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Soft Power从我做起

OK everybody, it’s Genius Time: I’m going to write a screenplay.

It’ll be a romantic comedy for the 90后 teenyboppers. Premise: two online censors meet cute when they accidentally delete the same forum thread. The entire thing will be shot indoors, preferably in bad lighting, with all dialogue to be overdubbed slightly out of sync in keeping with local tradition. Virtually all of the scenes will take place in the faceless cubicle farm where Boy Censor and Girl Censor work. There’ll be a romantic dinner in the office canteen, the two of them leaning gradually closer together over stamped-tin trays of reheated mystery fish, Boy Censor’s knockoff Zippo flickering merrily beside them in lieu of candlelight.

There’ll be the standard-issue rom-com musical montage, but halfway through there’ll be an obvious, externally imposed cut to remove all sex scenes, comic misunderstandings, conflict, and doubt that the ending will be anything but happy. We close on a shot of Girl Censor’s hand on the mouse, preparing to click “Delete” on some troublesome forum topic — then on his hand covering hers, moving the mouse slightly to the right, and clicking “Delete All.”

Working title: You’ve Got Meiyou.

Posted 22 September 2011 § Genius Time ‡ Comments (5) °

Today in non-Chinese Language Politics

Exhibit A:

Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log: “David Starkey on rioting and Jamaican language”

A week after the riots that sprang up across a large part of England, pundits are struggling to find smart and profound things to say. One of the least successful has been David Starkey, a historian and veteran broadcaster. Speaking about the results of immigration into Britain since the sixties, he explained on the BBC 2 TV program Newsnight (video clip and story here):

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.

So it wasn’t not mindless, ignorant, immoral lust for consumer goods that was behind the copycat violence of the August riots across England; it’s language what done it! That damned Jamaican patois is responsible! What a moron. My latent prejudices are whispering to me (I will try to resist) that white historians must have an innate intelligence deficit.

Jamaican Creole (JC), also known as Jamaican patois, is a language very closely related to English but not mutually intelligible with it. In structure, syntactic as well as morphological and phonological, it is distinct from English in numerous ways. Sometimes it seems grammatically simpler than English: it’s comparable with Chinese in lack of inflection, and people usually think learning 200 irregularly inflected verbs (that’s roughly how many English has) is a mark of complexity. Sometimes it’s definitely neater: JC has one personal pronoun for each person/number combination, including a number distinction in the 2nd person (ju is singular, unu is plural). But sometimes the grammar seems more complex: there are three different counterparts of be restricted to distinct constructions — the locative verb defor phrases denoting locations (“He is in the garden” = im de ina di yaad), the auxiliary a for progressive aspect (“He is running” = im a ron), and zero copula for predication (“He is crazy” = im kriezi).

(do read the whole thing; it’s a great post.)

Exhibit B:

The defining academic work on the subject, to the best of my knowledge, remains Culture, 1984:

Cockney have name like Terry, Arthur and Del-boy
We have name like Winston, Lloyd and Leroy
We bawl out YOW! While cockneys say OI!
What cockney call a Jacks we call a Blue Bwoy
Say cockney have mates while we have spar
Cockney live in a brum while we live in a yard
Say we nyam while cockney get capture
Cockney say guv’nor. We say Big Bout ya
In a de Cockney Translation!
In a de Cockney Translation!

Posted 16 August 2011 § Interesting Times § Language ‡ Comments (3) °

Development

When I was explaining the difference between Beijing and Hong Kong, I used to say to friends back home that Hong Kong was the kind of place where my Evil Expat Twin would have a great time.

Then a couple of years ago I realized that actually, my evil doppelganger would have a pretty rocking time in Beijing, too.

Posted 13 May 2011 § Interesting Times ‡ Comments (2) °

Trans-Cultural Yuppieism and the Big Gulp

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting Ikea in China — on weekends, especially, it’s like a theme park (FurnitureLand?) where people flop around on the demo units, test out lamps by flicking them on and off repeatedly, and blow off steam by waiting in half-hour lines for two-kuai hotdogs.

In China, Ikea also continues its tradition of presenting its furniture with pseudo-Swedish names. You know, the one that’s resulted in much unintentional hilarity for US customers: JERKER? LOL AMIRITE?
In China, though, it presents the incomprehensible names in two scripts — the Roman alphabet (in good clean Scandinavian sans-serif fonts, all capitalized) and Chinese characters. A couple of weekends ago my girlfriend and I went to pick up some sorely needed furniture for our new apartment: two 格尔姆 and three 毕利, or two GORMs and three BILLYs, or (as we say in the English) two storage shelves and three bookcases.

Unrelated to Ikea but also faintly annoying is the Starbucks policy of redefining cup sizes. People in the US have been ranting about the tall/grande/venti system for years, but here in China it was always a reliable 小杯 (“small cup”) /中杯 (“medium cup”) /大杯 (“large cup”) (at least, in my experience) until late last year, when suddenly Starbucks staff began interpreting “大杯” as “medium” (or “Grande,” I guess). To get a large, you have to ask for a 最大杯 (“biggest cup”), as in the attached photo.

Seriously, I am not even joking.

And now that I’ve said that a “Large” (or “Grande,” if we must) is a 最大杯, which is what I’ve heard people saying, I would point out that on the sign it says 超大杯 (“super-big cup”).

This is actually much more interesting: “Venti,” to the monoglot English ear, sounds classy — maybe it means “Danger,” maybe it means “A man who likes his coffee — and the laaaaadies.” Afternoons on the piazza (never mind which piazza); evenings at the casino, dinners at the tavolino. (It doesn’t; it means “twenty.”) But the Chinese “超大杯” — “super-big cup” — is very much the opposite: rather than being classy, or pseudo-Eurotrash-mysterious, it sounds (to my admittedly non-native ear) quite a lot like the 7-11 “Big Gulp.”

A few years ago, I was visiting Macau, where I am able to more-or-less read but not speak the local languages — Portuguese by way of high school Spanish; Cantonese by way of Mandarin. I’d been walking around all morning and was just looping back by way of Largo do Senado, the lovely Portuguese-style square at the center of the old city, when I passed a Starbucks and decided that it was probably time to caffeinate.

My Cantonese was and is basically nonexistent, but I figured I could probably muster up enough to order a coffee by using the Cantonese readings of the Mandarin words. So I asked for “Yat dai bui dong yat kafei m’goi,” and the barista looked at me blankly.

Fine, I thought. Mandarin, then. So I asked for “Yī dà bēi dāngrì kāfēi, xièxie.” Again, a blank look from the barista. I tried again in English: “Can I have a large coffee of the day, please?”

“Oh,” said the barista in more or less unaccented American English. “You mean a venti.”

Posted 12 May 2011 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (15) °

True world-class badmotherfuckerdom

Exhibit A:

Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th centuries was so vast that it may have been the first instance in history of a single culture causing man-made climate change, according to new research out of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. [...]

Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

So how did Genghis Khan, one of history’s cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today’s environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.

Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world’s total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.

Exhibit B:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn’t for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven’s Achilles’ heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven’s nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.

Which is okay. Sometimes it’s all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you’ve got.

– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.
Posted 29 January 2011 § Interesting Times ‡ Comments (0) °

The Tonsorial Theory of Development

Hu Jintao is in the US, and as usual Jamie is asking the questions nobody else has the courage to ask.

From a comment I left on that post:

I’ve often wondered if there is a hair dye (or possibly shoe polish) factory somewhere on the outskirts of Beijing that produces dye for the sole use of Politburo members, the way Kikkoman supposedly has vats of soy sauce that are reserved for members of the imperial house. Or is it an open bidding system, with hair dye manufacturers competing against one another for the next Five Year Plan-period contract? Do they try to outdo one another on features — glossy vitality, youthful sheen, yang energy reinvigoration through the follicles — or do they compete solely on price? And further down the supply chain, is there one man somewhere in Zhongnanhai who is hair dyer to the masters of the universe? Because if so, I bet he’s got a hell of a tell-all memoir in him.

Also: whatever’s in that hair dye (or whatever was in that hair dye two Five Year Plans ago) must be some mean stuff: in the pictures I’ve seen of Jiang Zemin since they took him off the dye, his hair has looked orange.

For what it’s worth, I think Jamie’s theory about the jet-black hair helmet serving as an affirmation of the anti-charisma required of political leaders here is probably more or less dead on. As physical representations of social caste go I suppose it’s not quite on the level of ritual scarring or facial tattoos, but there definitely is such a thing as Leader Hair, and it’s immediately recognizable.
One of the best logos in Beijing, I think, is that of Mao Livehouse, live music venue and notable firetrap. No points for guessing whose hairline that is.

Posted 20 January 2011 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (3) °

Notes from Hard-Seat

Last Wednesday, I made a visa run down to Hong Kong – one of way too many over the past six months. This time, I got to the train station too late to go through the exit procedures necessary to ride the sealed, soft-sleeper, Hong Kong-bound half of the Beijing-Hong Kong train, and ended up riding hard-seat on the Guangzhou-bound half. These are the notes I took on my phone and e-mailed to my parents while on the train; any typos are to be blamed on the iPhone keyboard and/or on the fact that I was slowly developing gangrene of the arse as the hard seat cut off circulation to my toches and all points south. It may be worth noting that all of this was basically the high point of the trip for me.

I was going to try to edit this together with notes from some of my other train trips down to HK for a more polished blog post, but this is not likely ever to actually happen. 人貴有自知之明 and all that; I’m opting to just post what I’ve got instead.

We’re sitting at the northmost end of the hard-seat car. Guys from behind us, unable to wait, light up before they pass us on their way to the smoking area between cars. It’s not bad — some kind of air vent above the sinks, which is where most of them congregate to smoke, seems to separate the air in the car from the air where they stand, but there’s still a tang of flue-cured tobacco smoke in the air, sharp enough to cut through the MSG and reconstituted space-beef smell of cheap ramen. Am lucky to have gotten the seat; if I hadn’t, I’d be standing in between the cars right now, next to the inadequate and frequently disregarded ashtray.

4:30 - boxed meals look even more dire than usual. Debating whether to try my luck with the dining car later or just go without until Guangzhou.

5:05 - the guy sitting next to me, who has been sleeping quietly with his head down on the table since the start of the ride, gets up and says “excuse me, may I pass” in shy but pretty decent English.

5:15 - somewhere between Linzhou and Xunxian, according to Google Maps. On the bench behind and across from me there’s a young (?) monk with a Jiangnan accent talking about the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara and dogs’ Buddha-nature or lack thereof.

5:37 - this is the talkingest fucking monk I ever did see. His seatmates – well, at least the young man (Henan accent?) across from him – seem to be getting into it. He has now progressed to talking about meritorious deeds.

6:12 – we pass through Xinxiang station. The engineer seems as eager to get through the place as – well, as one would imagine. Am reminded of the game I played with Michelle on the way back from Qingdao to Beijing last April, based on the realization that there exist people for whom Xinxiang is the Big City.

6:15 - they switched off the air. It immediately — seriously, within ten seconds — becomes uncomfortably warm and close. The monk is still talking behind me.

6:48 - Zhengzhou. I’m now charging my iPhone back up off laptop battery, and have loaded a few Cantonese lessons on it for good measure, on the offchance that I decide to improve myself.

6:53 – guy sitting next to me gets off. Now have the bench to myself.

About 8:40 - the monk sits down with us and begins talking to the Beijingnese guy across from me and the Zhengzhounese guy next to me. My headphones are in and I am missing out on the Good News about Sakyamuni.

Around 9:30 - the Beijingnese guy strikes up a conversation with me — I suspect in order to keep from being the chatty monk’s sole audience. (The Zhengzhounese guy isn’t holding up his end.) This guy is Beijingnese, and he has met his conversational match — pretty impressive! The conversation is actually pretty nice — the Beijingnese guy is a pleasant conversational partner, and the monk (from Shanghai) talks a bit about having studied Sanskrit and Pali in Sri Lanka, and how he worries his English won’t be good enough for him to move to Canada.

About 10 - The sight of a Chinese-speaking gringo has drawn a crowd – many of them smokers who linger on in the sink/bathroom area after they finish their cigarettes. This is fine, except that one of the guys who sticks around is a practitioner of Falun Gong, and he wants to debate the monk (“I know about Sakyamuni. Li Hongzhi extended his teachings!”) and get support from me (“but you can establish a new political party any time you want in America and Taiwan!”) in his arguments. He claims to have been at the demonstration outside Zhongnanhai that got the Jiang Zemin regime freaked out about FLG in the first place. (“When my friends and I left, we took every piece of garbage with us! That part of Chang’an Jie was the cleanest part of Beijing! Think about it – when the PLA soldiers do anything they scatter their shit all over!”) This is really interesting and special, but the crowd is only growing and I deeply do not want to be near, or perceived as involved in, this conversation.

Neither does anyone else: the Zhengzhounese guy has gone completely silent; the monk is looking very uncomfortable and making the point, several times, that no matter what one believes, one has the responsibility to work within and not against the system of whatever country we live in. (I agree, probably too vigorously.) The Beijingnese guy does a neat trick of comparing people’s different faiths to different types of tea, and while we’re all agreeing he gets up and heads to the other end of the carriage to fill his tea jar.

The FLG guy is now sitting across from me, where he is boxing in the monk and talking about doctrinal issues. (“The Eight Trigrams are Buddhist, right? What about the, you know, the tadpole? The Yin-Yang tadpole sign?”) The Beijingnese guy is playing cards across the aisle (“Looks like you guys could talk for days!” he called over a moment ago.) I have absented myself from this conversation by typing on my phone, very rudely, this past record. Now I am done and will put in my headphones and attempt sleep.

11:26 - The FLG guy gets up and leaves. I resist the urge to press my palms together and say “Amitabha deliver us.”

Posted 21 September 2010 § Interesting Times ‡ Comments (15) °

archy and mehitabel and du fu

六月廿六日於費城市立圖書館讀《唐詩300首》英譯版

Written After Seeing an English Translation of 300 Tang Poems in the Philadelphia Public Library on June 26

古語韻難尋
夷言更添哀
囮者詠嘆寄
巢空鳥驚飛

what is with all these
translators who make
tang poetry read like e.e. cummings

don’t they know
classical forms never used
enjambment
Posted 23 July 2010 § Rants § Translation ‡ Comments (12) °

More Great Firewall weirdness

Caution: geekiness.

So I have found recently that there are certain places where certain blocked sites — Facebook and Twitter yes; Blogspot no — are still inaccessible even when I’m logged in through my VPN. This seems to happen most consistently when I’m connecting from cafes in the Jiaodaokou and Jinbao Jie neighborhoods of Beijing, over what I believe is Netcom ADSL, and it happens regardless of which Witopia gateway I’m connected through.

I’m not the techiest person, but from my understanding of the way VPNs work, this should not be happening. What’s extra-special weird about it is that when I run traceroute to find out where the connections are failing, it seems that the Great Firewall may not even be involved: I’m seeing connection requests time out at IP addresses that are not within China. (One time it was a FastWeb server in Italy; another time it was Korea Telecom; another time it was a UK service provider.)
This is not a problem with my VPN or my setup, as far as I can tell: these sites work just fine through a VPN on my home connection. It seems to be a problem with one specific Netcom office (I could be wrong, but I think it’s the same office serving both Jiaodaokou and Jinbao Jie; then again, I believe my home connection runs through the same office.)

To be honest, the real effect of this is probably a net gain in productivity, but I would still like to know what’s going on, since I can’t figure out how the GFW — if it is that — is messing with me. Does anyone have any theories?

Posted 26 February 2010 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (15) ° Tagged: ,

BREAKING NEWS: Explosions Rock Chinese Capital

(This was originally written as a guest column for The Beijinger, but the censors apparently didn’t find it as funny as I did, and it didn’t make it into print.)

Brendan O’Kane, The Beijinger‘s new war correspondent, contributed this piece while in Beijing on vacation from his regular posting in Baghdad.

[DATELINE: FEBRUARY 13, 2010]

Beijing is under attack.

Low-grade munitions detonate all around the city every few seconds, the noise coming first from a few meters overhead and then from all around you as the sound slaps back and forth off of concrete, walls, overpasses, the inside of your ears.

It is everywhere, and I phone my local source to say I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it out of the bunker-like apartment block where I am staying. My calls drop as China Mobile’s circuits fill with people frantically calling loved ones, and when at last we are connected we have to shout over the explosions. All evening I have been receiving text messages in Chinese. I cannot read them, but the exclamation marks suggest that they are warnings – or threats.

Strewn across my bed are the things that will keep me alive on my way to dinner: a bulletproof vest; American dollars for bribing my way past checkpoints; a hijab. My source encouraged me to wear red underpants — “so that bad things will not happen,” she added ominously — and so I lay out a pair of these as well. I came to Beijing expecting a restful, relaxing stay that would wash away the horrors of Basra; Qala-i-Jangi; Newark – and indeed, all seemed calm when I landed here last night.

I awoke this morning to pandemonium as inscrutable to me as the ideographs scrolling across the television screen. Amazingly, state media provides no coverage of the blasts that must surely be audible within broadcast headquarters, opting instead to air slick televised galas showcasing perfectly coiffed, unnaturally grinning celebrities who have presumably refused to take sides in the conflict that threatens now to level China’s capital.

I risk a peek out the window. Outside, the air fills with chemicals loosed from the primitive cardboard tubes of gunpowder, strontium nitrate, barium chloride, and cryolite that young children run around with in their clenched fists as their parents look on approvingly.

It is difficult at first to make out what is happening, but as I speak to locals – none of whom will give me more than their surnames – a picture begins to emerge: the firefights are seasonal, having occurred at roughly the same time each year for as long as anybody can remember. Beijing had avoided the heavy shelling typical in other regions until February 2006, when civilians all across the capital first took up arms; every winter since then has seen the violence return as predictably as the spring that follows it. Last year, insurgents succeeded in burning down one of the newly built China Central Television buildings, scoring a propaganda coup for their cause. What cause that may be, however, is far from clear: when I ask locals what the fighting is all about, they only look back at me blankly.

My source has invited me to dinner in the very heart of Beijing, and I have accepted, reasoning that the hutong alleys that wind like snarls of yarn through the old parts of the city must surely be safe. It is also a late dinner, 11 PM, and with any luck the streets should have cleared – or been cleared – by then. I have been told that young people will be out on the streets, possibly for some kind of peace rally.

Outside I notice an acrid, quite literally mephitic odor, and gunpowder smoke stings my eyes. I hunch over, careful to make myself inconspicuous, but almost instantly a string of explosions goes off next to me. “Marg bar Amrika,” I shout reflexively. A burly, crew-cut man nearby shoves a tube of gunpowder at me, along with a cigarette to light it. I break into a run, not daring to look behind me, and manage to flag down a cab. “Drive!” I shout. “Drive!” The driver looks at me strangely, and I wonder what side he’s on. He doesn’t move until I thrust the map in front of him, my destination circled: the square between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower, where surely even the most depraved terrorist would not dream of setting off explosives. He floors it, and as we tear through the burning streets of Beijing, I realize with a sinking feeling that I am wearing completely normal underwear.

War is hell.

Posted 12 February 2010 § Interesting Times ‡ Comments (10) °