantasy Girlfriends'.

A Private Listening Party - Tom Waits has an amusing brainwave for promoting his new album, Bad As Me.

We Need Recruits! - the music hall recruiting scene from Richard Attenborough's Oh, What A Lovely War!, with Maggie Smith belting out a raunchy song to woo impressionable young men into the services (and the gorgeous Jane Seymour making her first - uncredited, blink-and-you-miss-it - screen appearance as one of the chorus girls in the background).

Baby, It's Cold Outside - the story of Frank Loesser's playful winter duet, with performances by Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell in Elf, by Cerys Mathews and Tom Jones, and by Frank Loesser and his first wife, Lynn (audio only, but magical).

Making a point - a disgruntled Chinese multi-millionaire in the northern port city of Qingdao (home of the famous Tsingtao beer) hired four workers to smash his Lamborghini Gallardo to pieces with sledgehammers. Apparently, the cigarette lighter wasn't working. Talk about a fit of pique!

The Music Channel

But not as we know it - Montreal-based folk musician Brad Barr does some bluesy experimentation with his remarkable custom-built guitar, fashioned out of an old metal fishing-tackle box.

The Theme from 'Shaft' - which, of course, Father Ted taught us is one of the best ways of driving the blues away. I linked to a couple of great clips of its composer Isaac Hayes playing it, but for an embedded video I chose a version by the marvellous Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

You'll Never Know - the latest entry in my 'Great Love Songs' series, with the original performance by film star Alice Faye and the subsequently more famous version by Ella Fitzgerald.

Both Sides Now - but not as we know it: here, the lovely Joni Mitchell song is performed in the Khmer language, by the band Dengue Fever (who are from California, but specialise in Cambodian pop); it's the end-credit music from the atmospheric 2002 thriller City of Ghosts, a promising directorial debut by Matt Dillon.

Yesu Wayinyanza  - a beautiful Kenyan folk song performed by the superb Muungano National Choir (a song with a strange personal meaning for me!).

The Long Way Home - after a most unfortunate experience, I turn to the wisdom of the great Tom Waits for consolation.

Need Your Love So Bad - my favourite blues guitarist, Peter Green, the original leader of Fleetwood Mac, performs the great slow blues ballad (and there's an additional link in the comments to a version by Gary Moore, performed as a tribute to Green, who had been a mentor to him as a youngster).

If You Gotta Go, Go Now - a Bob Dylan song done about a gazillion times better by the Cowboy Junkies (no video, alas; but a great recording of a great performance).

Needle and Spoon - Des McGarry and Black Cat Bone belting out some classic blues at an intimate little Harmonica Festival in Beijing's Jianghu bar a few years ago; not great sound or picture quality, but a lively performance. These guys had been The Jing's leading party band for several years, but had just announced their retirement at the end of last year - so, this was my farewell tribute to them.

We Need Recruits! - see above, under Movies.

Mr Romance - Chicago bluesman Andrew 'Jnr. Boy' Jones has some advice on keeping the ladies happy. It probably helps if you can play the guitar like that.

Baby, It's Cold Outside - see above, under Movies.

The Sports Channel

No entries under 'Sports' again in this period, I fear. Perhaps I'm just not very sporty any more??

Is the combination surprising? [War on Chinglish - 23]

The Chinese seem to be taught that as well as simply means the same as and.

And, for some reason, many of them seem to prefer the more cumbersome phrase, and use it far too often. Perhaps they have been infected with the vice of elegant variation, and shun the more straightforward word in a perverse bid for originality.

As well as is rarer and more intensive than just and; it implies that the item appended by it to a pair or list is somehow untypical or unexpected, perhaps excessive.

He attended Harvard as well as Columbia.

I tried the dumplings as well as the stew, and now I'm feeling too full.

It seems to be a particularly common tic amongst the Chinese 'academics' I work with to favour the use of as well as to link the last item in a list: e.g., On his visit to Europe, Hu Jintao visited Germany, France, Holland, as well as Denmark.

This brings up the small additional point that you can only substitute as well as for and with pairs of things (although it still might not be a good idea to do so); with a list like this, we'd need an and as well (between France and Holland, making them the last two items in the list proper, with Denmark being a supplement or afterthought). But the main thing here is that "as well as Denmark" would only be appropriate if we are seeking to correct a possible misapprehension in our reader or interlocutor that Denmark was the only - or only important - stop on the tour. As well as always carries some such extra emphasis, whereas and doesn't.

This may seem like a very small thing, but it has been occurring more and more frequently in my editing assignments of late, and it is starting to BUG THE CRAP OUT OF ME.

Please stick with and - it's so much easier. (And, as with so many of these Chinglish foibles, it is always correct; while learning the correct use of as well as will remain forever beyond the reach of most Chinese users of English.)

Bon mot for the week

"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."

Maya Angelou  (1928- )

Your lupins or your life!

The other week, a passing reference to 義匪 (yi fei, the Chinese for 'righteous bandits', and the 200th contribution to my Invent A Name For A Rock Band thread) reminded me of this classic Monty Python skit about the idealistic but inept highwayman Dennis Moore. It's a rather more sustained and coherent piece than most of their silliness, a full 10 minutes of continuous story. I remember it being one of my favourite bits of Python when I first saw the show as a young child; I found it one of the most bladder-bustingly funny things I'd ever seen. I'd probably only seen it two or three times, and nearly 40 years ago now, but I found I could still remember almost every detail of it. And it still makes me very nearly piss myself.

Consoling humour

The torture of last weekend's abominably pointless language testing marathon was slightly alleviated by a couple of moments of thigh-slapping hilarity. Our chortles, though, were not as hearty as they might have been, more the product of embarrassed discomfiture than pure mirth.

I think I have probably spoken before (though I can't recall where) of how limited most Chinese people's knowledge of history seems to be - even their own, but even more so of 'Western' history. For example, they seem to know next-to-nothing about World War II in Europe. This lack of a basic historical framework nurtures a broader ignorance of cultural sensitivities...

One candidate had listened to a portion of the speech Barack Obama made on a visit to Berlin a few months before he was elected President in 2008. He made references to it being the 60th anniversary of the Berlin airlift, an event of which our candidate - and, I would guess, about 98% of the Chinese people - was entirely unaware. When I tried to help the chap by prompting with one or two questions about WHO it was that the Allies might have been helping the Germans against after the War, he eagerly guessed: "Those Jews?"

How we cringed!

Earlier in the day, another candidate had been treated to an Obama anecdote (gawd, it was all Obama that day: we poor examiners got thoroughly sick of it!) about how his mother had woken him up in the middle of the night to give him extra lessons when he was a young boy, and how, if he ever whinged about it, she would reprove him by saying, "You know, this is no picnic for me either, buster."

Or, as our candidate recounted it: 

"This is not a picnic, you little bastard!"

I wonder if the saintly Mrs Obama ever did chastise her son in those terms. I bet she did, once in a while.

Haiku for the week

Wistfulness rises

At the prospect of parting:

End of an affair.

Have you ever been in a relationship that's deteriorated so far that you barely even talk to each other any more, where you realise it's 'over' and are just awkwardly waiting for one of you to summon up the courage to say so? And then, of course, just as you've got used to the idea and are feeling ready to move on, the damn girl starts dressing really sexily again... and it taunts you with memories of how things used to be, stirs up a flurry of doubts and regrets.

Beijing always does this to me. Just when I think I've really had enough, when I just can't take the craziness - the stupidity, the dishonesty, the selfishness, the homicidal behaviour on the roads, the crowds, the pollution, the corruption - can't take any of it any more, when I'm planning to leave and looking forward to it and thinking I probably might never come back... then we get a spell of idyllic weather, and a lull in work in which to enjoy it, and... the pangs of uncertainty start to tear at the heart.  We had some good times together, didn't we?

Simple pleasures

My grocery bill this morning came to 88.88 RMB.

The checkout girl acted as if I'd won the lottery! (The number 8 is regarded as lucky in Chinese superstition, you see.)

I confess her glee was infectious, although I would not on my own account have got particularly excited about receiving 11.1 RMB in change. However, I suppose I was quite grateful to get away with spending less than 100 RMB for once.

More futility

Last weekend, I was participating in a large-scale foreign language skills assessment programme for the state-owned news agency Xinhua. This is supposedly an "annual" event, but in practice it only seems to occur every two or three years. Well, I think this is the fourth time I've done it in seven years.

It was a particularly frustrating experience this time. In the past, the English tests I'd been administering were quite a varied challenge, involving some reading, some straightforward Q&A, and a small amount of rather freer conversation with the examiner at the end - which allowed for a reasonable amount of differentiation of the candidates.

The marking scale was a bit narrow, and the marking guidelines almost non-existent. But still, the test itself was fairly sound, and it did enable us to produce some kind of meaningful ranking of the candidates' English ability (a high level of which can, in theory, give them access to pay bonuses, promotions, and coveted overseas postings).

Following the old Chinese adage of "If it ain't broke, break it", this year they decided to change everything.

There was no longer any meaningful interaction with the examiners at all, no element of conversational English; it was almost entirely a listening test. 

The first part was graded on sets of 'True or False' questions which were so badly written (the basis of most of them was in fact: here is a hugely long verbatim quote from the passage you just heard, which has a number of typos and omissions in it; one of them is deliberate, and is supposed to be significant - it might well not be, but you have to guess if we intended it to be!) and varied so wildly in their degree of difficulty that the results on this section were essentially random. With 2 marks for each "correct" answer, almost everyone scored either 6, 8, or 10 marks (with the benefit of a lot of subliminal prompting from the examiners!). So, in effect we had only a three-point marking scale. And the main performance differentiator here was blind luck - whether you got an easy set of questions, or happened to guess right on some impossible questions.

In the second part, the poor candidates were forced to listen to LONG extracts from a political speech and then "sum up the main points" they could remember. This was a ridiculously difficult and unstructured task. The only people who did reasonably well on it were the ones who were adept at writing notes quickly, and were thus able to repeat certain phrases or sentences from the speech word-for-word (though usually without any apparent comprehension of their significance; almost no-one was capable of responding to even the simplest of questions about the stuff they were regurgitating). The banding scheme here was again very narrow: almost everyone was classified as either 'Low Average' or 'High Average', with only a few being (rather over-generously) awarded a grade of 'Excellent'. So, this section was judged on a three-point scale, with the main performance differentiator being an ability to take dictation.

In 20 years of EFL teaching, that was the most WORTHLESS test I have ever seen. I am appalled, disgusted to think that the results of this fiasco might actually be used to determine the progress of people's careers, to judge if they are capable of undertaking an overseas posting. My molars are ground down to the bone.

Up in smoke!

After two months of vexed attempts to follow up on a personal introduction, after two weeks of thwarted attempts to 'confirm' what seemed to have been all finalised at an interview, after two days of increasingly fractious non-negotiation about the details of a particularly insane and stupid contract... I have just blown yet another "job prospect" out of the water.

And boy, did that feel good!

Sometimes, when people are being idiots, you just have to tell them that they are being idiots. I refuse to work with a pair of dingbats who appear to have the combined IQ of a watermelon.

A 'stumbler' gets through

Darn! Just when I'd welcomed back a commenter who'd felt excluded by the pernickety behaviour of Blogger's word verification widget a couple of months back, I find that one shambling spambot has got past my filters.

I fear this could be the first of many.

I'm wondering if I might have to restore the dratted 'safety' widget... and thereby discourage all further commenting. Oh, woe, woe!

And, talking of zombies, she can eat my brains any time. Hmm, that's perhaps a rather too incisive metaphor for the devastation a girlfriend can wreak...

Slowdown - what slowdown?

I had occasion to visit the neighbouring city of Tianjin a couple of weeks back. The opening of a high-speed rail shuttle (trains every 10 or 15 minutes throughout the day, with most of them taking only a little over half an hour) has made this an attractive option for occasional day-trips out of The Beige. Being near the coast, with a small river running through the middle of it, Tianjin is a considerably greener and fresher proposition than my dust-clogged, smog-choked hometown. But I digress.

I had an hour or so free before my meeting, so took advantage of the first day of properly warm spring weather to go for a stroll along the riverbank. There are several large construction sites adjacent to the railway station in the centre of Tianjin, ranged along either side of the river. Most of them seemed eerily quiet, almost deserted. Quite a few were completely deserted. They had that ominous air of buildings that have been left half-finished for months (or years) and seem likely to remain so permanently. (We had a fair few of those in Beijing 6 or 7 years ago, but they all got tidied up ahead of the Olympics.)

I counted around two dozen tall cranes distributed among these sites. Only three of them were in operation.

Mere anecdote! Flawed observation? Isolated, untypical, statistically insignificant instance.

Perhaps. But I get the impression the construction boom has ground to a halt in Tianjin city centre, as in many other places across China.

Bon mot for the week

"Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain."

Lily Tomlin  (1939- )

List of the Month - the 'To be read' pile

If only it did mean that

I've always been interested in the morphology and etymology of words, and often fantasise outlandish origins or amusing back-formations of my own for them.

One of the first words I remember becoming slightly obsessed with - when I was only about 10 or 12 years old - was preposterous.

The prefix I understood, but there was something very odd-looking about posterous. It seemed to me that it ought to have something to do with posters. In fact, I soon convinced myself that it ought to mean worthy of being celebrated on a poster (not necessarily the same thing as appearing on a lot of posters, you understand: it's the difference between Gandhi or Einstein and Justin Bieber or David Beckham).

Hence, when you're on your way to global fame but you haven't quite got there yet, you're pre-posterous. And soon enough, of course, the hyphen falls away - et voilà!

Well, I think it ought to be a word.

Footnote 1:  I have learned that Posterous - with a tie-in to a rather different idea of 'post' and 'posters' - was adopted a few years ago as the name for a mobile blogging platform.

Footnote 2:  Preposterous is ostensibly derived from Latin (the logically strained combination of 'pre-' and 'post' implying back-to-front or topsy-turvy), but it looks like late medieval cod-Latin to me; I'm pretty sure I never came across praeposterus anywhere in the Classical canon!

Haiku for the week

A shaded corner:

Spring sunshine outside teases;

Brutal cold indoors.

Christ, my new apartment is bloody freezing. I hadn't anticipated this when I moved in. My last two apartments were both pretty warm (the earlier one actually rather too much so, baking under a flat asphalt roof). And by the time the winter heating goes off in mid-March, the weather is usually starting to get reasonably warm. Even if it isn't (the arrival of spring has been badly delayed in the last two or three years, with nasty cold snaps recurring through most of April), those other apartments were somehow uncannily well insulated. Furthermore, they benefited from being south and east facing, hence getting a lot of sun early in the morning.

That's probably the key difference in my new location: I'm on the north-west corner of the building, and so don't get much sun until late in the afternoon.

In those other apartments, I also benefited from being higher up in the building and getting a lot of heat coming up from the apartments below. Here, I'm on a low floor, with only commercial premises below me (a teahouse) which, I suppose, are only in use for something less than half of the day, and not very busy even then. I'm not picking up much heat from the neighbours on my floor either, since I have two long outside walls, and one of the two apartments with whom I share a wall is unoccupied.

For the past three weeks, since the central heating went off, my apartment has become an ICE-BOX. It is invariably several degrees colder than it is outside (and it often hasn't been that warm outside!). I'm usually having to wear a sweatshirt (sometimes two) indoors.

Once it gets properly HOT in another month or so, I shall be extremely grateful for this natural coolness in my apartment (I might even be able to get by without using the air-conditioning?). But at the moment... I am shivering. Roll on, summer.

A quiet sense of achievement

I am ashamed to admit that, four months after moving in to my new apartment, I still hadn't finished my unpacking. After several weeks of illness and then a month or so of being absurdly busy, I'd developed bad habits of procrastination or avoidance, settled into a modus vivendi that allowed me to ignore the messy pile of packing crates in the corner of the room.

It took a threatened appearance by my landlord (who, as is so often the way of things, then didn't show up after all) to shake me out of my inertia. The final big task was dealt with last Saturday afternoon: sorting out my huge library of DVDs. As you can see, they just about fill an entire bookshelf, so it was no mean undertaking.

In fact, they more than fill an entire bookshelf: all the music titles are filed separately with my CDs; there are two (small-ish) piles of the most urgent 'To Be Watched' titles beside the TV (some of which I bought over two years ago, and still haven't got around to; no reflection on the quality of the films - simply a function of the fact that I don't stay in that much); in the left of the picture, there's a small filing cabinet with a bunch of boxed set TV series in it; and then there's a cardboard box of films that were so disappointing I've decided I will never watch them again (obvious turkeys like 2012, Soderbergh's tedious do-over of Solaris, and the excruciating Keanu Reeves version of The Day The Earth Stood Still, but also perhaps more unexpected ones like The Sting, The English Patient, and Gangs of New York - films I really hated could well be an end-of-the-month 'Film List' for me some time soon), and should probably try to offload at a book-swap or charity store somewhere.

This wasn't just an unpacking-and-stacking exercise either (although, gawd knows, that would have taken quite long enough!). No, there is now some semblance of a cataloguing system: To Be Watched (Soon-ish), To Be Ditched, Classical Music, Modern Music, Recent Films (c. last five years) That Will Repay Viewing Again Soon, Series (Die Hard, The Matrix, The Terminator, etc.), Favourite/Cult Directors (well, anyone I've got more than 5 or 6 titles by, basically: Tarantino, the Coens, Kubrick, Kusturica, Woody Allen, Zhang Yimou), Trashy Fun (thrillers, action films, and horror comedies: undemanding entertainment when I'm feeling blue - Sin City, Machete, Watchmen, that kind of thing), Cult Comedies (I can't go more than a few months without watching Anchorman, Team America, Animal House, The Simpsons Movie...), French/Italian/Spanish Films (no particular reason for lumping those together, other than that I've got so many of them that they pretty much balance the whole of the rest of the world's contribution - I don't have enough German films, or enough Lars von Trier films, or...), Chinese Films, Other Foreign Films, Hollywood Classics Post-1960, Hollywood Classics Pre-1960, War Films, Westerns, Comedy, Horror, Family Films, and Animation. There's also a sizeable pile of English-language films that don't readily fit into any of these categories - dramas that aren't acknowledged as 'classics' - which are divided into those which are high priority for me to watch again, and and those which are low (but not NO) priority.

This is a very good reason NEVER to move again. Unfortunately, I may well have to leave this apartment - and perhaps leave China - within the next month or two.

What's that, you say? Displacement activity??

Inadvertent truths (2)

In checking on Wikipedia the other day to see exactly when Qing Ming Jie - the annual tomb spring-cleaning ancestor rite - falls this year (it's TODAY), I discovered that there's a Chinese expression for going outside to enjoy the arrival of spring. It's 踏青, ta qing - which means literally "to trample on the green".

It evidently doesn't have any negative connotations for the Chinese; but perhaps it should. It is rather too painfully apposite a description for the unconcern that so many Chinese display for the health of their countryside. There's been an awful lot of trampling going on over the past three days of public holiday.

Inadvertent truths (1)

I needed to get hold of my landlord yesterday (to query why he had not, as promised, turned up with workmen to re-lay the floor on my terrace - after I had dutifully got out of bed bright and early, on what was supposed to have been a holiday, to greet this expected intrusion).

He wasn't available: his phone was switched off, or the battery was dead.

The automated message from China Mobile (one I hadn't ever heard before) said:

The subscriber you have dialled is powerless.

Ah, yes. We all know that feeling from time to time. Especially in China.

[I wonder if that is a message created specifically for the situation where the phone's battery is out of juice? Can the service provider tell why a phone isn't responsive - dead battery, removed battery, switched off, or out of signal reach? I think I've sometimes heard "The subscriber you have dialled cannot be reached"; but the usual message is the classically Chinglish-y "The subscriber you have dialled is power-off."

I've really never heard "The subscriber you have dialled is powerless" before; but I rather like it. It's one of those happy accidents that makes you fall in love with Chinglish all over again.]

New Picks of the Month

More recommendations from three years ago this month...

It's really hard to pick just one post from Froogville. I think April 2009 may have been one of my richest ever months on here. I think I'll go for the succinct frivolity of The ming pian game, some amusing ideas for a self-description I might add to the next set of business cards I get printed. [However, this recollection of my first visit to China (in 1994!), this idea for a cartoon, this speculation on the causes of Beijing's dearth of rainfall, this heartbroken haiku, this collection of somewhat abstract photographs, this selection of North Korean pick-up lines, and this celebration of some of my favourite experiences in the cinema are also strong contenders.]

There's less of a wealth of choice over on The Barstool (I was perhaps distracted - or impaired - by my notorious Nanluoguxiang bar crawl in that month: 15 or 20 bars visited in one day!!). I think my choice here must be Gan bei! (Surviving the baijiu ritual), some valuable advice for dealing with the mass toasting that occurs at Chinese banquets - harsh lessons learned during my first experience of the country 15 years earlier.

Enjoy.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for March

Although my frequency of posting last month was much the same as ever, I seem to have been rather wordier than usual - perhaps because it was a rather light month on the work front.

There were 35 posts and around 16,000 words on Froogville.

There were 32 posts and 10,000 words on Barstool Blues.

Check out the shiny new feature over there near the top of the sidebar for both blogs - a link to a summary view of this month's posts. Very handy for the browser-in-a-hurry who just wants to try a taste of my recent output (Note to self: must try to make post titles more relevant to post content!). My thanks to the surprisingly tech-savvy Tony of Other Men's Flowers for alerting me to the existence of this widget. I don't know how long Blogger has been offering this facility, but apparently all you have to do is add the tag /?m=1 to the end of your blog address to create a link to this useful summary view.

Also of note over the weekend just past, my revived Invent a name for a rock band post reached its 200th comment with a Chinese band name suggestion from someone called Jim. I have a suspicion that might be one of my translator friends. Then again, it could also the Captain of the Starship Enterprise. Or any one of a hundred million other Jims. But thank you, Jim, whoever you are. If you identify yourself to me, I will try to arrange a small 'prize' for you.

Bon mot for the week

"There are few finer pleasures in life than turning down a job."

Froog