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.

Beijing restaurant rundown

I just posted a list of my favourite restaurants in Beijing over on The Barstool.

Do go and take a look - and let me know if you think there's anywhere else I should check out. (I am confined in my choices to places I've actually been to - more than once or twice - and so had to leave out a lot of the swankiest eateries like The Courtyard or Maison Boulud or My Humble House. One day, one day.....)

War on Chinglish (5)

Do you like climbing mountains?

It's a popular holiday and weekend activity in China, you see, so it comes up quite a lot in conversation. You are at first surprised, and then suspicious when almost every single one of your college students, even the weediest or most overweight of them, both boys and girls, all claim this as a hobby.

Most Chinese mountains, you see, are not all that high. Most of them have monasteries or temples built on them, and thus become popular tourist destinations. Most of them have metalled roads going nearly all the way to the top. Chinese people weekending in "the mountains" do not need boots and ropes and pickaxes. No, they can walk to the top. Sometimes this might involve a steep and rugged path over the last mile or two; sometimes, some pretty daunting stone staircases; but never any actual "mountain climbing".

None of their textbooks seem to tell them that in English "mountain climbing" usually implies taking on vertical rockfaces. They never seem to learn any of the alternative words for less strenuous forms of "climbing" - 'hiking', 'hill-walking'. More Chinglish!

The Spring deferred

I have commented often that the arrival of Spring in Beijing is one of the most consistent features in this bewilderingly inconstant city. No matter how wildly the temperatures may yo-yo through February and March (and they do, they do)..... properly, enduringly warm weather and opening blossoms always turn up on the last Sunday in March. I'm pretty sure they have done so every year I've been living here.

But not this year. Oh no. The weather has been arse-freezing again for the past few days, and the trees have all pulled in their buds.

The 5-day forecast suggests that temperatures might be creeping back into the 70s by the weekend, but it'll be pretty darned cool until then, and for the next 2 or 3 nights at least we can expect to be suffering frost and bitter winds.

This is disturbing, unnatural. It is difficult not to imagine baleful portents in it.

Two bons mots on friendship

"Friends are thieves of time."

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"A friend is a present you give yourself."

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Because of his or her great wings

I stumbled across this online a little while back, and was immediately reminded of my (brilliant, but socially challenged) friend, The Poet.

As so often with these Internet postings, I'm afraid the translator is unidentified.

Albatross

Often to pass the time on board, the crew
will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
which nonchalantly chaperone a ship
across the bitter fathoms of the sea.

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,
as if embarrassed by its clumsiness,
pitiably lets its great white wings
drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

How weak and awkward, even comical,
this traveller but lately so adroit!
One deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak;
another mocks the cripple that once flew.

The poet is like this monarch of the clouds
riding the storm above the marksman's range;
exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
he cannot walk because of his great wings.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

My "personal search engine", JES, kindly informs me that this translation is by someone called Richard Howard. I gather his version (another one for my wish list!) of Les Fleurs du Mal is widely considered a masterpiece, and won the American Book Award In Translation when it first appeared in 1983.

Here, belatedly, is the original French text (source, with 5 other English versions).

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

Film List - my favourite Chinese films

I went to see an interview with the British film critic Mark Cousins a couple of weeks ago, and discovered that he is a passionate fan of Chinese cinema.

My own feelings, I realised, are rather more mixed. The dominant strain in my response, I suppose, has been disappointment. Well, disappointment and boredom. The Chinese have some wonderful cinematographers, and even their most humdrum films usually look fantastic. But the conception of 'narrative' here seems to be very different from the West: there's often no pacing, and very little direction or coherence in a story. They just present a muddle of stuff that happens.... and then, it stops happening. And that's it. The Chinese missed out on the Aristotelian analysis of tragedy: the idea of following the transformation of a character, the sense of a story arc.

I always made a point of seeking out Chinese films when I was living back in the UK (the one or two a year that would get an arthouse distribution). And I've watched a lot since I've been living here. And most of them, I'm sorry to say, have sucked mightily. I find Jia Zhangke, much praised for his gritty realism, to be insufferably tedious (scenes that should take ten seconds are often spun out to minutes). I find Feng Xiaogang, much praised for his lively wit, to be erratic and undisciplined (I like the opening scene of Cellphone and a few bits and pieces in A World Without Thieves, but most of his stuff is very laboured and obvious). I find Li Shaohong, much praised for, er, being a woman, to be pretentious and incoherent (although I quite liked her early work, Bloody Morning, a re-telling of García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold set in a small Chinese town; but again, that's more to do with the cinematography than the storytelling): her Baober In Love (despite the radiant presence of Zhou Xun in the title role) is just a turgid mess.

I don't even much like the stuff we're all supposed to like: Farewell, My Concubine was overlong and failed to engage me; The Blue Kite I found ploddingly over-earnest and (again!) far too long; Gu Changwei's Peacock I've heard some good things about, but anything that runs over 4 hours in its original cut suggests the lack of discipline and proportion that I decry in so much of the Chinese cinema I have suffered through. And as for Spring In A Small Town - a 1948 film that is supposedly the great classic of Chinese cinema (remade a few years ago by rehabilitated Blue Kite director, Tian Zhuanghuang) - well, I'm afraid I still haven't seen it.

Don't even get me started on Zhang Yimou. His early stuff - Ju Dou, Raise The Red Lantern (my favourite of the lot), Shanghai Triad, The Story of Qiu Ju, To Live, and The Road Home - all these are fantastic. His recent infatuation with bloated martial arts flicks is lamentable.

I love Hong Kong films: the martial arts comedies of Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow, and the slick gangster films like Election and Infernal Affairs. But if I confine myself to mainland Chinese cinema that I've seen while I've been living here..... hmmm, not such a broad selection.

Well, here goes......

My 10 Favourite (Recent) Chinese Films


1) The Missing Gun (Xun Qiang)
(Dir. Lu Chuan, 2002)
As The Weeble complains in the first comment below, Lu Chuan is known as even more of an arsehole than most people in the Chinese film industry. Furthermore, it is apparently an open secret in the industry that the author of this film was really its star, Jiang Wen, temporarily unable to get permission to work as a director from the authorities here.

Well, whoever should be getting the credit, it's a stunning piece of work, head and shoulders above anything else I've seen here; the one film that I can truly say has a coherent narrative that's accessible to a Western audience, as well as an exhilarating zest and stylishness in its execution. It's a police procedural, a comedy of small town manners, and a study of a struggling marriage, laced with moments of magic realism and parodies of other genres. Tremendous fun, but also ultimately surprisingly moving. I've already reviewed it more fully here.

2) Kekexili (released in the US as 'Mountain Patrol')
(Dir. Lu Chuan, 2004)
Well, even if Lu Chuan may not be a nice chap, and may not have been the sole or principal director of the marvellous Missing Gun, he surely was the man at the helm for this fantastic action adventure. It's a Chinese 'Western', based on a true story about a group of Tibetan vigilantes which formed in the mid-90s to try to fight the plague of poaching of the endangered Tibetan antelope. It's breathtaking to look at (shot entirely on location in the Kekexili region of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau), morally complex, and compellingly tragic.

3) Keep Cool (You Hua Hao Hao Shuo)
(Dir. Zhang Yimou, 1998)
A little-known gem from the famous director, which I only found out about through personal recommendation from a translator friend. It was apparently shot on a shoestring budget in the space of a few weeks, a fill-in between other more expansive projects. It's filmed almost entirely on location on the streets of Beijing, and with a largely non-professional cast. There's an almost Dogme-like simplicity and directness about it, much of it being shot with hand-held cameras, in a jerky, hyper-kinetic style that is unimaginably removed from the elaborate choreography of colour and movement that is the trademark of his most famous films. It starts out as a breezy, if offbeat, romantic comedy, but evolves into something much darker: the entire second half of the film focuses on the two principals sitting together in a restaurant, debating the pros and cons of violence and murder. It is, in fact, a very black comedy; but, for once, the humour translates, and even Western audiences will find it laugh-out-loud funny. And it has superb performances from the two leads, Jiang Wen and Li Baotian.

4) Blind Shaft (Mang Jing)
(Dir. Li Yang, 2003)
Li Yang began his career in documentaries, and this, his first feature, has a gritty, slice-of-life feel to it. It's an extremely dark drama about migrant workers in China's largely unregulated and appallingly dangerous coal-mining industry, and is purportedly based on a true story of two such workers who develop a method of scamming money by murdering fellow workers below ground and then faking an accident and demanding compensation - or hush money - from the anxious mine owners for the death of their 'relative'.

5) Not One Less (Yige Dou Bu Neng Shao)
(Dir. Zhang Yimou, 1999)
Another rather untypical, 'experimental' venture from Zhang Yimou, shot on location in the Chinese countryside with an entirely non-professional cast. When the elderly teacher at a village school has to go away to visit a sick relative, he hires a teenage girl from a neighbouring village to be his substitute. Promised a bonus (I think it's 50 RMB!) if she can ensure that all of the children remain in school, the girl is distraught when one young boy runs away to 'the big city' to try to earn money to help his invalid mother. With almost no money, and no experience of city life, she journeys to the city herself to try to find him and bring him back to school - and, amazingly, she succeeds. Some find this film a bit too trite and sentimental, but I found it utterly, utterly charming (although it is also a devastating reminder of the depths of poverty in rural China: the entire school goes to work in a brick factory for a day, in order to earn the bus fare for a 30-mile journey).

6) The Emperor and The Assassin (Jing Ke Ci Qin Wang)
(Dir. Chen Kaige, 1998)
The only historical epic to really impress me, this is the same story as Zhang Yimou's Hero - a famous plot to assassinate China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang - but told in a more straightforward and realistic fashion.

7) Balzac and The Little Seamstress (Xiao Cai Feng)
(Dir. Dai Sijie, 2002)
Author Dai Sijie directs the film version of his fictionalized Cultural Revolution memoir: two teenage 'intellectuals' from the city are sent to a remote mountain village for "re-education" - and, of course, they both fall in love with the beautiful tailor's daughter (it's the irresistible gamine, Zhou Xun - how could they not?). Nothing very deep, but a charming bit of fluff.

8) Beijing Bicycle (Shiqi Sui De Dan Che)
(Dir. Wang Xiaoshuai, 2001)
Another look at the plight of migrant workers. In this one, a peasant newly arrived in the capital finds himself a job as a bicycle courier. Half of his meagre earnings go towards paying for the expensive mountain-bike his company has provided for him. When the bicycle is stolen, his world falls apart. He begins an obsessive search for it - and, improbably, he finds it again; but now it is owned by a wealthy teenager, a schoolboy at a private school, who bought it at a secondhand market and refuses to part with it. It's a marvellous portrait of Beijing in the Noughties, and a bleak reminder of the desperation of the very poor.

9) Chicken Poets (Xiang Ji Mao Yi Yang Fei)
(Dir. Meng Jinghui, 2002)
Two university friends live together on a farm on the outskirts of Beijing, in the shadow of the airport. One, a go-getting entrepreneur, tries to make his fortune by breeding rare black chickens. The other, a would-be writer, makes a Faustian bargain with a mysterious CD vendor who gives him a magical CD-ROM which enables him to become a successful poet, the darling of the literary scene. There's not really much story to this, just a meandering succession of surreal episodes: but it's so weird and quirky and stylish that it lingers long in the memory.

10) Er.... I really can't think of any more.....

oh, I suppose maybe Suzhou River (Suzhou He)

(Dir. Ye Lou, 2000)

It's a long time since I've seen this, but I recall it as a very unusual meditation on the nature of identity, and on obsessive love (it has been likened to Hitchcock's Vertigo), and also as a very striking depiction of the poorer, seamier side of Shanghai that one rarely sees. And it's got the lovely Zhou Xun in it; she makes almost anything watchable.

Even here, I was cheating a bit, in that I saw The Emperor and The Assassin and Beijing Bicycle back in England before I moved here. It's also rather alarming to note that these films are all at least 5 years old, some of them over 10 years old. There's really been nothing decent recently; or at least, nothing that I've seen (I do miss the old Cherry Lane Movie club, which showed recent Chinese films with English sub-titles - it's been virtually defunct for the past couple of years).

Thumbnail reviews of these selections to follow later (possibly). I have a lunch date now.

OK, done now (very long lunch date!).

Is this a holiday??

Did you notice? China has declared today, March 28th, "Serf Liberation Day" in Tibet.

Yep, it's the 50th anniversary of the DL's flight from the country. China instead chooses to celebrate it as the date of the ending of feudalism - something Neuro-Linguistic Programming adherents would no doubt laud as an inspired "reframe", but which most folks tend to feel is a rather skewed, self-deluding take on history. Oh yes, and massively insensitive - given that large numbers of the Tibetan people still idolise the DL and bitterly resent his continued exclusion from the country (and the prohibition on even keeping pictures of the man in their houses); and given that, because of all the anniversaries this month associated with the uprising against the Chinese occupation in 1959, and the major outbreaks of unrest in 1989 and last year, the place is a bit of a tinderbox, a recurrence of such troubles now only being (barely) suppressed by massive police and troop deployments.

No, holding a day of fireworks and ethnic dancing on this date is not going to do much to promote peace and goodwill in Tibet, I fear. And it is yet another ludicrous PR disaster - in the long string of PR disasters relating to Tibet - for China, hugely detrimental to the way the country is perceived around the world. Will it even play well with the domestic Chinese audience? I have my doubts.

We snarky foreigners are more likely to dub the 'holiday' National Tactlessness Day. Or Re-Writing History Day. Or Buffoonish Public Relations Exercises Day. Or Let's Make Ourselves The Laughing Stocks Of A Hostile And Uncomprehending World (Again) Day.

A couple of points in passing, things that are always rather conspicuously glossed over in the standard Chinese presentation of this story. 'Serfdom' is not the same as 'slavery', although the Chinese are apt to use the terms interchangeably. (And I wouldn't know if 'serfdom' did still exist there, or how widespread it was in the '50s, but..... well, 'serfdom' isn't necessarily all that bad: it's not usually the Auschwitz-type horror that the Chinese propaganda likes to portray it as.) Second, er, since the PRC had already been in control of the country for nearly 9 years, why had it not abolished 'serfdom' earlier? Just curious....

Not exactly a Daily Llama

No, in fact, this one is an alpaca.

An alpaca is generally reckoned to be the closest analogue of China's mythical 'grass mud horse'.

Forgive me, fellow China hands - I know this is getting to be a bit of a stale story for us by now, but our friends overseas may still be missing out (unless they read the New York Times article on it a couple of weeks ago). I had been meaning to write about this for a month or so now, and may have left it a bit too late. Oh well.

Chinese Netizens, you see, can be a fractious bunch, and are much given to abusing each other in colourful terms. From time to time, the government launches a moral crackdown on this free-and-easy obscenity. But the online community is endlessly inventive in finding ways to circumvent such censorship. In fact, it's not so very hard, because the Chinese language has such a huge number of homophones that generating dirty puns often seems more like an unavoidable accident than a creative challenge.

At the beginning of this year, in response to an attempt to filter and block comments including the favourite expression of abuse 操你妈 (cao ni ma - "F**k your mum!"), one Chinese forum created the alternate phrase 草泥马 (same pronunciation - though different tones, I think - but the nonsense meaning "grass mud horse").

Before long, it had spread all over the Internet and beyond. For 8 or 10 weeks, it has been one of the biggest pop culture phenomena in China. Elaborate stories were developed about this non-existent creature: its habitat in the Malegebi Desert (I won't tell you; you can guess; or consult the ChinaSmack glossary of online slang) was said to be under threat from the incursions of 'river crabs' (this, 河蟹, is a near-homophone for 'harmonious', Hu Jintao's favourite political buzzword, now co-opted by the country's Netizens as a synonym for censorship - "Oh no, I've been harmonized!" meaning that someone's comments, or a whole blog, have been deleted).

The humble 'grass mud horse' has spawned numerous cartoons, and even a song (which I had been hoping to embed, but....) which was one of the funniest things I've seen on the Internet in a long, long time: cute pictures of llamas and alpacas accompanied by what appears to be a children's nonsense song - but is in fact an absolutely filthy lexicon of contemporary Chinese profanity. There were dozens of variations of this starting to appear on YouTube.... until a few days ago. Now, they've all been pulled. Boo!

I wonder if that NYT article is responsible. The Chinese government was probably getting a bit hacked off with this joke anyway, but when it starts gathering "unfavourable" publicity overseas, then it's definitely time to act. I gather the Kafka Boys are trying to sweep the Internet clear of the offending phrase (I hope I don't get myself blocked again!). We'll just have to come up with something else.

Weekly haiku

Step forward, step back;
In Beijing, Spring comes halting;
Winter chill lingers.

Every year the same old thing: the weather is utterly schizophrenic in March - balmy sunshine and early blossoms showing one day, the next the wind blows straight in from the North Pole.

This weekend should be the real start of Spring (it has been every other year I've been here): a blissful season that lasts all of 8 or 10 days.

Metaphor of the Month

I've been having a little set-to this week with my new gadfly, ThinkWeird. He took issue with my flippant complaint a couple of weeks back that China's failure to develop an alphabetic writing system was a rather strange and unfortunate omission, and responded with a furious post defending the character sytem of hanzi. My original remark had been a - deliberately provocative - jest, but I was drawn into a much more detailed and serious discussion in that comment-thread. My view is that characters are an evolutionary dead-end, that the structural shortcomings of the system are so great that it will inevitably wither and die out one day, perhaps sooner rather than later; indeed, it may be replaced with a Romanized system (as happened in Vietnam) by government edict, perhaps within a few decades, certainly within a century or so.

Unfortunately, the debate didn't really take off, because TW refused to accept my basic point that there are certain innate advantages in alphabetic scripts, that learning lots of individual characters does tend to be a more difficult and time-consuming process. He would keep insisting that learning characters was easy, easy, EASY (at least for native Chinese, who, he seemed to suggest, have some kind of genetic facility for doing this that us poor laowai may lack). This is rather at odds with stats I've seen on how many hours Chinese schoolchildren have to spend learning to write their own language (a lot - probably more than twice as much as any European country devotes to this), and with the experience of most of Chinese students I've worked with here (almost every single one of whom has complained to me at some point about how miserable they found their early years of schooling, about what a wretched slog it is to learn characters).

Then it occurred to me....

You know how some people - science teachers, chefs - burn themselves so frequently that they become used to it; their skin gets tougher, and they cease to notice the pain?

In fact, after a while, they forget that they ever felt any pain. They take pride in showing off the skill they have acquired: "Hey, that's not HOT. Look how easily I can pick it up! No pain at all. Easiest thing in the world."

I suggest maybe that's what TW and his Chinese friends are like when they think about learning to write Chinese characters. Easy, easy, easy - not difficult at all.

Amuse yourselves

I'm busy for the next day or two.

Check out supergeek Adam Bowman's site for more interactive toys for your webpage.

Bugger! This isn't displaying for me in Firefox at the moment, but it seems to be OK on Explorer. If you're having problems seeing anything here, try clicking on the post title to move to a single page view - that seems to work in all browsers. And this is really COOL. (Nope: still not working for some reason. It's suppose to be this neat rolling rings widget - but Adam seems to have given up on this one, since his webpage isn't providing any embed code for it any more.)

I wonder why?

This webpage is currently blocked in China. (Usually it gets 'timed out' immediately; although it will occasionally display briefly before the data transfer is interrupted.)

It's been open to access for quite a long time now, and still was as recently as a month or two ago (I referred to it in writing this piece at the end of January).

The CCP goons are getting jittery about "the anniversary" really early this year, it seems...

Heroine of the hour

There was an interesting photo-story on the ChinaSmack news site over the weekend about an off-duty policewoman in the city of Changchun who saved the life of a young girl threatening suicide. The policewoman was apparently just driving by the scene where the girl was threatening to throw herself off the top of a tall building. Police units were gathering already, but were perhaps unsure how to proceed (I don't suppose they get much training in this kind of thing; and, from the photos, it doesn't look as if there were any other female officers on the scene). So the heroine decided to intervene, going up on the rooftop to try to talk the girl down - and then grabbing her arm and hanging on to her as she tried to slip over the edge.

It's interesting that nearly all of the Chinese commenters on this story, while warmly praising the bravery and compassion of the officer, place it in the context of the generally dismal reputation the police have here - "what a pleasant change to find an officer we can admire, for once!"

The other common trend in responses is to extravagantly praise the young police officer's supposed beauty. Well, all things are relative, I suppose. I don't wish to be ungallant about this, and I am as full of admiration for her conduct in this incident as the next bod, but..... well, I wouldn't call her unattractive, but I found her looks fairly unremarkable. "Pretty" for a police officer, perhaps. Or for Changchun - capital of Jilin province in China's north-east 'rust belt', noted for its brutal winters and not much else. But a dazzling beauty? No, I missed that.

There's a quaint mixture of hyperbole and tweeness in the Chinese response to incidents such as this. It took some time for the young policewoman's name to emerge, and during this interval Netizens nicknamed her "Most Beautiful Police Flower". Flower??!!

Ah, well, in 'the West' I suppose we would have dubbed her "a uniformed hottie" - or worse. Diffrent strokes, and all that.

Do go and check out the story.

War on Chinglish (4)

No pains, no gains.

Again, this is an astonishingly common one - I feel sure it must be in a textbook somewhere; or perhaps in some kind of reference book such as a glossary comparing Chinese and English proverbs. It is, in fact, rather more than merely common; it is ubiquitous.

'Pain' is - usually - uncountable. Therefore, the phrase in English is:

No pain, no gain.

This really shouldn't be that hard to remember. Particularly if, with your irrepressible love of clichés, you are going to use it every day of your life.

In the neighbourhood (2)

The garish red wood and plaster of the Drum Tower, I find, is not quite so beguilingly attractive as the grey-green stone of its partner, the Bell Tower. Nevertheless, it is still rather an imposing sight. (This is one of my favourite shots of it, currently set as the desktop wallpaper on my computer.)

And, with that, I bring to an end my 'photo gallery' week. 20 posts and 45 pictures in all, I think. I hope you've enjoyed them.

Back to writing, now; back to spleen and bile and snarky humour, and so on and so on.

In the neighbourhood (1)

The ancient Bell Tower, just a short walk from my apartment, is perhaps Beijing's most beautiful building, and is at the heart of one of its quaintest areas of old-style hutong low-rise alleyways - a favourite spot for strolling and hanging out. Here are three shots taken from the roof terrace of the adjacent Drum & Bell Bar: one by day,one by night,and one on the cusp between the two, at dusk, when the local pigeon-fanciers let their flocks out for an hour or so's exercise - my favourite time of the day!

Street abstracts