cerebrate good times » curiousities

some curious things today

Andrew Pouw — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:14:15 +0000

Near the end of the two-and-a-half-hour lunchtime every day, the students here always hijack the school PA system to blast pop music throughout the rafters and courtyards. The teachers don’t seem to mind, though after my lesson on music I’m always a little paranoid about which songs they play might have come from me. This was the case a few weeks ago when from the PAs emerged Lady Gaga instead of the regular Korean songs or Taiwanese mandopop.

Today as I walked to the bank to deposit my monthly wages (even though it’s only $700 US per month, I feel like a rich man!) and exited the school gates a blast of Flo Rida’s “Right Round” trailed my departure. I actually turned my head around to look up towards the upper floors of the school and said aloud “I KNOW I didn’t give them that.” Chinese students returning from lunch turned their head and waved at the foreign English teacher talking to himself.

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Something else I learned during an impromptu Department photo session (like picture day!): while we say “Cheese!” when we get our mugs shot, the Chinese say “qie zi!” which means eggplant.

the grass is always greener in some other country’s soaps

Andrew Pouw — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:49:05 +0000

I have been wanting to watch television in Mandarin for a while so that I could improve my vocabulary, but the news isn’t suitable (the words are too hard; I can’t imagine translating ‘bilateral trade negotiations’ on my iTouch and feeling very much accomplished) and the Chinese soaps I find on TV are too silly for me (no way those three ladies all gave birth on the riverbank at once) or too specific (I doubt I will get much practical conversational Chinese from a Revolutionary War soap).

If you are thinking of watching dramas in Asia, it seems that Korea has the monopoly right now with the most sophisticated industry and products. In college I would visit some friends and find them avidly downloading and watching Korean dramas. A few months ago I saw a report in an Asian newspaper about unsuccessful government attempts to ban Meteor Garden, one of the older and more famous Korean dramas, in China because of its “encouragement of materialistic pursuits and desires” or something like that. And even in the latest Chinese novel I read (Brothers by Yu Hua, it was okay) there is a character who talks big about making fortunes but is too busy watching Korean soaps to successfully begin his enterprises. I wouldn’t mind trying them myself (after taking the MCAT last summer I ended up watching a particularly silly Taiwanese drama, rationalizing to myself that I would do it to learn Chinese). Again the rationale is that I would learn Chinese from the practice, but it doesn’t seem like the Korean soaps would help much with this.

It turns out, however, that my aunt and uncle are fans of Korean soaps too, and actually as I’m writing this they are sitting beside me watching one. “It’s in Chinese too,” my uncle showed me. I hadn’t realized that they were all dubbed and subbed in Mandarin and Simplified Chinese – of course they would be if the market for them here was so huge, I belatedly realized. I was used to seeing the English fansubs that my friends furtively downloaded and hadn’t thought that I could get any such useful translations.

So here is a dangerous precipice that I am standing over. Before I fall in, does anybody have any recommendations so that I know at least which cliff is the best one to jump off of?

Daily Summary Update: I spent the weekend here in Hong Kong again with my family. At this point, my parents have left and are home in Olympia already, but my grandmother is still visiting Hong Kong and my aunt/uncle as well as my cousin’s family all live here. Aidan was particularly rambunctious today – he’s learning a lot of new words.

Nanowrimo Update: If I’m going to finish, I need to write about 2000 words a day at this point. I don’t know if I can make the deadline anymore.

brother chun is all man

Andrew Pouw — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:18:26 +0000

I can’t really sleep (I think I drank too much tea) so here’s one post for you.

Teaching a foreign language has been an interesting challenge for me, since I’m the kind of arsehole who has trouble keeping my syllables down. A friend once affectionately (euphemistically, I thought) said “you talk just like you write!” But usually the reaction is more like “why do you have to talk so weird?” which is what a classmate once asked me in second grade. At that age I probably had swapped the word “complicated” for “weird” to merit the question. Fifteen years and a comparative literature degree later, I can still drive my friends crazy by just uttering the word “postmodernism.”

But of course I can’t speak like this while I’m teaching – it wouldn’t just be uncool, it would be totally incomprehensible. Attempts to teach the word “characteristic” the other day, for instance, were attacked first with “It is something…that makes something else…special,” then with “It is what makes one thing different from all other things,” and finally “Screw it, let’s look in a dictionary.” In a way, I think this might be a good thing for me. A way to learn to speak in a more approachable fashion. I mean, a way to jive with people better. Hurr.

So after I cleared the way for my celebrity lesson (no, kids, they have nothing to do with celebrations), it was time for me to do even more learning. At one point in the lesson I asked students to brainstorm a list of all the celebrities they could think of in groups, then report back to me after five minutes.

The usual suspects appeared: Michael Jackson, Obama, Jackie Chan and Jay Chou. Some not-so-usual ones did too – Hammurabi and Darius I got to briefly confuse the class after a student pulled out a history textbook. Some ones that I didn’t expect at all showed up (while we Westerners consider “Poker Face” a guilty pleasure, turns out Lady Gaga is openly admired over here.)

In the next class I tried a new activity out, themed towards celebrities. I picked a letter, and kids from different teams would have to try to make a sentence about a celebrity that also started with that letter for a team point. Most were pretty simple: K, for instance, yielded “Kobe Bryant is a basketball player.” Good job kids.

Attempting to be a little more devious, I threw out the letter B, figuring that it would be hard to imagine a celebrity whose name started with B. Imagine my surprise when one of my normally-truculently-quiet-middle-schoolers bolted upright and shouted “Brother Chun is very handsome!” The class erupted in giggles and desk slappings.

I was happy to see everybody else so animated, but kind of puzzled too. “Who is Brother Chun?” I asked the class. They just giggled again. “Is he a celebrity?” I asked. They giggled even more. “What, it isn’t a he?” I asked. The two pronouns for “he” and “she” are almost interchangeable in Chinese, so Chinese ESL students often mix them up. I thought this might be why they were laughing. “Yes!” “No!” shouted back my students, who then dissolved into even more hysterical giggles. Puzzled, I moved on to the letter C. The boy shot back up again and yelled out “Brother Chun’s English name is Chris!” After we went over the rules again he amended, “Chris is Brother Chun’s English name!” Pandemonium again.

After class finished, some students ran up to my teacher’s podium and threw up some pictures of “Brother Chun,” stopping on a picture of a brute of a muscle man with the head of a prettyboy. The class went bonkers again. I stared at the projector screen, still a little bewildered, and asked a boy near me “What, is it because he looks like a girl?” He tittered. “It is because she IS a girl!”

Later in the office I looked up “Brother Chun” and found this entry. The girl’s real name is Li Yuchun, famous for winning the TV show “Super Girl,” a contest that is basically the same thing as “American Idol.” When I realized who she was, I faintly recalled my mother once watching Chinese television late at night back home in America, absorbed by what I thought was a silly dance variety show. “Mom, what are you doing?” I had asked her. She explained that all these people were voting on who they thought should win this contest, but nobody had expected that this androgenous tomboy (or, in Mom’s words, this “not very feminine” girl) would prove to be so popular with the Chinese audience. I could see that, given how every starlet I see on Chinese television is either a waif of a model or sporting military epaulets. (However, I was still a little bemused that my mom was watching it.)

As to whether or not my middle schoolers’ reaction constituted a revealing glimpse into modern China’s attitude towards gender roles and feminist theory, I don’t know. They’re 14-year-olds whose boys shout out “Sexy!” every time I show a picture with a girl in it. (Well, except for this girl.) But what they did do quite adeptly was somehow bypass in a second all of China’s censorship software to find Brother Chun’s head photoshopped onto Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body, over the caption “Brother Chun is all man.” Take another look at the Wikipedia page that I found Chun Ge under and see for yourself: a list of 10 Internet memes designed to either get around or poke fun at “The Great Firewall of China.” Like our lolcats, except adapted for more scrutinized circumstances (another shameless plug for that essay, hee hee).

chinese chess

Andrew Pouw — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:55:31 +0000

I usually see the same guards every time I return home, usually because it’s later at night and only a few of them must have those shifts. By that time they are often not in the guard house attached to the gate, but have pulled a school desk and chair into the courtyard further away from the gate and play with their cell phones as they wait for people to wave at them to open the gate. It seems like a pretty boring job, and I’m not sure from whom I first learned the Chinese word for “boring” (wuliao, 无聊)- them or my students (my lessons are sometimes unappreciated, alas).

But they are always very friendly to me, in particular one older man who I often see when I’m returning home. I sometimes chat with him after I enter, and he is very patient with my poor Chinese speaking. But lately I feel like I’ve run out of things to talk about (difficult to expand when your vocabulary is so limited), which has made things a bit more awkward when I come home these days. I never had this problem with taxi drivers since you could always have the same conversation over and over…but then, taxi drivers don’t return wallets.

Anyway, I saw the older guard again tonight and started chatting with him. This quickly led to the expected conversational roadblock. To hedge around it I stammered something about maybe one day learning how to play that game I often saw people playing, and to practice with him to alleviate his boredom. He kindly figured out what the heck I was talking about and supplied the necessary noun: Xiangqi (象棋)!

Digression:

I have never figured out exactly what Chinese chess is. I suspect that there are multiple versions of it that are in fact all completely separate games, and often misconstrued by Westerners as all being the same thing. There is a version that I’ve seen all with only white pieces (its name is still a mystery to me). There is xiangqi, this aforementioned version that I always had in my closet at home but never mustered the courage to interpret because of the necessity to first be able to READ the pieces (they are labeled in traditional script). There is also that version that you all know made by Hasbro, with the six-pointed star and the marbles. I have a feeling that, as usual with Western misconceptions, this last version is like food from Panda Express: it bears absolutely no resemblance to nor does it originate from the real thing, but Westerners don’t know any better. (Except, confounding this is the fact that my mother used to play it, but evidently by a different set of rules than my elementary school librarians were used to, who called me out on my “incorrect” application of such. Bother.)

End of digression.

The older guard led me into the guardhouse to show me a xiangqi set that he and the other guards kept around to battle off the wuliao with. He explained to me the meanings of each labelled piece, sometimes referring to pictures in his military-interest magazine (at least I think that’s what it was; a tank was on the cover and a few generals’ portraits inside). Then he sent me off with a laugh and an extra xiangqi set to learn with!

This is kind of exciting; if I learn how to play it, I might be able to one day intersperse myself into a street gathering of old men and play with them. Or, barring that adventurousness, I could always play with the friendly guards.

and fruit too, oh my

Andrew Pouw — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:19:32 +0000

I was eating dinner at a fancy Thai restaurant at Coastal City with Kami and Nicole when Tiantian called.

“Andrew where are you!”

Uh oh. Did I forget another teacher’s banquet?

“No, it is okay. There is a box of fruit for Mid-Autumn Festival here for you! It will be on first floor.”

Oh, thanks Tiantian!

Hours later I turned up again at my school gates, waving at the guard to let me in. He was on the phone talking but still saw me, and amiably opened it up with a remote and waved me in. I ambled on and ran into Guan Laoshi. After speaking with her for a little while I kept going, until I heard “Ah Ah Ah Ah!” The guard was running after me waving. “You forgot your fruit!” called Guan Laoshi.

Out of nowhere Liu Laoshi materialized. “Let me help you carry that back to your room,” he insisted. He also ran up to his office to get me something. “You really don’t have to,” I protested. He insisted. “My daughter likes you very much!” he laughed. It was a bag of moon cake.

After wrestling the batch up with Liu Laoshi, chatting with him in my room about Chinese musical instruments and offering him tea, I was left alone to inspect what the heck this thing was, exactly.

Opening it up yielded more questions than answers…

What the heck is it?????

Oh, that….is a lot less intimidating than it looked on the outside.

Tastes kind of nice!

Edit: Turns out that it is called “dragon fruit,” or “pitaya.” Also, I hate formatting posts with pictures in them…I’ll clean this mess up later.

QDUD #1

Andrew Pouw — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:00:04 +0000

(Is anybody old enough to remember MS-DOS? The command prompt OS that existed before Windows? When doing a report on Microsoft once in grade school I read that Bill Gates actually bought the code for MS-DOS from the guy who wrote it, who had instead called it QDOS. That was literally short for “Quick and Dirty Operating System.” Well, this is a Quick and Dirty UpDate, so…QDUD.)

It was a very interesting weekend, and I should really dedicate the time to write about it, but I just don’t really feel like writing a blog post (still got this weird laziness towards blog writing that’s been with me since four days ago.)

But the obligation exists, so here it is in a very non-literary bullet point list:

Saturday
– Traveled to the Dongmen shopping bazaar in Luohu District with Hunter in search of some cheap shirts. Couldn’t find any. Instead, found a lot of frustrating shop clerks with sub-par wares. My Chinese isn’t good enough to bargain aggressively, yet. My usual way of dealing with people – getting on their good side, which here means playing the fool very often with my bumbling Chinese – certainly won’t work on the jaded hawkers of Dongmen. We didn’t get any shirts.
- In the evening the Yucai School Group foreign teachers were picked up by our contact teachers and taken to a fancy evening dinner at the Garden City megamall. There we were ushered into a private room, which by Chinese standards isn’t uncommon, but even by Chinese standards this was an extraordinarily fancy room. My suspicions about the fanciness of the evening were proven correct when Roots (the head headmaster of all the Yucai Schools; real name Liu Genping, but “Gen” means “roots” so that’s what everyone calls him when he’s not looking) showed up. He was accompanied by a few secretaries from the main Yucai office and the headmaster of Yucai Second Primary. Also in attendance: not only our handlers, but our handlers’ handler, another office lady in the main Yucai office named Lily. Then Judy from the Shenzhen Education Bureau. And finally, to top off the evening’s list of important VIPs, the Shenzhen Foreign Affairs counsel, who alone was responsible for every single foreigner in Shenzhen (probably more people than are in all of Wyoming).
- Going to a Karaoke bar with said VIPs.
- Singing ridiculously with said VIPs.
- Dancing to My Humps with said VIPs. Most mortifying experience of my life, watching Roots shimmy to that.

That karaoke bar, by the way, was the most ostentatiously extravagant place I’d ever been to, almost as large as one of my 50-student classrooms and done up like a Vegas hotel lounge. A long way from LA’s Koreatown, boys and girls.

Sunday:
- Teaching a day’s worth of classes on a weekend, because in China, school missed due to holidays is made up for on the weekends.
- Going to meet up with Kami, Hunter, Murray, Emily and Katie for an evening foreigner rendezvous.
- Remembering only when I got there what they had been planning to do on said rendezvous. Walked through the door of Milan Hair Style and laid down for a spa hair treatment and massage along with the other prone and satisfied Americans. Struck up a mostly one-sided conversation with my own amused hairwasher/masseuse guy.
- Remembering only when I was called while having said hairwash that the Yucai Third Middle Single Teachers’ Midautumn Festival Dinner banquet was that night. Ran over to the restaurant after hair wash and joined in the eating of such delicacies as pig faces and chicken bones. Nana and Tiantian were not enthusiastic about the pig face, but remembering the marshmallow turtle shell and snake hoods of the fancy banquet yesterday, I felt like I could do anything.
- Dreading the much-talked about karaoke session rumored to follow the dinner. Apparently last year’s was pretty riotous and all the teachers got absolutely wasted.
- Escaped from having to go to it when it turned out that this year, most all of the teachers were studying for a professional exam.
- Came home early and decided to go shopping in the evening.
- Visited again the music store at Gongye Ba Lu to ask if it was possible to rent guitars there. No, but I could get a discount on a cheap guitar. Tried a few out and chatted with the girl there as I did so, who by this point remembers me from all my previous bumbling-ins. Conversation was all in Chinese!
- Walked over to the grocery store to find eggs and butter for my cookie baking experiment (I have one of Shenzhen’s rare toaster ovens in my apartment) and agar powder for a coconut jelly recipe. Asked an attendant about the agar. No luck. Asked another attendant about the butter. One 15 minute search and 5 other consulted attendants later, the response: “We don’t have butter here, because this is a Chinese grocery.” I did find the eggs, though. And another pack of dumplings with Jackie Chan’s smiling face on them.

And that was my weekend, in bullet form. Ta da.

as comprehensive as sea

Andrew Pouw — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:41:55 +0000

I was sitting on the bus and quietly gazing out the window. Because it makes a stop practically twice a minute, the 72 takes a half hour just to get to the subway station, but I trust that other salaryworkers riding with me have found the most efficient way to get there. Still, half an hour is a long time so I spend a lot of it window-looking.

The bus rounded a corner and whizzed past a construction site that was blocked off by some temporary walling. As we zoomed alongside it, a picture of a little girl happily holding a seashell to her ear rocketed towards me, followed by some Chinese. After that, the English translation that I could read:

THOUGHT AS COMPREHENSIVE AS SEA.

The wall was full of them.

DREAMS ENRICH THE WORLD.

WONDER PRESENTS THE FUTURE.

FASCINATION SPREADS THE WORLD.

And, if you were beginning to laugh,

SELF-CONFIDENCE REJECTS HESITATION.

POWER OF LIFE CONQUERS EVERYTHING.

READY FOR THE WONDER.

Charming! Even poetically compelling in its own way.