John’s got some nice examples of local stationery products up in his latest post at Sinosplice. Children’s notebooks are particularly good comedy value here, combining as they do bizarre Pokey the Penguin-type illustrations with excellent specimens of Chinglish translated and typeset by guerrilla Dadaists. (One of my six year-old students back in Harbin had a [...]
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Greetings from Shenzhen Airport
To: Jane, Patrick, Jane, Jon, Richard Greetings from scenic Shenzhen Airport, where there is at least a Starbucks. This being Shenzhen, the area outside the airport is teeming with migrants offering various services and not taking ‘no’ for an answer. When Li and I got here a few days ago, we got a couple of [...]
Postcard to my grandmother
Hi, Gran – It’s National Day – the 58th anniversary of the day Mao Zedong proclaimed from the dais in front of the Forbidden City that the Chinese people had stood up – and I’m writing this on the midnight ferry between Hong Kong and Macau. Both cities are bizarre hybrids, in China but not [...]
HALP HALP O HALP
Dear all: How can I cheer up my crazy, talented artist girlfriend? Suggestions that are not “flowers” will be welcome. That is all.
searching-thought-earth-skin-virtue.
Via the chinese@kenyon.edu listserv, two articles in which American journalists write lazily about Chinese in ill-considered English. The issue at stake: whether or not Massachussetts should provide ballots on which candidates’ names are rendered phonetically into Chinese characters. (Everybody seems to agree that voting instructions, at least, should be provided in Chinese.) First, excerpts. The [...]
more soon
Real life and the day job have been keeping me busy of late, but there’s some cool stuff coming up. Eric Abrahamsen, Cindy Carter and I have started up a new blog, Paper Republic, that aims to be a resource for Chinese literature and translation. The site is still somewhat in the process of getting [...]
missionaries
So John was in town with his folks over the weekend, and I had the pleasure of hanging out with him while his parents and wife visited the Forbidden City. John was quite understandably unenthused at the prospect of visiting the Forbidden City a third time. It may have been the seat of power for [...]
Live Ink and Chinese Literacy
A long time ago I noticed that even though I’m much more comfortable with simplified characters than I am with complex-form characters, I find columnar Chinese to be much more comfortable to read than horizontally printed Chinese when it comes to avoiding eye strain, brain strain, and the problem of losing my place in a [...]
Why I'm not afraid of Google
Sure, Google may be beating up Yahoo and Microsoft and taking their lunch money, and it may be plagiarizing part of its Pinyin IME wordbank from Sogou, and it may be growing and spreading into every industry it can find — but I’m pretty sure that its machine translation systems aren’t going to be putting [...]
OMG teh promised one!!!!1!
On my way to the subway this morning, I passed a guy sitting on the steps of the local branch of the Construction Bank with his head in his hands. He was a large – hell, a fat – Chinese gentleman, apparently middle-aged, with a shaved head and a long, flowing gown. He was just [...]